Everyday Injustice Podcast: Trauma-Informed Criminal Defense

In this episode of the Everyday Injustice podcast, Ernest Stone discusses trauma-informed criminal defense — how understanding what a client has experienced changes the way a defense attorney prepares, communicates, and advocates. Attorney Stone draws on more than 30 years of criminal defense practice and current neuroscience research to make the case that trauma literacy is not optional enrichment for defense attorneys. It is the work.

Host David Greenwald and Attorney Stone cover the full landscape of trauma-informed criminal defense — what it means in practice, why the legal profession has been slow to adopt it, and what individual attorneys can do right now.

Attorney Stone begins with a principle that shapes every client interaction: assume trauma. Research shows that between 60 and 90 percent of people have experienced at least one traumatic event in their lives. Trauma is not limited to combat veterans or victims of violent crime. It includes childhood emotional neglect, abandonment, addiction, abusive relationships, serious illness, and the experience of arrest itself — even a summons in the mail can be genuinely traumatic for someone whose livelihood or family stability is suddenly at risk.

Stone makes a point that often surprises people: there is no such thing as a "normal" client who is free of trauma history. "You may look like the typical suburban two kids and a dog white picket fence person," he says. "There's something in your life that was a traumatic experience — and you may not be aware that it affects you."

The behaviors that frustrated Stone for the first two decades of his practice — clients who couldn't tell their story in a linear way, who couldn't access certain memories, who became suddenly angry, who refused to discuss certain subjects — turned out to have a clinical explanation. These are not signs of a difficult or dishonest client. They are symptoms of trauma affecting how the brain encodes, stores, and retrieves information under stress.

Stone describes the shift in his own practice: instead of demanding a linear account and fighting with clients who couldn't provide one, he learned to ask about specific facts and people rather than saying "tell me what happened." The brain of a traumatized person can often access specific sensory details — who was there, what they saw, what they heard — more readily than a chronological narrative. Working with that architecture rather than against it produces better information and a better client relationship.

Stone and Greenwald discuss a structural problem: lawyers are not trained in law school to understand the people sitting across from them. The same gap exists in policing and teaching, but in criminal defense the consequences are acute. Stone argues that trauma literacy is not a soft skill or an optional enrichment — it is an ethical responsibility, in the same way that states now require attorneys to maintain basic technology competency.

"I think we have an ethical responsibility to learn how to be trauma informed," Stone says. "And we have an ethical responsibility to implement that in the way we interact with and represent clients, particularly in criminal defense." He notes that the prevalence of trauma in society is no longer a contested question. The clinical community has been trying to get lawyers' attention for years. The information exists and is accessible. The barrier is professional culture, not knowledge.

The conversation touches on the growth of holistic public defense — the model pioneered by offices like the Bronx Defenders, in which defense attorneys connect clients with social workers, housing advocates, substance abuse treatment, and other services alongside the legal representation. Stone supports this approach and practices a version of it in his own office, building a referral network of trauma specialists, therapists, neurologists, and other providers.

He raises a concern about reach: holistic defense has taken hold in some large urban public defender offices, but the majority of indigent clients in Massachusetts are represented by private attorneys on contract with the state — attorneys who typically lack the infrastructure and training to practice this way. The gap between what the best public defenders offer and what most appointed counsel can deliver remains significant.

Asked for closing thoughts, Attorney Stone offers three things every lawyer should internalize:

First — the prevalence of traumatic experience in the general population is far higher than most people assume. This is not a fringe population. It is your client population.

Second — trauma looks like many different things. It is not only combat or violence. Repetitive childhood emotional neglect, a serious illness, a difficult arrest — all of these qualify.

Third — when a person who has experienced trauma is sitting in your office discussing something they have been accused of, they will communicate and respond in ways that are not optimal for the way a lawyer needs to work. That does not make them a difficult client. It makes them a person experiencing symptoms related to trauma. Understanding that changes everything about how you work with them.

For attorneys and others who want to develop trauma literacy, Stone recommends starting with Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score — now more than a decade old but still the most accessible entry point into the clinical literature. Searching the book title will surface a wide range of additional resources, because the clinical community has built an extensive body of accessible material around it. The medical world, Stone notes, is well ahead of the legal profession on this — and has been trying to get lawyers' attention for years.