Trauma-Informed Criminal Defense: How We Do It Is As Important As What We Do

To my dismay, I am entering my fourth decade of defending people accused of crimes. For most of that time I practiced the way criminal defense attorneys are trained to practice: learn the law, try to master the craft, work to build the skills to win in court. I think I became a competent trial lawyer. What I did not become, for a long time, was someone who understood what my clients were going through, and how important that understanding is to being a truly effective defense lawyer.

My understanding came slowly, and late. For most of my career I experienced the frustrations familiar to most lawyers who work with human clients. I saw clients who couldn't stay focused on what mattered legally, who kept returning to the unfairness of their situation or the wrongfulness of someone else's behavior even after I thought we had put those issues to bed. I had clients who left out critical parts of their story and then, when I confronted them with what an independent witness or a surveillance video showed, would argue that their memory was correct and the witness or video was wrong. I thought these people were being stubborn, dishonest, or at least obtuse.

I found some clients couldn't make decisions, or would make one and reverse it, and make it again, and reverse it again. I thought that was weakn
ess of character, or ignorance. I had clients who were impossible to contact, who missed appointments, who didn't produce documents I knew they had. And I had clients who would not simply trust me solely because I was their lawyer and my job was to help them, which I assumed would be sufficient grounds for their trust. It was not.

These things confused and frustrated me, and I complained and commiserated with colleagues over our shared frustrations. Only after many years and eventually accepting that I needed to learn a whole lot more did I begin to understand what I was experiencing, and what my clients were experiencing. And when I did, it changed how I think about everything I do.

When some understanding finally came, it came from outside the criminal defense world, from researchers, clinicians, and trauma specialists who had been working in this territory for years. What I found gave language to something I had been watching for decades without being able to name. I thought those behaviors I had been struggling to understand were character traits. I thought they were personality. They were not. They were symptoms.

Most writing and teaching about criminal defense focuses on tools and tactics: motions to suppress, oral advocacy, cross-examination technique. Those matter enormously. But we give very little attention the dimension of our work that I believe most determines whether a client can actually participate in their own defense, and whether we can be truly effective in defending them. I am talking about the quality of the relationship and communication between attorney and client, and about a framework for building both that we have been slow to identify and adopt, even as other helping professions have understood it for years.

What I have learned about that has helped me understand, and helped me change how I work with and for clients, is trauma-informed practice. This article explains what it is, why it matters, and what it looks like in the context of criminal defense representation.

In clinical usage, "trauma" is not simply a synonym for a bad experience or a stressful event. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) defines individual trauma as an event or circumstance that results in physical or emotional harm, or poses a threat to life or safety, and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual's mental, physical, emotional, or social well-being. What distinguishes trauma from ordinary stress is the combination of perceived threat and a perceived inability to escape or control it. The body and mind register the experience as a genuine threat to survival, and the nervous system responds accordingly. That response is not chosen. It is physiological. And crucially, it does not automatically switch off when the external threat passes. The effects can persist for weeks, months, or years, reshaping how a person thinks, feels, communicates, and functions. It is in that specific sense that the research literature documents what happens to people who are accused of crimes. [1]

Apply that definition directly to what a criminal prosecution involves. Consider the prospect of incarceration, the loss of employment, the fracture of family relationships, the public humiliation of an arrest record, and the radical uncertainty of an outcome controlled entirely by a system the defendant cannot navigate and barely understands. The timeline is not the defendant's. The language is not the defendant's. The outcome, ultimately, is not the defendant's to choose. The SAMHSA definition requires a genuine threat to safety or wellbeing, perceived as beyond the person's ability to escape or control. A criminal prosecution delivers both, from the moment of arrest forward. This is not a situation analogous to trauma. By the clinical definition the profession has accepted in every other context, it is trauma.

Making this case plainly is something the legal profession has been reluctant to do, in part because the research literature has made it easy to avoid. Most of what has been systematically studied focuses on wrongful convictions. But the wrongfully convicted are not the clients sitting across from most defense attorneys. The pending defendant has not been wrongfully convicted of anything. They do not yet know the outcome. And the direct empirical study of the psychological effects of pending prosecution in community-based defendants, people released on bail and going home, is thin. The argument does not rest on research that has not been done. It rests on the application of an established clinical framework to the observable facts of prosecution and defense.

Thirty years of practice have taught me that this application is correct. The client who cannot recall the sequence of events clearly; The one who shuts down when you press for details; The one who agrees with everything while sitting in the office and then does the opposite after they leave; The one who is unreachable for days and then calls at 9 PM on a Saturday; The one who sits across from you with eyes that are open but somehow not present; these are not outliers. What we observe in these folks are not character defects. They are a recognizable clinical presentation, matching point for point the documented behavioral and cognitive responses to trauma: memory fragmentation, avoidance, emotional dysregulation, hypervigilance, dissociation, difficulty with sustained attention, impaired decision-making under stress. The clinical literature gives it a name. The name does not change what it looks like in a law office. But it changes how we should respond and expect.

