I focus my practice on appellate litigation and civil rights. Prior to founding Faraino, LLC, I was an associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York, where I worked on dozens of multibillion-dollar mergers. After a few years in corporate and antitrust practice (during which I maintained a steady pro bono caseload), I returned home to Alabama to provide advocacy support amidst a constitutional crisis in Alabama prisons.

 

My interest in issues of racial and socioeconomic injustice is a natural product of growing up in Birmingham — a place with a painful history of discrimination that continues to shape modern-day inequalities. As an undergraduate at Harvard College, I participated in a class inside of a women’s prison in which half of the students were incarcerated. It was at that time that I began to understand how essential legal knowledge is to combating entrenched systems of oppression. I thus attended law school with the resolve to build a career around amplifying the voices of people who feel silenced. 

 

In my advocacy work, I have experienced a number of successes. I was the lead researcher and drafter of an amicus brief that contributed to the exoneration of a wrongfully convicted man on Louisiana’s death row. I secured permanent residency for a woman abused by her husband after immigrating to the US and continue to support her informally in her journey to receive a bachelor’s degree. 

 

However, perhaps most influential in my decision to focus on prison litigation is the tragically unsuccessful effort to secure justice that I have encountered in 2020: the capital case of Nathaniel Woods. As I began to investigate his case a mere month before his scheduled execution, I discovered what many in his poor, predominantly Black community had known for years — he had been wrongfully convicted. 

 

Nathaniel’s court-appointed attorneys had let him down at every step, and so I pulled together a group of attorneys, activists, reporters and politicians from across the U.S. to try to halt the execution. Through entirely volunteer efforts, our team filed a federal habeas appeal, received extensive news coverage on CNN, MSNBC and FOX, and engaged hundreds of thousands across the world to fight for his clemency. Ultimately, we were unsuccessful in convincing Governor Ivey and the courts to intervene. It was a devastating outcome, but I find at least some comfort in knowing that Nathaniel saw the truth of his story circulate across the world before he was killed.

 

After his execution, I founded The Woods Foundation to provide investigative services to those facing unjust sentences in Alabama. We have helped secure freedom for five individuals. I also worked with the NYTimes Presents on a documentary about Nathaniel's case: To Live and Die in Alabama, which was nominated for an Emmy in 2022 and is streaming on Hulu. If there is one thing that I learned from Nathaniel’s case, it is that every attempt to achieve justice provides necessary hope for a better future.

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Education

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Harvard College, B.A., cum laude

University of Chicago Law School, J.D., cum laude; The University of Chicago Law Review; Doctoroff Business Leadership Scholar

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Licensed In

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Alabama

New York