Emma Freudenberger

Five Hundred Fifty-Five Invocations

In November 2020, Emma Freudenberger questioned former Kansas City, Kansas, detective Roger Golubski under oath. Lamonte McIntyre had spent twenty-three years imprisoned for a double murder he did not commit. His civil complaint alleged that Golubski coerced two women into identifying him and targeted the seventeen-year-old in retaliation against his mother, Rose.

Golubski invoked the Fifth Amendment 555 times.

Freudenberger and the McIntyre team treated the 555 invocations as a starting point for broader municipal-liability discovery. They sought files involving other women allegedly exploited by Golubski, informants, unsolved homicides, drug activity, alternate suspects, sexual misconduct, and police supervisors’ knowledge. To hold the municipality liable, they had to show that the wrongful conviction arose from more than one detective’s private misconduct by establishing what the department knew, tolerated, recorded, and allowed to persist.

Federal discovery orders required the department to produce files involving other women, homicide investigations, informants, alleged corruption, and notice within the police department. Those records could bear on pattern, practice, motive, and municipal liability.

The Identification Evidence

The McIntyre complaint alleged that Golubski used threats and suggestion to produce false eyewitness evidence. Ruby Mitchell initially said she had not seen the shooting. The civil plaintiffs contended that police pressure transformed her into an identifying witness and that another woman was subjected to similar tactics. Rose McIntyre alleged that Golubski had sexually coerced and harassed her before her son became the murder suspect.

The defense disputed those accusations, challenged the scope of discovery into municipal practices, and denied municipal responsibility. Golubski’s Fifth Amendment invocation in the civil case did not itself establish liability. It protected him from compelled answers that could create a link to criminal exposure. The plaintiffs still needed documents, other witnesses, police files, supervisors, chronology, and proof connecting alleged misconduct to Lamonte’s prosecution.

The Unified Government settled the McIntyre family’s claims for $12.5 million in 2022 without admitting liability. Golubski was later federally charged with civil-rights crimes involving allegations of sexual assault and kidnapping under color of law. He died in December 2024 before the criminal trial began. Those charges ended without conviction or acquittal.

Jeffrey Deskovic’s Civil Trial

Jeffrey Deskovic was sixteen when investigators began treating his grief over a classmate’s murder as suspicious. Police questioned him repeatedly, isolated him from his parents, and subjected him to an interrogation and polygraph process that lasted for hours. Deskovic confessed.

The physical evidence pointed elsewhere before trial. Serology excluded him as the source of semen recovered from the victim. Prosecutors argued that another person had left the semen before Deskovic committed the rape and murder. The confession supplied the bridge between an innocent teenager and evidence that did not match him.

Deskovic was convicted and spent nearly sixteen years imprisoned. In 2006, DNA testing identified Steven Cunningham, who confessed to the crime. Exoneration removed the conviction. It did not decide who should answer civilly for the interrogation, the fabricated account surrounding it, the use of exclusionary science, and the years that followed.

Freudenberger and Nick Brustin tried the remaining civil case against Putnam County investigator Daniel Stephens in 2014. The jury found intentional misconduct, including 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.

The Deskovic Verdict and Recovery Agreement

A pretrial agreement limited the amount recoverable from the remaining trial defendant to $10 million. Earlier settlements with other defendants, combined with the capped trial recovery, brought Deskovic’s aggregate compensation to approximately $21.9 million.

The $41.65 million verdict and the approximately $21.9 million recovery answer different questions. The verdict records the jury’s findings and valuation; the recovery records what the agreements and available defendants ultimately paid.

DNA cleared Deskovic of the crime. The civil trial still required proof of Stephens’s conduct, the role of the confession and fabricated evidence, and the damages attributable to that conduct.

Terance Calhoun’s Exculpatory DNA

Terance Calhoun’s civil case concerns exculpatory scientific evidence that emerged after conviction. Calhoun was nineteen and had documented cognitive limitations when he entered no-contest pleas in two Detroit sexual-assault prosecutions in 2007. He spent more than fifteen years imprisoned.

His complaint alleges that police coerced a false confession, used a suggestive identification procedure, fabricated incriminating statements in a polygraph report, and suppressed a DNA report excluding him as a contributor. His convictions and sentences were vacated, and the charges were dismissed with prejudice in 2022.

Freudenberger and Amelia Green represent Calhoun with Julie Hurwitz and Kathryn Bruner James. In March 2026, the federal court resolved competing dispositive motions claim by claim. It first held that the stipulated vacatur removed the barrier created by Heck v. Humphrey. The officers could not defeat the civil action by arguing that the state court had entered the vacatur through a stipulation rather than a separately captioned motion.

The court then confronted qualified immunity. Detectives Jose Ortiz and Robert Kane did not receive immunity on the claim that they suppressed the postconviction DNA report. The court held that an officer had fair warning that deliberately withholding scientific evidence excluding the convicted person violated due process, even though the report issued after the plea rather than before trial.

Claims Preserved for Further Litigation

The March 2026 order preserved the DNA-suppression claim against both detectives and the coerced-confession claim against Kane. The court held that those claims could proceed without qualified immunity on the evidentiary record before it.

The ruling determined which claims and defendants remained; later proceedings would decide liability and damages.