The relevant research that does exist is consistent and illuminating. A 2025 study published in Social Justice Research examined criminal justice encounters and psychological well-being in a large nationally representative sample. The finding was striking: arrest itself, not conviction, not the length of incarceration, was the primary driver of harm to well-being, with the first arrest showing the strongest effect. The event is where the damage begins. That is exactly what the clinical definition predicts. It is the experience of threat and loss of control, not its duration or outcome, that produces the harm. [2]

Bessel van der Kolk, a psychiatrist who founded the Trauma Center in Brookline, Massachusetts and served as professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine, spent more than three decades studying trauma and its effects. His research has become foundational in the field. He put it plainly: the terror and isolation at the core of trauma literally reshape both brain and body. Traumatic experience does not stay in the mind. It encodes itself in the nervous system as a persistent biological state of readiness that does not switch off when the immediate danger passes. The body keeps the score. [3]

Accepting that conclusion carries consequences. The person sitting across from you is not simply a client with a legal problem. Understanding that changes what the representation requires, practically and specifically, in ways this article will address.

What makes this particularly complicated is that the damage rarely travels alone. Secondary trauma in family members and close friends of the accused is well established in the research — the support system a person most needs is itself being harmed at precisely the moment it is most necessary. Research consistently identifies powerlessness and isolation as the factors that make traumatic experiences most damaging. A criminal accusation scores high on both.

The majority of criminal defendants are not incarcerated while their cases are pending. They are released on bail or personal recognizance, and they go home. They return to their jobs, their families, their routines. From the outside, they may appear to be managing. Inside, the research tells a different story. The accused person going home after arraignment is carrying the same clinical trauma load as one heading to a jail cell. They lie awake at three in the morning running through what might happen. They struggle to concentrate at work. They become short with their families and then feel guilty about it. They avoid telling people what is happening because the shame of the accusation is itself part of the injury. They feel profoundly alone in something they cannot fully share with anyone in their lives.

When that client sits across from their attorney in a law office, the setting may look calm. They are not in a jail cell. They are in a chair, in a comfortable room, of their own free will. But their nervous system does not register it as safe. Their amygdala is still running the same threat response it has been running since the arrest. The meeting about their case is itself a trauma trigger, because the content of the conversation is inextricably connected to the most frightening thing that has ever happened to them. The attorney who expects focused, organized communication from this person is expecting something the person's neurology is not currently capable of delivering. And the phone call taken at home, however private and however calm the surroundings, carries the same load. There is no neutral moment in a pending criminal case for the person whose life it is.

For defendants who cannot make bail, the injury is compounded by the jail environment itself. The Urban Institute has documented that approximately 26 percent of people in jails meet criteria for serious psychological distress, compared to five percent in the general population, and that 44 percent have a history of mental illness. Research documents that incarceration itself, even before conviction, is traumatizing in its own right. The initial transition from community to custody has been identified as the most psychologically dangerous period, marked by shock, disorientation, and disproportionately high rates of suicide. Researchers have theorized a specific syndrome, Post-Incarceration Syndrome, sharing core characteristics with PTSD, meaning that for some defendants the period of pretrial custody itself produces lasting neurological harm that extends well beyond release. [4]

For the detained client, every attorney interaction happens on the institution's terms. The jail phone call is made from a shared phone in a housing unit, with no privacy, a likely recording the client knows about, and a fifteen-minute limit. The in-person visit takes place in a small institutional room, often through glass, with the client arriving and departing under escort. The environment communicates, at every level, that the person in it is not free, not safe, and not in control, before the attorney has said a word. The non-detained client comes to your office and takes calls at home, but the underlying neurological reality is the same. The containers differ. The trauma response does not.

The behaviors that attorneys most commonly report as frustrating in clients, detained and non-detained alike, make complete clinical sense once you understand this. The client who cannot answer a direct question without veering off may not be evasive; their prefrontal cortex, which supports focused linear communication, may be functionally impaired by sustained threat activation. The client who contradicts themselves between meetings may not be lying; the inconsistency may reflect the fragmented storage of traumatic memory that van der Kolk documented. The client who seems not to care, who is flat and gives one-word answers to questions that require paragraphs, may be dissociating. The client who becomes suddenly emotional or agitated may have encountered a trigger in the conversation, with their amygdala responding before their thinking brain could intervene. The attorney who interprets any of these as character problems will develop a progressively thinner picture of the client and the case. The attorney who recognizes them as neurological presentations will work differently and will get more of what they need. For clients in professional or business careers the stakes carry additional weight: careers in healthcare, education, finance, and law can be ended irreversibly even when charges are ultimately resolved in the client's favor, making the accusation itself, independent of any legal outcome, often the event that produces the lasting damage.

To understand why trauma-informed practice produces different outcomes, it helps to understand what trauma does to the brain and what the accumulated stress of prosecution does to a traumatized nervous system. Some of what follows is neuroscience specific to trauma. Some is foundational research on threat response and arousal regulation that trauma clinicians have drawn on extensively to explain how their clients present and function. All of it is directly relevant to what defense attorneys encounter in practice.

The brain's threat detection system is centered in the amygdala, a structure that functions faster than conscious awareness. Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, professor at New York University's Center for Neural Science, established that the amygdala processes threat signals through what he called a "low road," a rapid subcortical pathway that can trigger a defensive response before the cortex has had time to evaluate what is actually happening. When the amygdala registers danger, it activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, triggering the release of cortisol and adrenaline throughout the body and brain. The response is automatic. In people who have experienced significant trauma, this system does not simply return to baseline when the acute threat has passed. It remains calibrated to respond to a broader range of stimuli as potentially dangerous. The brain shaped by trauma is not the same brain it was before. Its threat detection circuitry has been recalibrated by experience to stay primed. [5]

