In May 2025, the Center for Justice Innovation published the first-ever national blueprint for trauma-informed practices in criminal courts. [1] The document was three years in the making, drawing on surveys of courts in twenty states, interviews with practitioners across the country, and a national symposium. It addressed judges, clerks, prosecutors, court administrators, and security personnel.

It had almost nothing to say about defense attorneys.

That gap is not a criticism of the blueprint, which is a serious and useful document. It reflects the reality that trauma-informedpractice in the legal system has largely been understood as a court-managementproblem: how do institutions process traumatized people without making things worse. There has also been some discussion of how prosecutors work with victims and witnesses of crime. The question of how an individual defense attorney should understand and respond to the traumatized client sitting across from them has received far less attention. We as a defense bar need to change that.

The research is unambiguous: nationally representative studies find that more than 80percent of American adults have been exposed to at least one traumatic event in their lifetime, [2] and two-thirds carry at least one adverse childhood experience. [3] So, before a client ever walks through my door, they are likely carrying a trauma history. Think about repetitive childhood emotional trauma, addiction, abusive romantic relationships, sexual abuse, traumatic physical injuries, and other “baggage” our clients carry and cannot put down. They won’t tell you about it, but it’s there.

When they walk through my door, they are in the acute phase of a new trauma. Criminal accusation meets the clinical definition of trauma articulated by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration: an event resulting in lasting adverse effects on mental, physical, emotional, or social well-being.[4] The client who has been involved in a violent event; who has been arrested unexpectedly by aggressive police; the wrongly accused; the clearly guilty who have been abandoned by friends and family, and society; we can all imagine uncounted other traumas our clients experience right before we first meet them, and thereafter.

The behaviors that trauma produces are predictable, and we as defense lawyers are familiar with, and frustrated by them. The client who cannot give a consistent account of events. The client who insists on a version of events that the objective evidence contradicts. The client who cannot focus on what we know is important. The client who goes flat and gives one-word answers and cannot elaborate. The client who becomes suddenly agitated in a conversation that seemed calm a moment before. We may have seen these as character issues or personality defects. They may well be neurological presentations as symptoms of trauma.

Understanding these symptoms requires knowing how trauma affects brain function. Very briefly and among other things, in a person who has experienced trauma, the amygdala, the brain's threat detection center, processes danger faster than conscious thought and triggers hormonal cascades that impair the prefrontal cortex — the seat of reasoning, planning, and organized communication. The hippocampus, which normally sequences memory in time and place, is disrupted under high-stress encoding, producing fragmented rather than narrative recall. Broca's area, responsible for language, can go functionally dark when traumatic material is re-experienced. These are documented neurological events with specific, predictable consequences for every conversation an attorney has with a traumatized client. The neurological science of trauma is now well-established, and is readily accessible to us.

It took me the first  twenty years of my practice to appreciate that I needed to understand this. I had been reading client behavior through a lens of character and motivation — assuming that resistance, inconsistency, and disengagement reflected deliberate choices — when I should have been reading it as clinical presentation. The framework that has changed and greatly improved how I work did not come from legal training. It came from researchers and clinicians who had spent decades studying trauma. The medical and behavioral health communities are well ahead of the us in this area, and the resources to learn and implement their perspectives and techniques already exist. We and our clients will benefit if we do.

Here are four tactics that have changed how I practice.

Neuroscientist Stephen Porges identified three states of nervous system activation.[5] One supports calm social engagement. One mobilizes for threat: fight or flight. One produces shutdown and immobilization, the freeze response. Traumatized people shift between these states in response to perceived danger signals, usually without conscious awareness of it. A client who was engaged thirty seconds ago may shift abruptly to shutdown mode. A client who seemed cooperative may now be scanning for threat. Importantly, the content of the conversation did not have to be overtly threatening for this to happen.

Psychiatrist Daniel Siegel's concept of the window of tolerance describes the range of arousal within which a person can engage, think, communicate, and process information effectively.[6]  Trauma narrows this window; active criminal prosecution pushes a client toward its edges more readily still. An attorney presenting a difficult piece of evidence, a plea offer with serious consequences, or a decision with no good options may be slamming that window of tolerance shut for a client whose nervous system has now moved outside the range in which effective communication is possible.