The order analyzed suppression, coercion, identification procedures, and fabrication separately because each theory carried distinct elements, evidence, immunity law, and causal requirements.

The Medical Unit and the Empty Watch Post

Victoria “Tori” Herr and William Goetzee died after entering local jails, where access to medical care and suicide monitoring depended on the institutions holding them.

Victoria “Tori” Herr entered Lebanon County jail at eighteen after disclosing heavy heroin use. The complaint alleged that she vomited, suffered severe diarrhea and hallucinations, stopped eating, struggled to retain liquids, and deteriorated over five days. After collapsing, she was returned to housing rather than transported to a hospital. She suffered cardiac arrest, catastrophic brain injury, and death. Freudenberger and Rick Sawyer represented her family with Jonathan Feinberg. The case settled for $4.75 million in 2018.

William Goetzee entered Orleans Parish Prison after a suicide attempt. He was a commander in the Coast Guard Reserve and a civilian Coast Guard employee. The jail placed him on its mental-health tier under direct observation. The deputy assigned to watch him repeatedly left the post. Goetzee died during an absence.

His siblings alleged that the empty post reflected a jailwide practice rather than one deputy’s isolated abandonment. The chief psychiatrist and medical director had responsibility for suicide-prevention policy and treatment. Federal judges denied their summary-judgment motions, leaving a jury to decide whether they had condoned practices that permitted suicidal detainees to remain unwatched. The sheriff paid $1.75 million days before trial.

Herr’s case turned on withdrawal, dehydration, medical assessment, records, and emergency transport. Goetzee’s turned on known suicide risk, direct observation, staffing, and medical policymaking. In both, the jailed person could not summon ordinary care without the jail that controlled the door.

The Agreement Signed for Release

Marvin Roberts and the other Fairbanks Four spent approximately eighteen years under murder convictions. During a five-week postconviction hearing, another man confessed, witnesses corroborated the new account, an original witness said police had coerced his statement, alibi witnesses testified, and experts attacked the forensic theory used at trial.

Before the state judge ruled, prosecutors offered immediate vacatur and dismissal only if all four men released the State, the City of Fairbanks, and their employees from civil liability. Roberts was already on parole. The other three remained imprisoned. They would not be released unless he signed.

The agreement stated that the original convictions had been validly entered while acknowledging enough new evidence to justify a new trial. It avoided an innocence finding. The four signed, the convictions were vacated, the indictments dismissed, and the three imprisoned men walked free.

The release then became the first obstacle in the civil case. The Ninth Circuit held that vacatur removed the Heck bar. On remand, the district court addressed whether the no-suit agreement itself should be enforced. In January 2024, it granted partial summary judgment to Roberts. Requiring him to surrender civil claims so that three other men could leave prison did not serve the public interest, particularly after the parties had acknowledged material new evidence capable of producing a new trial.

Freudenberger joined Nick Brustin, Anna Benvenutti Hoffmann, Christina Matthias, Sophia Villarreal, and Alaska counsel on the litigation team. Roberts declined the $1.59 million settlements accepted by the other three men and prepared for trial. In 2025, Fairbanks agreed to pay him $11.5 million. The settlement contained no admission of liability, and the payment schedule extended through October 1, 2026.

Hastings and Mack

Maurice Hastings spent thirty-eight years imprisoned for a murder he did not commit. DNA testing and other evidence produced a factual-innocence ruling. His civil complaint alleged that Inglewood police ignored or concealed evidence pointing to the actual perpetrator, who remained free to assault other women.

Freudenberger worked with Nick Brustin, Christina Matthias, Gerardo Romo, and Cotchett Pitre & McCarthy to carry Hastings’s claims against former Inglewood detectives toward trial.

With trial approaching in September 2025, Inglewood agreed to pay Hastings $25 million, concluding the civil action against the remaining defendants.

Forty-Seven Years under One Conviction

Leonard Mack was twenty-three, a Black Vietnam veteran, when police arrested him for a 1975 rape in a largely white Westchester community. He had multiple alibi witnesses and did not match several details supplied by the victims. The complaint alleges that police manufactured identifications and that a laboratory analyst misrepresented testing that excluded Mack as the semen source.

Mack spent more than seven years imprisoned and approximately two and a half more on parole. He lived under the conviction for forty-seven years. Modern DNA testing excluded him and identified another convicted sex offender, who confessed. In September 2023, a Westchester judge vacated the conviction. The district attorney acknowledged that the system had failed an innocent man.

Freudenberger, Anna Benvenutti Hoffmann, Amelia Green, Christina Matthias, and Elsa Mota filed Mack’s federal civil-rights action in November 2024. Mack received $4 million in separate state compensation in March 2025, while the federal claims against the county, town, officers, estates, and laboratory personnel continued.

Greenburgh authorized continued retention of defense counsel in March 2026, and the civil action continues.

Wrongful-Conviction Litigation and Teaching

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 and was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. She then clerked for Justice Virginia A. Long of the New Jersey Supreme Court in its death-penalty clerkship.

She is now a partner at Neufeld Scheck Brustin Hoffmann & Freudenberger, litigating wrongful-conviction and jail-death cases in state and federal courts nationwide. She has taught civil wrongful-conviction litigation at Columbia, Yale, Cardozo, and other law schools.