The stress hormones triggered by this response have a documented effect on the prefrontal cortex, the region governing executive function: planning, reasoning, sustained attention, decision-making, impulse control, and the organized use of language. Under sustained threat activation, the prefrontal cortex is functionally impaired. Brain imaging research documents the mechanism: the amygdala's threat signal effectively redirects neural resources away from the prefrontal cortex toward the physiological threat response. For a client whose nervous system is already dysregulated by a trauma history, the additional acute stress of criminal prosecution compounds this effect. The cognitive capacities a defense attorney most depends on from a client, such as organized thinking, clear communication, the weighing of options, the ability to make and hold to decisions, may be neurologically compromised. Not as a matter of will or character, but as a matter of neurochemistry. [6]

The consequences for memory are equally specific. The hippocampus, which under normal circumstances organizes memories in time and space, sequencing events, contextualizing them, attaching them to a particular place and time, is impaired during high-stress encoding. Traumatic memories are therefore not stored the way ordinary memories are. They are encoded not as coherent narratives with timestamps and context but as fragments: images, sounds, physical sensations, emotional states, body responses. The memories are real. They are simply not organized in the form that linear verbal recounting requires. When a client cannot give a consistent, sequential account of what happened during or around a traumatic event, the clinical interpretation is not necessarily that the client is lying or evading. It may be that the hippocampus was impaired at the time of encoding, and the memory was stored in the fragmentary form that trauma produces. What looks like inconsistency may be an accurate reflection of how the event is neurologically held. [7]

Van der Kolk's brain imaging research documented a related finding with direct consequences for how attorneys communicate with clients. When trauma survivors re-experience traumatic material, activity in Broca's area, the region of the brain responsible for translating experience into language, decreases substantially. He described this as the "speechless terror" of trauma: the experience is encoded below the level of language, in body states and sensory fragments that resist verbal expression. When an attorney asks a client to describe a traumatic event and the client cannot find words, goes silent, becomes flat and halting, or produces fragments rather than narrative, this may be a neurological presentation rather than a communicative choice or an act of evasion. The information may be there. It may simply not be accessible through the channel verbal questioning assumes. [8]

Stephen Porges, a neuroscientist and Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University, developed polyvagal theory, which has been widely adopted in trauma treatment and trauma-informed care, and offers a complementary framework for understanding the range of presentations attorneys encounter in traumatized clients. Porges identified three distinct states of nervous system activation. The first, associated with safety and social engagement, is the state in which the nervous system supports calm, focused interaction. The second, the sympathetic state, is associated with threat mobilization: fight or flight. The third, the dorsal vagal state, is associated with shutdown and immobilization, what Porges called the freeze response. Traumatized people shift between these states in response to perceived threat signals, often below the level of conscious awareness. What an attorney reads as agitation or combativeness may be a sympathetic nervous system response. What reads as apathy, flat affect, or shutdown, the client who gives one-word answers, who seems absent even while present, may be a dorsal vagal collapse into the freeze response. These are not fixed personality traits. They are neurological states that can shift within a single meeting depending on the content of the conversation. [9]

Psychiatrist Daniel Siegel's concept of the window of tolerance, a cornerstone of trauma-informed clinical practice, provides a practical frame for understanding why timing and structure matter in the attorney-client relationship. The window of tolerance describes the range of arousal within which a person can engage, think, communicate, and process information effectively, neither flooded by emotion nor shut down by it. Trauma narrows this window. A person carrying significant trauma history is working with a smaller functional band, and the stresses of active criminal prosecution push them toward its edges more readily. An attorney presenting a difficult piece of evidence, a plea offer with serious consequences, or a decision with no good options may be presenting it to a client whose nervous system has already moved outside the window in which effective communication and decision-making are possible. Understanding this changes when important conversations happen, how much information is presented at one time, and what written follow-up looks like. [10]

Understanding this neuroscience does not require lawyers to become clinicians. It requires two adjustments: how we interpret our clients' behavior, and how we structure the conditions of communication. When a client displays one of the behaviors we've described above, we need to be careful how we assess them. These may not be shortcomings in character, but neurological symptoms. Recognizing them as such changes what we do in response.

The criminal accusation is rarely the beginning of the story a new client brings to your first meeting. By the time a client sits across from you, they are likely a person who has experienced trauma before, sometimes significant trauma, and who is now experiencing a new acute crisis layered on top of an existing history. Understanding this is not ancillary. It is the foundation for everything that follows.

Epidemiological research has established that over 80 percent of the United States population will be exposed to a traumatic event at some point in their lives. [11] The CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which surveyed adults across all fifty states, found that 63.9 percent of American adults reported at least one adverse childhood experience, defined as a preventable, potentially traumatic event occurring before age eighteen. One in six reported four or more such experiences. [12] The National Center for PTSD estimates that approximately 13 million Americans were living with post-traumatic stress disorder in 2020 alone. [13]

These are not statistics about a vulnerable subset of the population. They describe the people who live in your community, build careers, raise families, and on one particular day find themselves calling a criminal defense attorney. Trauma is not a clinical rarity. It is a common condition of American adult life.

