Part 2: A Holistic Approach to Representing Federal Criminal Defendants

Q & A with NiaLena Caravasos, Esq.

Editor’s Note. US Daily Review recently interviewed one of the country’s leading criminal defense attorneys about her very unique approach to the law. She is known for providing a “holistic” and very empathetic approach. Kevin Price, Host of the nationally syndicated Price of Business show and Editor at Large for US Daily Review, has interviewed NiaLena Caravasos several times and calls her “a true thought leader when it comes to the law and an innovator in the area of federal criminal defense and white collar crime.” US Daily Review is delighted to explore the important work and approach of NiaLena Caravasos in this three part series of questions and answers with our editorial team.

Do people ever ask you how you are able to represent defendants who are accused of committing terrible crimes?

Yes. First I explain to them that the criminal justice system only functions if the government is put to the test and its feet are held to the fire in order to make certain that they can actually prove beyond a reasonable doubt the charges that they have brought against someone. That is the only way to hold the government in check. As Benjamin Franklin said, it is “better a hundred guilty persons should escape, than one innocent person should suffer.” I also explain that defendants are not always as they initially seem. Defendants are human beings like anyone else and their predicaments are often the combination of many things that have gone wrong in their lives beforehand. Of course, that is not a justification for harming someone else but rather an explanation that life circumstances do not occur in a vacuum but rather are intricately interconnected and reflective of where we’ve been, who we are, and how we got there.

Have you always practiced in a holistic manner for which you have become very well known?

Yes, but… At the beginning of my legal career, I clerked for the Honorable Lisa Aversa Richette who was a trailblazing judge in Philadelphia. She is the one who taught me to look past the fact that defendants are defendants and embrace them and treat them foremost like the human beings that they are. She believed that if I did that, they would trust me and I would be able to develop the kind of connections with them that would really enable me to help them in very profound ways. She was right, and I began to do that right away in my career when I started in private practice. And I was able to reach clients in profound ways that allowed for transformative life changes. But I wasn’t able to necessarily translate those transformative life changes into a direct benefit in their cases until years later due to the confines of the legal system.

What changed in the law during the later years and how were you able to help clients more as a result?

From 1997 when I began in private practice, I had to work within the confines of mandatory federal sentencing guidelines when representing federal criminal clients and white collar clients in Federal Court. What that means is that unless someone went to trial and was acquitted, they were pigeonholed into mandatory ranges of sentencing guidelines that a judge had to impose unless the client cooperated with the government and the government made a motion for the court to be allowed to sentence outside of those mandatory guidelines. The law changed in 2005 with United States v. Booker and the federal sentencing guidelines became advisory. So while a judge had to consider them, a judge could sentence outside of them if given a legitimate reason to do so and that had nothing to do with cooperation. So, since then, I have been able to work very intensely with clients to understand their lives and the catalysts for any criminal activity that they may have been involved in and then to develop that through experts so as to be able to present it to the Court if appropriate as mitigating circumstances so that the Court could take all of that into consideration in deciding an appropriate sentence for my client. And the timing worked out very well because a few years after that, a federal judge in Philadelphia introduced me to a world-renowned forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Sadoff, with whom I began working very closely in an effort to cultivate issues of forensic psychiatry into my federal criminal and white collar crime practice so as to put meat on the bones, if you will, to arguments that I could develop on behalf of clients and then have them reinforced from a medical perspective through expert testimony.

NiaLena Caravasos is the only Philadelphia criminal defense attorney to be featured twice on the Super Lawyers cover – once in the Philadelphia Magazine and in a cover story entitled “Fierce” and again on the cover and cover story of the 20th Anniversary Super Lawyers edition. She has been repeatedly recognized in the Top 100 and Top 50 Women Super Lawyers lists and was also featured on the cover and cover story of CIO Women Magazine as a “Pioneer of Female Leadership in Male-Dominated Criminal Defense.” She was also honored by the international nonprofit project “Inspirational People” that focuses on featuring accomplished individuals around the world who practice their professions in a manner that is believed to be inspirational to young people. NiaLena has her own law firm in Philadelphia where she focuses on defending her federal criminal and white collar crime clients while employing a unique holistic approach geared to restoring her clients to good lives. Please visit her website at https://nialena.com to learn more about her practice.