The first thing a trauma-informed defense attorney does is create conditions in which the client's nervous system can settle. This is not a therapeutic intervention. It is a practical necessity, because a client in a threat response cannot give you what you need. They cannot remember clearly, communicate coherently, weigh options, or make decisions.

In practice, this means taking more time at the beginning of every meeting before asking anything of consequence. It means explaining what is going to happen and what is going to be discussed before it happens. It means asking open-ended questions and tolerating nonlinear answers. It means noticing when a client has left their window and adjusting rather than pushing through. It means being consistent: I have to call when I said I would call, send the summary I promised, be where I said I would be. A nervous system shaped by unpredictability is soothed by predictability. These are not acts of unusual kindness. They are clinical architecture. And yes, we lawyers function in an atmosphere of barely controlled chaos and unpredictability in our daily work lives. Our traumatized clients cannot.

Bessel van der Kolk, a psychiatrist who founded the Trauma Center in Brookline, Massachusetts and has spent more than three decades studying trauma and its neurological effects, documented that when traumatic events are encoded under high stress, the hippocampus, which under normal circumstances organizes memories in time and sequence, is impaired.[7]  The result is memory stored as fragments: sensory details, body states, emotional impressions, disconnected from each other and from any reliable sense of when and where things occurred. He also documented that when survivors re-experience traumatic material, activity in Broca's area, the region of the brain responsible for producing language, decreases substantially.[8]  Trauma tends toward the unspeakable, encoded below the level of words.

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux established that the brain's threat detection system, centered in the amygdala, processes danger signals through a rapid process that triggers a defensive response before the conscious, deliberative brain has had time to evaluate what is actually happening.  Under sustained threat activation, the prefrontal cortex, which governs planning, reasoning, attention, and the organized use of language, is functionally impaired. For a client whose nervous system is already dysregulated by a trauma history, the additional acute stress of criminal prosecution compounds this effect.NeuroscientistJoseph LeDoux established that the brain's threat detection system, centered inthe amygdala, processes danger signals through a rapid process that triggers adefensive response before the conscious, deliberative brain has had time toevaluate what is actually happening.[9] Under sustained threat activation, the prefrontal cortex, which governs planning, reasoning, attention, and the organized use of language, is functionally impaired. For a client whose nervous system is already dysregulated by a trauma history, the additional acute stress of criminal prosecution compounds this effect.

What this means for a defense attorney is specific: when a client cannot give a linear, consistent account of what happened, the most common interpretation, that the client is lying or strategically withholding,  may be fundamentally wrong. The inconsistency may be an accurate reflection of how the event is stored in the client’s brain. The holes in the timeline may be real gaps, not evasions.

An attorney who understands this approaches the inconsistent account as clinical information rather than a credibility problem to be managed. They ask questions that invite sensory detail rather than demanding narrative sequence. They understand that a client who cannot tell them when or how something happened may be able to tell them what they smelled, what they saw, what they felt in their body. They work with the architecture of traumatic memory rather than against it. This isn’t easy for lawyers, and it takes conscious effort on our part.

Research on what makes traumatic experiences most damaging consistently identifies two factors: the degree to which the person felt powerless, and the degree to whichthey felt alone.[10] A criminal accusation scores high on both. The legal system is opaque, the language is foreign, the stakes are catastrophic, and the person at the center of the proceeding has almost no control over what happens to them.

Transparency addresses both factors directly. A client who understands what is happening is less helpless. A client who is regularly informed feels less abandoned. This is not simply customer service. It is a clinical intervention that improves your client's capacity to participate in their own defense.

In practice, this means explaining the prosecution's role as well as your own. It means describing what each court appearance is and what will happen there before it happens. It means sharing bad news carefully and directly rather than withholding it in the name of managing distress. It means sending written summaries after meetings, because a client whose nervous system was activated during the conversation may not retain what was said. It means confirming understanding, not by asking whether they understand, but by asking them to explain back what they heard.