But the PTSD statistics, significant as they are, actually undercount the clinical reality. A formal PTSD diagnosis requires that specific symptoms persist at sufficient severity and duration to meet diagnostic criteria. What the research documents extensively is that many more people who experience trauma, the majority in fact, carry what clinicians call subthreshold trauma symptoms: real, documented, clinically significant responses that fall just short of a formal diagnosis. The SAMHSA Treatment Improvement Protocol series describes this directly: many trauma survivors experience symptoms that, although they do not meet the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, nonetheless limit their ability to function normally, including their ability to regulate emotional states, maintain stable relationships, and perform competently at work. [14]

What do those subthreshold symptoms look like in a lawyer's conference room? They may look like a client who cannot give you a consistent account of events, possibly not because they are lying or in denial, but because traumatic memory is stored in fragments rather than narrative sequences, and retrieval under stress is unreliable. They may look like a client who cannot retain information from one meeting to the next, possibly not because they are indifferent to their case or of low intelligence, but because hyperarousal is consuming the cognitive bandwidth that ordinary memory and concentration require. They may look like a client who is guarded, slow to trust, and resistant to counsel, possibly not because of a difficult personality, but because a nervous system that has learned that the world is dangerous does not simply stand down because they are now in a law office. They may look like a client who misses calls, fails to produce documents, and avoids engagement, possibly not because they are irresponsible, but because engagement with the legal process requires them to confront, repeatedly, the most destabilizing thing that has happened to them. And importantly, that may not be the current legal crisis. They may look like sudden anger, or sudden flatness, or an emotional volatility that seems disproportionate to what was just said.

Criminal defense attorneys have been seeing these presentations since the discovery of fire. What has been missing is the clinical framework to recognize them accurately. Without it, behaviors that may be neurological presentations get read as character problems. The representation suffers for it, and so does the client. And so do we.

Most of a client's trauma history will never declare itself. A meaningful percentage of clients carry subthreshold trauma symptoms that have never been diagnosed and may never be. And then they are accused of a crime. The attorney who understands what that means, who can read the room with clinical accuracy rather than personal frustration, is in a fundamentally different position to serve that client than the attorney who cannot.

I want to address one client population specifically, because the research on them is particularly well-developed and because their presentation in the criminal justice system has distinctive features that are directly relevant to everything this article has argued.

Veterans in the criminal justice system carry a specific and layered trauma profile that most attorneys are not equipped to recognize. A meta-analysis published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress found that veterans with PTSD have 61 percent higher odds of criminal justice involvement than veterans without PTSD. The Council on Criminal Justice has documented that combat exposure and its associated conditions, including PTSD, traumatic brain injury, moral injury, and substance use disorders, are significantly associated with greater likelihood of criminal justice system involvement. Veterans account for roughly 8 percent of incarcerated persons in the United States, and the lifetime prevalence of PTSD in veteran populations ranges from 9 to 31 percent, substantially higher than in the general population. [15]

What makes veteran clients particularly complex, from a trauma-informed standpoint, is not only the PTSD. It is the specific kind of institutional mistrust that many of them carry. Research on institutional betrayal in military and veteran populations documents a consistent pattern: military members who gave their loyalty fully and then experienced the institution as failing them, abandoning them, or actively working against their interests, develop a form of mistrust that is qualitatively different from ordinary distrust. The original definition of moral injury required three elements: a betrayal of what is right, by someone who holds legitimate authority, in a high-stakes situation. That description fits a substantial portion of the veteran experience of military service.

The consequences for the attorney-client relationship are specific. A veteran who has experienced institutional betrayal does not simply bring skepticism about whether the system will treat them fairly. They bring a nervous system that has been calibrated, by direct experience, to treat institutional authority as dangerous. The attorney is, from the client's initial perspective, another representative of a system that has failed them before. Van der Kolk's work on the social engagement system explains why this matters: the neurological circuitry that governs trust is not reset by good intentions. It is reset by consistent experience over time. A veteran client who has been let down by the military, the VA, and possibly previous attorneys will require more consistent evidence of trustworthiness, over a longer period, before their nervous system begins to interpret the relationship as safe. This seems intuitive. But the underlying neurology is not.

There is also the specific issue of hypervigilance, which is both a symptom of combat-related PTSD and a trained survival skill. Veterans who have operated in environments where failing to monitor threats could be fatal do not simply turn this response off when they return to civilian life. Van der Kolk documented this extensively: the nervous system that has been trained for constant threat assessment continues to perform that function in contexts where it is maladaptive. In an attorney's office or a courthouse, hypervigilance presents as guardedness, scanning behavior, difficulty relaxing into a conversation, and a hair-trigger sensitivity to any signal that might indicate threat. The attorney who reads this as hostility or evasiveness is misreading clinical symptomatology as character.

Moral injury adds another dimension specific to veteran clients. Research published in Psychiatric Quarterly found that strong feelings of betrayal and contempt can cause veterans to view authorities and institutional staff as illegitimate, reinforcing distrust and exacerbating functional impairment. This is not general cynicism. It is a specific cognitive consequence of having experienced authority figures as perpetrators of injustice in a high-stakes context. A veteran who sits across from an attorney who is part of the legal system that is now prosecuting them is sitting across from a representative of exactly the kind of institutional authority that has previously caused them harm. That dynamic does not have to be explicit to be operative. It runs in the background of every interaction until the attorney has done sufficient work to interrupt it.

Healthcare and social work embraced trauma-informed practice well before the legal profession did, built on a foundational clinical reframe: from "What's wrong with you?" to "What happened to you?" The insight is straightforward: before you can effectively help someone, you need to understand what they have experienced and how it is currently shaping their behavior, their communication, and their ability to engage with the help being offered.

The dominant culture in the legal profession treats the client's emotional state as background noise rather than material information. There are legitimate reasons for that model: it reflects real concerns about professional boundaries. But it has also produced a profession that systematically misreads what it is seeing. Our reflex is to treat the behaviors we have outlined as credibility problems or character flaws. The research says they are neurological presentations. The transactional lawyer-client model has no language for that distinction, which is precisely why it keeps failing the people who need it most.

