Ms. Hollander is an internationally recognized criminal defense lawyer from the Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA firm of Freedman Boyd Hollander & Goldberg P.A., and is Of Counsel to the firm of Savolainen Avocats in Geneva, Switzerland. She has been admitted to practice in the US Supreme Court, most US Courts of Appeal and District Courts, two US Military Courts, in addition to New Mexico. She is also on the list of counsel for the ICC and the US Department of Defense’s Pool of Qualified Civilian Defense Counsel for Military Commissions.
For more than four decades, her practice has largely been devoted to representing individuals and organizations accused of crimes, including those involving national security issues, in trial and on appeal. Ms. Hollander also served as a consultant to the defense in a terrorism case in Ireland, has assisted counsel in other international cases and worked with a team to win two cases before the European Court of Human Rights for her client facing the death penalty in Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. In 2016, she won the freedom of another prisoner in Guantanamo, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, after 11 years of pro bono representation. His story is chronicled in his bestselling book, Guantanamo Diary, which Ms. Hollander helped facilitate and publish, and in the film, The Mauritanian. She was also lead appellate counsel for Chelsea Manning in the military appellate courts. She won Ms. Manning’s release in 2017 when President Obama commuted her sentence.
In addition to her criminal defense practice, Ms. Hollander has also been counsel in numerous civil cases, forfeitures, and administrative hearings, and has argued and won a case involving religious freedom in the US Supreme Court.
Ms. Hollander regularly teaches trial advocacy to lawyers in other countries, including, for example, in Sweden, the UK, France, Switzerland, and Portugal. She has taught in numerous trial practice programs and has conducted more than 200 seminars and presentations around the world on various subjects including the securing of evidence in international cases, forfeiture, illegal search and seizure, expert witnesses, defense of child abuse cases, ethics, evidence, and trial practice. She has coordinated and taught training courses for criminal defense lawyers wishing to appear before the ICC and the ICTY, was the coordinator of a jury trial training project in Russia and has served as a consultant to the UNDP in Vietnam. She has also written extensively on these and other criminal law topics. She was co-author of WestGroup’s Everytrial Criminal Defense Resource Book from 1993 until 2016, Wharton’s Criminal Evidence, 15th Edition, and Wharton’s Criminal Procedure, 14th Edition.
Ms. Hollander has received numerous awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from America’s Top 100 lawyers in New Mexico, Best Lawyers’ Albuquerque Criminal Defense: Non-White-Collar Lawyer of the Year in 2010 and White-Collar Lawyer of the Year in 2011, the Professional Lawyer of the Year Award from the New Mexico Trial Lawyers Foundation in 2006, among others. She is listed in the Top 250 Women in Litigation in the US and in 2001 she was named as one of America’s top fifty women litigators by the National Law Journal. In 1992-93, she was the President of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. She was inducted as a Fellow into the American College of Trial Lawyers in 2004.
Ms. Hollander earned her Juris Doctor degree from the University of New Mexico School of Law in 1978, where she graduated Magna Cum Laude and was an editor of the law review.
Ms. Hollander holds national security clearances.
While Ms. Hollander is no longer taking new cases, she is available to consult on significant matters of interest.