About Tanya
““Tanya Leach has a rare combination of trauma training and legal experience. Her legal background provides a useful lens and critical understanding of the challenges of representation. The experience she brings to a case based on her training as a psychoanalyst enables her to counsel clients effectively, with compassion and insight. . . After quickly earning the trust of the client, we learned things that had been unclear through months of legal counseling.” ”
Tanya is an experienced and highly trained mitigation specialist, sentencing and parole consultant, and restorative justice practitioner in private practice in New York City. Tanya began working in the field in 2009, assisting incarcerated clients to prepare for their parole board hearings. Tanya collaborates with clients and their teams to create a mitigation package that will provide a holistic picture of who the client is as a person. She uses her training as a psychoanalyst to help clients understand the events in their personal history that contributed to them committing a crime. Once the clients have gained this insight, Tanya helps craft a compelling narrative that shows them as a human being, with a personal history, positive attributes and deep insight into and remorse for the events that lead them into conflict with the law. Her background as both an attorney and a psychoanalyst provides her with a unique ability to help the court or other adjudicating body to fully appreciate all mitigating factors, including the client’s mental health, trauma history, or developmental disorders.
Check out Tanya’s LinkedIn profile.
Relevant experience
Private Practice, October 2019 – Present
Assist clients with sentencing mitigation presentations, parole preparation and parole board packets, and clemency applications. Supervisor: Cori Chertoff.
Coming to Terms Group Co-Facilitator, The Osborne Association, August 2018 – March 2020
Co-facilitated restorative justice groups for individuals convicted of murders and incarcerated in Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Assisted paticipants in exploring their life narrative, grappling with their participation in their crime, understanding the suffering caused by their crime, and focusing on remorse, responsibility, apology and amends.
Volunteer Lawyer, Longtermers Project, The Osborne Association, February 2009 – March 2020
Assisted long-term incarcerated individuals in preparing for their parole board hearings using a restorative justice model. Interviewed clients and drafted criminal case summaries to be included in parole packets. Requested court papers and drafted and filed motions for pre-sentence reports and other supporting documentation. Researched and drafted briefs and memoranda of law. Participated in Mock Parole Board Hearings
mitigation Trainings
Childhood Trauma and Psychological Development of a Mass Murderer Through the Lens of Fairbairn’s Object Relations Theory, Object Relations Institute, Dr. David P. Celani, September 2021
Coming to Terms, The Osborne Association, Cori Chertoff, 2017