The profession is beginning to recognize the problem. In 2023, the American Bar Association published Trauma-Informed Law: A Primer for Lawyer Resilience and Healing, with nearly forty contributing legal authors spanning law, psychology, and allied fields. The book frames trauma-informed practice not as an optional add-on for especially compassionate attorneys but as an ethical obligation: the principle of "do no further harm." The legal system can and regularly does exacerbate the trauma of the people who pass through it. Lawyers are not neutral actors in that process. [16]

In 2025, the Center for Justice Innovation, one of the most respected criminal justice reform organizations in the country, published the first comprehensive blueprint for implementing trauma-informed practices specifically in criminal courts. That blueprint was produced after surveying courts in twenty states, conducting practitioner interviews, and hosting a national symposium. Its scope and institutional weight signal something important: this is no longer the project of a few thoughtful practitioners. It is becoming a professional standard. [17]

The Body Keeps the Score, published in 2014 and still on major bestseller lists more than a decade later, has brought the neuroscience of trauma into mainstream public understanding in ways that have reached the legal profession directly. A small handful of law schools, including USC, UCLA, and Columbia, have introduced trauma-informed lawyering course offerings. The BC Law Institute published a guide in 2025 on trauma-informed legal writing. The Law Society of Scotland has made this training mandatory for continuing legal education. The infrastructure of a new professional standard is being built, albeit slowly.

We lawyers take it as gospel that we are on the client's side, that we will be zealous, loyal, and protective. For us, that is a threshold given. Many of the folks who come to us do not share that certainty. My dismay at the clients who did not trust immediately despite my status as their lawyer was naïve. But the reality was far more complex than "I just met you and you haven't earned it yet."

For many of the people who come through our doors, trust has to be built deliberately, because the experiences that have brought them here have often involved its violation.

Research on trauma identifies breach of trust as a common root cause across many categories of traumatic experience. This is especially relevant for clients whose charges involve relationship contexts or abuse of professional position. But it also applies more broadly. The experience of being arrested and charged is, among other things, an experience of institutional power exercised against you, often by people and systems in which you had some degree of trust. That primes a person to expect further betrayal.

Van der Kolk's research on attachment and safety is directly relevant here. Trauma, particularly repeated or relational trauma, dysregulates the neurological circuitry that governs trust in ways that make ordinary trust harder to establish. A traumatized client is not simply "distrustful" as a matter of personality. They are operating with a nervous system calibrated by experience to treat trusting others as dangerous. The attorney who reads this guardedness as a personality problem, as obstinance, or a difficult client, or someone who doesn't want to be helped, is misreading a neurological state as a character trait. Building a genuine attorney-client relationship requires actively engaging this system rather than bypassing it. It requires patience, consistency, and the absence of the small betrayals: unfulfilled commitments, unexplained changes of course, condescending shortcuts, that would confirm the client's existing expectation. For a busy trial lawyer, this is a minefield.

Trustworthiness in practice means transparency at every stage: explaining my role and what it is not, explaining the prosecution's role, explaining what the court process looks like, explaining what the realistic range of outcomes is. It means not assuming that they know anything at all about the system or process they have found themselves in. It means telling clients things they do not want to hear, carefully and directly, rather than managing their distress by withholding information. Clients who understand what is happening participate more fully in their own defense. The client who discovers that a plea offer was their best option on the courthouse steps before trial, rather than weeks earlier when there was time to absorb it, has not been prepared. But that is not just a communication failure. It is a re-traumatizing event delivered by the person the client was supposed to trust most.

There is a dimension of this that the BC Law Institute's 2025 guide on trauma-informed legal writing brought into sharper focus: the language attorneys use in written communication carries its own consequences. How a client's situation is described in a letter, how a plea offer is framed in correspondence, how a court date is explained in an email: all of it lands differently on someone who is already carrying a trauma load. Trustworthiness extends to written work.

Researchers who study trauma consistently identify the experience of helplessness as one of the most damaging dimensions of traumatic events. It is not simply that bad things happen. It is that bad things happen in ways you cannot control, predict, or stop. Van der Kolk's research drew on a foundational set of experiments by psychologists Maier and Seligman on "learned helplessness," in which animals subjected to inescapable stress lost the capacity to escape even when escape became possible. The implications for trauma in humans are significant: once the nervous system has internalized the lesson that effort does not change outcomes, it stops trying. The path to recovery requires not just removing the threat but actively restoring the experience of efficacy and agency, the felt sense that one's actions can produce different results.

The criminal justice process is extraordinarily effective at producing an exquisite experience of helplessness. From the moment of arrest, a person's ability to make meaningful choices about their own life is dramatically curtailed. They are processed according to schedules they did not set, by systems they do not understand, toward outcomes they cannot reliably predict. Court appearances involve the lawyer and prosecutor and judge talking to each other in an unfamiliar vernacular, and a new court date being set, as the client stands by with no role to play. Continuances are granted or denied by judges who have never seen the client before. Prosecutors make decisions with enormous consequences based on case files rather than human beings. Even defendants who are ultimately acquitted have spent months or years in a process that systematically stripped them of agency.

The research on this is clear: restoring genuine choice is consistently associated with better engagement and better outcomes. And the inverse is also true: the client who has been stripped of all agency and then handed a passive role in their own defense may not just be being difficult when they disengage. They may be doing what traumatized nervous systems do when learned helplessness has taken hold. Passivity and disengagement may be the predictable result of a process that has removed every meaningful choice from the person at its center.

