Emma Freudenberger

Five Hundred Fifty-Five Times

In November 2020, Emma Freudenberger sat across from Roger Golubski, a retired Kansas City, Kansas detective, and began asking questions under oath in Lamonte McIntyre's civil case.

Golubski invoked the Fifth Amendment. Then he invoked it again. By the time the deposition ended, he had refused to answer 555 times.

Each refusal became part of the record. McIntyre's complaint alleged that one witness had initially said she never saw the shooting — before police pressure produced an identification — and that a second witness was worked over with similar tactics. Freudenberger and the McIntyre team did not stop at those two identifications. They went after the department itself: files on other alleged misconduct, informants, unsolved homicides, alternate suspects, and what supervisors knew. Federal discovery orders opened portions of that record as relevant to pattern, practice, motive, and municipal liability.

The deposition fixed the silence in place. The documents widened the case from two coerced identifications to an entire police department — what it knew, what it recorded, what it permitted. In 2022, the Unified Government paid the McIntyre family $12.5 million.

Sixteen Years for Another Man's Crime

The science cleared Jeffrey Deskovic before his trial even began. Testing excluded him as the source of the physical evidence in the case. The prosecution went forward anyway, leaning on his confession and telling the jury the unmatched evidence belonged to someone else.

It did. Years later, DNA identified another man, and that man confessed. Deskovic walked out after nearly sixteen years.

Exoneration opened the prison door, but a civil case demands its own proof: that official conduct produced the confession, and the confession produced the years. Freudenberger carried the exoneration record into claims of coercion, fabricated evidence, causation, and damages — and in 2014, she tried the remaining civil claim against a county investigator.

The jury found intentional misconduct, including a conspiracy to coerce the confession and fabricate evidence. It awarded $25 million for the years in prison, $15 million for pain and suffering, and $1.65 million in stipulated lost wages — a $41.65 million verdict.

The Price of the Door

The Fairbanks Four had everything a postconviction lawyer could want: a new confession, corroborating witnesses, recantations, alibi testimony, and a forensic theory coming apart under challenge. The State of Alaska offered immediate vacatur and dismissal — on one condition. All four men had to release the State, the City of Fairbanks, and their employees from civil liability.

Marvin Roberts was already out on parole. The other three were still inside, and they would stay inside unless all four signed.

Roberts signed, and then Freudenberger's team went to work on the bargain itself. The Ninth Circuit held that vacatur removed the Heck bar to his Section 1983 damages claim. In January 2024, the district court granted partial summary judgment on the release-dismissal agreement, concluding that forcing one man to surrender his civil claims so three others could leave prison did not serve the public interest.

Freudenberger carried Roberts's individual claim through trial preparation. In 2025, Fairbanks resolved it for $11.5 million.

Thirty-Eight Years

Maurice Hastings spent thirty-eight years in prison before DNA testing and other evidence produced a ruling of factual innocence. Freudenberger helped prepare his civil claims against former Inglewood detectives for trial — joining the innocence ruling to the police record, then building the separate proof of causation and damages that money relief requires.

With trial set for September 2025 and closing in, Inglewood agreed to pay Hastings $25 million.

Inside the Jail Walls

Her practice reaches people who never came home from custody at all. In a Lebanon County matter, Freudenberger and co-counsel represented a family whose claims concerned medical care during detention; the case settled for $4.75 million in 2018. In Orleans Parish, she represented family members in claims about direct observation, mental-health treatment, and suicide-prevention policy. Federal judges kept the claims against senior medical officials alive for a jury, and the sheriff resolved the matter for $1.75 million shortly before trial.

The Architecture of a Second Case

Every one of these matters demanded a different record. McIntyre joined a deposition transcript of 555 silences to departmental files and supervisory knowledge. Deskovic joined a coerced confession to exonerating science and a damages presentation a jury could act on. Roberts required appellate and summary-judgment victories over the very agreement that had freed his friends. Hastings moved from a factual-innocence ruling to the edge of trial.

Freudenberger builds the civil action from the exoneration record, identifying the responsible conduct and connecting it to a constitutional theory. She must preserve the claim through dispositive motions, then present the lost years as damages at trial or in settlement negotiations.

A Jailhouse Lawyer's Manual

Freudenberger graduated with honors from Wesleyan University and earned her law degree at Columbia, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of A Jailhouse Lawyer’s Manual — the handbook written for people litigating from inside prison — and was named a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. She clerked for Justice Virginia A. Long of the New Jersey Supreme Court.

She now teaches civil wrongful-conviction litigation at Columbia, Yale, Cardozo, and other law schools, walking students through the same sequence her cases follow: exoneration evidence, constitutional theory, agency records, causation, damages, and the procedural rulings that keep a civil claim alive.