Anna Benvenutti Hoffmann
Anna Benvenutti Hoffmann joined NSB in 2006. Since then, she has helped secure multi-million-dollar verdicts and settlements for innocent clients in cases involving the gamut of misconduct, including suggestive identifications, coerced and fabricated confessions, Brady violations, fabricated evidence, junk science, prosecutorial misconduct, and unconstitutional municipal practices. She has litigated wrongful conviction and malicious prosecution claims in North Carolina, Louisiana, California, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Texas, Kentucky, Florida and New York. She also has taught continuing legal education on litigating wrongful conviction claims.
Ms. Hoffmann’s practice focuses on substantial legal writing and analysis in federal and state trial and appellate courts. Recently, on a team with Peter Neufeld, Debi Cornwall and Cochran Fellow Sandy Henderson, she authored the briefs to New York’s highest court on behalf of Douglas Warney, a mentally ill and mentally retarded man who sought compensation for nine years spent imprisoned for a murder he did not commit. Lower courts had rejected his compensation claim on the basis that, because he had falsely confessed, Warney had caused his own conviction. In a landmark 2011 ruling, the Court of Appeals reinstated Warney’s claim, holding that where police feed nonpublic facts to an innocent suspect and then falsely claim those facts originated with him, the police have effectively coerced the confession.
Before joining NSB, Ms. Hoffmann clerked for the late Honorable Reginald C. Lindsay of the District of Massachusetts. In 2004 she graduated third in her class from New York University School of Law, magna cum laude and Order of the Coif, where she received the Benjamin F. Butler Memorial Award for “unusual distinction in scholarship, character and professional activities.” While in law school, Ms. Hoffmann worked in NYU’s Capital Defender Clinic at the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama. She interned at the Innocence Project, Legal Aid Society Criminal Defense Division in Manhattan, the CPCS Public Defender Division in Cambridge, and NSB. Ms. Hoffmann graduated from Harvard College in 2000.
Ms. Hoffmann is admitted to practice in New York, Massachusetts, the U.S. District Courts for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York and the District of Massachusetts, and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Ms. Hoffmann can be reached at anna@nsbcivilrights.com.