For the attorney-client relationship, this means involving clients genuinely in strategic decisions rather than informing them of strategies already determined. A client who has been asked what they want and had that preference taken seriously will communicate differently than one who has been managed. They will disclose more. They will show up consistently. They will trust their attorney in ways that make the collaboration more productive. The client who has been told what is going to happen to them is a different participant in their own defense than the client who has been asked what they understand, what matters most to them, what outcomes they can and cannot live with. The first client is passive. The second is engaged.

The traditional model of attorney-client relationship places the lawyer firmly at the center of expertise: the attorney knows the law, knows the system, knows the strategy, and the client's job is primarily to provide the raw material of facts. That model is not entirely wrong. But it is incomplete in a way that has significant practical consequences.

My clients know things I will never know unless they tell me. They know their relationships, their history, their context, the specific texture of the events that led to the charges. They know what was said, what was meant, what the other people in the situation were actually doing. That knowledge is essential to effective defense, and accessing it requires a relationship in which clients believe that their full story, including its complicated and unflattering parts, is both welcome and useful.

Van der Kolk's work on what he called the "speechless terror" of trauma, the tendency for traumatic experience to disable the verbal brain and encode itself in sensory fragments and body states rather than language, explains something criminal defense attorneys encounter constantly. A client who was in a physical altercation may be able to describe the sensory details of the moment, the smell of the room, the sound, the feeling of impact, but cannot give you a clear sequence of who did what first. A client present during a drug transaction may have a visceral physical memory but an almost complete absence of the contextual details the attorney needs. A client involved in a shooting may break down entirely or become angry when asked to describe the moment and then recover, composedly, to discuss something unrelated. These are not unusual presentations. They are the norm for clients who have experienced genuinely traumatic events. The story is not absent. It is stored differently, and it needs to be accessed differently.

At my practice, our intake process is built around this principle. Even before a client comes in to see us, they have had a phone conversation with a kind, sympathetic, and yes, patient person who will spend inordinate amounts of time listening to whatever the caller needs to tell her. When a new client comes in, the whole team is present. The goal is to hear the full story before forming any strategic conclusions. That means open questions. It means tolerating the non-linear answer. It means acknowledging what we are hearing before we respond to it.

The collaboration principle also has implications for the pace of the representation. Van der Kolk's research documents that traumatized individuals often have difficulty with sustained attention, complex multi-step information, and decision-making under pressure. Important decisions made in rushed or stressful conditions will often be made poorly. Structuring key decisions with adequate time, written summaries of options, and explicit acknowledgment that questions are welcome is recognition of how the nervous system actually works under conditions of acute stress.

Empowerment is the fifth principle, and in some ways the most expansive. It means more than giving clients a voice in the decisions that affect them. It means recognizing that legal problems rarely exist in isolation from the rest of a person's life, and that a defense practice genuinely committed to serving clients well must engage with that fuller picture.

The research on this is consistent and sobering. Traumatic life experiences are among the strongest predictors of criminal justice involvement. Substance use disorders are frequently trauma-driven: people use substances to regulate the neurological dysregulation that trauma produces. Van der Kolk documented that many forms of self-destructive behavior, including substance abuse, self-harm, and risk-taking, function as attempts by the nervous system to modulate overwhelming internal states it cannot otherwise regulate. The person arrested for a drug offense may be, at a deeper level, self-medicating a nervous system shaped by early or repeated trauma. What looks like bad judgment or reckless behavior is often the nervous system doing the only thing it knows to do. The legal charge is the visible surface of something that goes considerably deeper. That deeper layer, the trauma driving the presenting behavior, is exactly what the empowerment principle addresses.

For us, empowerment in practice means building and maintaining relationships with professionals who provide mental health treatment, substance use counseling, psychiatric evaluation, housing support, employment assistance, and whatever else a client's situation requires that falls outside the scope of legal representation. It means knowing which therapists and counselors work well with people in acute crisis, which treatment programs have meaningful track records, and which community-based organizations can actually help with the practical problems that orbit a criminal charge. It means being able to make a specific referral at the specific moment a client needs it, not pointing them vaguely toward a category of service and hoping they find their way.

Everything in this article describes what trauma-informed criminal defense practice looks like when it is done well. I want to spend some time on the conditions that make it hardest to do well, because those conditions are not rare. They describe the everyday reality of a substantial share of criminal defense work in this country, and in Massachusetts specifically.

This is precisely why the current Massachusetts Bar Advocate compensation crisis is not merely an employment dispute. When the state pays $65 an hour and no provision for staff, it is structuring public defense in a way that makes this kind of comprehensive representation impossible.

In Massachusetts, the vast majority of court-appointed defense attorneys are known as Bar Advocates. They are private attorneys who contract with the state to represent indigent defendants, and they handle approximately 80 percent of the state's court-appointed criminal defense work. As of 2025, Bar Advocates working in District Court were paid $65 an hour. Superior Court cases paid $85. Homicide cases paid $120. For context: New Hampshire pays its court-appointed attorneys $125 to $150 an hour. Maine and New York pay $158. Rhode Island pays $112 to $142. Massachusetts, one of the highest cost-of-living states in the country, pays its court-appointed defenders less than half what neighboring states consider adequate, and has done so for years. [19]

The Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers has been direct about what this represents: when defense attorneys are forced to choose between paying their bills and properly defending their clients, the constitutional guarantee of counsel becomes an empty promise.