If the plea offer is the best option, but because it triggers his trauma responses the client cannot effectively process the decision when it is presented, he needs the time to absorb, react, and then discuss. That can’t happen on the courthouse steps. Better to trigger the trauma reaction in your office or at the jail, with time to deal with it, than at the penultimate moment.

PsychologistsSteven Maier and Martin Seligman documented what they called learned helplessness: when subjects were subjected to inescapable stress, they lost the capacity to take protective action even when escape later became possible.[11] The nervous system had learned that effort does not change outcomes, and it stopped trying. The implications for trauma in humans are significant. Passivity and disengagement look like indifference. They may not be. They may be the predictable result of a process that has stripped a person of every meaningful choice, compounded by a trauma history that has already taught them that resistance is futile.

The client who has been told simply what their options are 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 and why. Giving clients a genuine voice in the decisions that affect their lives is not just ethically correct. It combats the learned helplessness that trauma and the legal system conspire to produce in them.

This means when there is a decision to be made, it should be presented as a real choice. It means explaining not just the options but the considerations that bear on them, and then actually asking what the client thinks, rather than first telling them what is best for them. It means resisting the efficiency instinct to simply tell a client what to do when the answer seems obvious. Their investment in the decision is not a courtesy. It is a clinical resource that will determine how they show up at every subsequent stage of the case.

The medical and behavioral health communities have been developing trauma-informed practice standards for years. Nursing, social work, emergency medicine, and psychiatry all have established frameworks and curricula for working effectively with people who have experienced trauma. In comparison, the legal profession has barely started. That means the resources already exist, developed by other disciplines, and fully accessible to any attorney willing to look.

The most accessible starting point is Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score, which translates the neuroscience of trauma into language any reader can follow. SAMHSA's Treatment Improvement Protocol No. 57, Trauma-Informed Care in Behavioral Health Services, is a comprehensive guide available free of charge. The Center for Justice Innovation's TIPS Lab Blueprint includes a trauma training roadmap applicable to individual attorneys, and the Center for Health Care Strategies' Trauma-Informed Care Implementation Resource Center offers additional frameworks from clinical practice.[12]

None of this requires attending a graduate program in psychology. It requires reading outside the legal silo. The behaviors we have been misreading in our clients for years are documented, explained, and addressable. The framework exists. I would argue we have an ethical obligation to learn it. But on a practical level, my experience is that understanding trauma and my clients who suffer from its effects has made my advocacy more effective and my work with clients less baffling.

H. Ernest Stone has practiced criminal defense in Massachusetts for more than thirty years. He is the principal of H. Ernest Stone, Attorney PC, in Beverly, Massachusetts, where his practice focuses on serious criminal matters, including homicide, sexual assault, domestic violence, OUI, drug crimes, and cases with mental health components.

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

2. Kilpatrick, D.G., et al. (2013). National estimates of exposure to traumatic events and PTSD prevalence using DSM-IV and DSM-5 criteria. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 26(5), 537-547. Using DSM-5 criteria, this nationally representative sample found traumatic event exposure in 89.7% of participants. The earlier National Comorbidity Survey (Kessler et al., 1995) found that 60.7% of men and 51.2% of women reported at least one traumatic event; more recent estimates using broader criteria consistently exceed 70 to 80 percent.

3. 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. Available at: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7226a2.htm

4. 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). Available at: https://store.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/sma14-4884.pdf

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

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

7. van der Kolk, B. (1998). Trauma and memory. Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 52(S1), S97-S109. See also van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books.

8. van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score, supra note 7, at ch. 3 (discussing Broca's area deactivation during traumatic re-experiencing).

9. 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.

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

11. Maier, S.F., & Seligman, M.E.P. (1976). Learned helplessness: Theory and evidence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 105(1), 3-46.

12. Starting points for attorneys seeking to develop trauma literacy: van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Penguin Books. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Treatment Improvement Protocol No. 57: Trauma-Informed Care in Behavioral Health Services (2014), free at https://store.samhsa.gov/product/tip-57-trauma-informed-care-behavioral-health-services/PEP21-02-01-001. Center for Justice Innovation TIPS Lab Blueprint, supra note 1. Trauma-Informed Care Implementation Resource Center, Center for Health Care Strategies: https://www.traumainformedcare.chcs.org/