Samantha E. Freed

Practice Areas:

State and Federal Trials and Appeals; Criminal Law; Family Law; Custody, Visitation, Guardian ad litem; Civil Litigation

Biography:

Samantha Freed was born in Washington D.C. and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, where she attended Garrison Forest School. She went on to Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana and graduated from the Honors program, magna cum laude, with a Bachelor of Arts in Medical Ethics.  She then returned to Maryland and received her Juris Doctor from the University of Maryland School of Law.  During law school, she worked for the Maryland Healthcare Ethics Committee Network under the guidance of Dean Diane Hoffman, the Maryland Attorney General’s Office at the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and the Legal Aid Society’s Health Law Unit in New York City.  Upon graduation, she clerked for the Honorable William O. Carr, Administrative Judge, of the Harford County Circuit Court.  Afterwards, she moved to Charlottesville with her husband and has been working for Snook & Haughey, P.C. since 2006.  Her practice focuses on criminal law, family law and juvenile law, and she appears in courts throughout Central Virginia.  She recently argued an important Confrontation Clause case in the Virginia Supreme Court, Crawford v. Commonwealth,  281 Va. 84, 704 S.E.2d 107 (2011), where the Virginia Supreme Court held that an affidavit used to obtain a protective order against the defendant should not have been used as evidence against the defendant in his subsequent murder trial.

Samantha is a member of the Charlottesville-Albemarle Bar Association, the Charlottesville-Albemarle Criminal Bar Association, the Virginia Trial Lawyers Association, and the Virginia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.  She is licensed to practice law in both Maryland and Virginia, and is admitted to practice in the U.S. District Courts for the Eastern and Western Districts of Virginia.

When she is not working, Samantha enjoys spending time outdoors in the Blue Ridge Mountains, gardening and playing with her Great Pyrenees, Steve.