I raise this not as a digression into legal politics but because the compensation structure directly ensures the practice conditions that this article has been describing as harmful to traumatized clients. The math is not complicated. At $65 an hour, a Bar Advocate cannot afford to hire staff. No receptionist. No paralegal. No one to receive and return calls when the attorney is in court, which is often most of the day. The attorney is a solo practitioner with a phone, a voicemail box, and a caseload that the rate structure compels to be large in order to generate any viable income. The state has effectively decided, through its compensation structure, that support staff are a luxury in criminal defense representation. What the research on trauma-informed practice tells us is that this decision has specific, predictable, and serious consequences for the most vulnerable people in the system.

Consider what the attorney-client relationship looks like under these conditions, from the perspective of a traumatized defendant. The client calls the attorney's office. Voicemail. They leave a message. It may be returned in a day or two. It may not be returned at all, because the attorney is in court and has no one to handle calls and dozens of active cases to manage alone. The client calls again. Voicemail again. They stop calling. Or they call every day with mounting desperation. Either way, each unreturned call is not merely an inconvenience. For someone whose nervous system is already in a state of chronic threat activation, who has a history of institutions failing them, who was already frightened and isolated before the arrest: the unreturned call is a confirmation of what they already fear. They are alone. Their case does not matter. Even their own attorney cannot be reached.

Bar Advocates do meet with clients in their offices, and they visit them in the jails. But the hours in the day are finite, and choices have to be made about who gets personal attention, and how much. The client with the "lesser" or "smaller" case may be relegated to courthouse contacts. Likewise the "difficult" client.

How does this play out at the Courthouse? The Bar Advocate arrives in the morning with several clients on the docket. They move from client to client in brief hallway conversations before hearings that may significantly affect that client's life. There is no time for a real check-in before a difficult proceeding. No time to explain what is about to happen in a way that allows the client to absorb it and ask questions. The client sits in the courtroom alongside strangers, many of them also in crisis, not fully understanding what is happening, waiting for a few minutes with the attorney who is already managing the next matter. The whole experience, the confusion, the powerlessness, the feeling of being processed rather than represented, is a near-perfect reproduction of what trauma researchers have identified as most harmful: unpredictability, absence of control, and the felt sense of being alone in a threatening situation.

Van der Kolk's research on the social engagement system established that safety, for a traumatized person, is communicated not primarily through words but through the quality of relational presence: consistency, attunement, the felt sense that the other person is genuinely there with you. A traumatized client does not experience an overloaded, unreachable attorney as merely inconvenient. They experience sporadic contact, unreturned calls, and rushed hallway conversations as confirmation of what their nervous system already believes: that they are alone, that they cannot rely on anyone, and that this system, including now their own attorney, does not see them. The clinical term for what follows is retraumatization. The client's existing trauma response is activated and reinforced, not by anything the attorney intends, but by the structural conditions in which the representation is taking place.

The behavioral consequences of this are then routinely misread as the client being difficult. The client who has stopped calling back, having perhaps concluded that the attorney does not want to hear from them. The client who goes flat and silent in courthouse hallway conversations, possibly having dissociated because nothing about the interaction signals safety. The client who uses the short amount of time available to castigate the lawyer for their unavailability and perceived disinterest in the case. The client who misses court dates, possibly not from irresponsibility, but because their nervous system may be in a state of overwhelm that makes forward planning genuinely impaired. The client who appears at sentencing so shut down that the judge perceives no remorse where there may in fact be only dissociation. In each case, the presenting problem looks like a client problem. The underlying reality is a relationship that has been consistently, if unintentionally, retraumatizing.

None of this is the individual Bar Advocate's fault. The attorneys doing this work in Massachusetts are, in many cases, deeply committed lawyers doing their best under structurally untenable conditions. Some of them are among the best lawyers I have ever seen in practice. The fault lies with a compensation structure that has been allowed to persist for decades at levels that make adequate staffing economically impossible.

What the legislature has not fully confronted is that the inadequacy of Bar Advocate pay is not only an economic injustice to attorneys. It is a clinical harm to clients. When the state declines to fund the staff and infrastructure necessary for consistent attorney-client communication, it is not withholding a luxury. It is guaranteeing the specific conditions most likely to retraumatize people who are already among the most vulnerable in the system.

The goal here is not to make individual attorneys feel guilty for structural conditions beyond their control. It is to name clearly what those conditions produce. Because naming it honestly is the first step toward doing something about it, even within constraints. An attorney who understands that unreturned calls are experienced as abandonment can establish a minimum response standard and hold to it regardless of caseload. They can sacrifice to allocate assets from another line item to a live answering service that is professional and pleasant. An attorney who understands that the courthouse hallway conversation activates rather than calms a trauma response can build two minutes of genuine human contact into that interaction before turning to legal business. An attorney who understands that a client's flat affect or silence is a neurological presentation rather than indifference can respond to it differently. None of these adjustments require a paralegal or a receptionist. They require understanding what is actually happening in the room.

The goal here is not to make individual attorneys feel guilty for structural conditions beyond their control. It is to name clearly what those conditions produce. Because naming it honestly is the first step toward doing something about it, even within constraints. An attorney who understands that unreturned calls are experienced as abandonment can establish a minimum response standard and hold to it regardless of caseload. They can sacrifice to allocate assets from another line item to a live answering service that is professional and pleasant. An attorney who understands that the courthouse hallway conversation activates rather than calms a trauma response can build two minutes of genuine human contact into that interaction before turning to legal business. An attorney who understands that a client's flat affect or silence is a neurological presentation rather than indifference can respond to it differently. None of these adjustments require a paralegal or a receptionist. They require understanding what is actually happening in the room.

Let me come back to the title of this article, because I want to make sure the argument it makes is stated as plainly as possible.

Legal outcomes are the primary purpose of what we do as criminal defense lawyers, and we must focus on obtaining the best possible outcome in court for our clients.

But legal outcomes are not the only measure of representation. The client's experience of the process matters too: whether they felt heard, whether they understood what was happening, whether they had genuine agency in decisions about their own defense, whether they were treated as a whole person rather than a case file. For clients with a trauma history, that providing that experience, and avoiding making it worse, is especially challenging. Fortuitously, it turns out that the nature and quality of the client's experience is also a factor in the quality of the legal outcomes produced.

The connection between trauma-informed practice and criminal case outcomes is mechanical. A client who feels safe communicates more fully, which produces better case preparation. A client who trusts their attorney discloses the information that changes the case. A client who has genuine voice in strategy decisions invests in that strategy. A client whose underlying needs are being addressed is less likely to undermine their own defense with behavior driven by crisis.

Van der Kolk offers a useful way to think about this. He described three pathways to working with trauma: top-down, through language and cognitive processing; pharmacological, through medications that dampen alarm responses; and bottom-up, through experiences that directly contradict the helplessness and isolation at the core of trauma. The bottom-up pathway is the most powerful and the most durable. What this means for criminal defense is that the attorney who creates genuine safety, who actually restores some measure of agency and trust, who treats the client as a full human being rather than a problem to be processed, is providing something that goes beyond legal representation. They are offering an experience that directly contradicts the traumatizing process the client has been subjected to. That is not therapy. It is effective lawyering.

Let's address the question of professional obligation honestly. No court has yet found a criminal defense attorney ineffective for failing to apply trauma-informed practice, and given the extraordinary deference the Strickland standard extends to defense counsel, that is unlikely to change. The formal legal standard is not where this argument lives. But professional obligation does not wait for a disciplinary case to be decided. In January 2023, the Idaho State Bar published a substantive article connecting trauma-informed lawyering directly to Model Rule 1.1, arguing that understanding the impact of trauma on a client's thoughts and behaviors is an important component of the professional responsibility of competence. That is a state bar publication, and it reflects a direction the profession is clearly moving. The knowledge base has now advanced to the point that ignorance of it is harder and harder to defend as reasonable professional judgment. [20]

But more than that, the obligation is already present in what it means to genuinely represent and defend a person in crisis. The people walking through my door are, with overwhelming statistical likelihood, people who came in already carrying trauma, and who are now carrying the additional acute trauma of accusation on top of it. The behaviors that I have classified as problems, the inconsistency, the denial, the avoidance, the guardedness, the flat affect, the disengagement, the anger and agitation, may be symptoms. Recognizing them accurately is not optional enrichment. It is our work. And recognizing symptoms makes my work, if not easier, then at least not harder due to my frustration or anger or judgment. It makes it easier not to take those behaviors personally.

H. Ernest Stone has practiced criminal defense in Beverly, Massachusetts since 1996. He is the founder of H. Ernest Stone, Attorney PC, where the firm's practice is built on a comprehensive, trauma-informed approach to criminal defense representation. He can be reached at 978-969-2890 or es@herneststone.com. herneststone.com

1. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). SAMHSA's Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach. HHS Publication No. (SMA) 14-4884 (2014). https://store.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/sma14-4884.pdf

2. Sanders, C.A., & King, L.A. (2025). The downstream well-being effect of encounters with the U.S. criminal justice system. Social Justice Research. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-025-00465-1

3. van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books. https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/resources/the-body-keeps-the-score

4. Urban Institute. Pretrial Deaths in Custody Are Prevalent but Preventable. https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/pretrial-deaths-custody-are-prevalent-preventable

5. LeDoux, J. (1996). The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. Simon & Schuster, New York. See also LeDoux, J. (2000). Emotion circuits in the brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 23, 155–184.

6. van der Kolk (2014), supra note 3.

7. van der Kolk, B. (1998). Trauma and memory. Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1440-1819.1998.0520s5S97.x

8. van der Kolk (1998), supra note 7.

9. Porges, S.W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W.W. Norton & Company, New York.

10. Siegel, D.J. (1999). The Developing Mind: Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience. Guilford Press, New York.

11. Schein, J., et al. (2021). Prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder in the United States: a systematic literature review. Current Medical Research and Opinion, 37(12), 2151–2161. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007995.2021.1978417. The 80% lifetime trauma exposure figure cited therein derives from foundational epidemiological research, including Kessler, R.C., et al. (2005). Lifetime prevalence and age-of-onset distributions of DSM-IV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. Archives of General Psychiatry, 62(6), 593–602.

12. Swedo, E.A., et al. (2023). Prevalence of Adverse Childhood Experiences Among U.S. Adults — Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2011–2020. MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 72(26), 707–715. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7226a2.htm

13. National Center for PTSD, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. How Common Is PTSD in Adults? https://www.ptsd.va.gov/understand/common/common_adults.asp

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15. Taylor, E., et al. (2020). Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Justice Involvement Among Military Veterans: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Journal of Traumatic Stress. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8288507/

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17. Center for Justice Innovation (2025). Trauma-Informed Practices for Criminal Courts: A Blueprint for Implementation. https://www.innovatingjustice.org/resources/trauma-informed-practices-courts-blueprint/

18. SAMHSA (2014), supra note 1.

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