Adrienne Urrutia Wisenberg is of counsel in the Washington, D.C. office of Barnes & Thornburg LLP, where she is a member of the firm’s White Collar Crime Defense Practice Group. Mrs. Wisenberg has represented clients in nearly 250 direct appeals and habeas corpus proceedings in her 21 years as a criminal defense attorney. Her years of experience in the federal appellate and district courts have resulted in nearly 50 oral arguments and 60 published decisions.
Mrs. Wisenberg’s practice covers all phases of the federal criminal process, including pre-indictment investigations and negotiations, trials, sentencing hearings, appeals and federal habeas work.
Mrs. Wisenberg began her legal career in 1989 as briefing attorney to the Honorable Judge M.P. 'Rusty' Duncan III, on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals – the highest court in Texas for all criminal matters. When her clerkship ended, Mrs. Wisenberg immediately went into private practice in San Antonio, Texas, defending clients in state and federal courts throughout Texas, in both the trial and appellate arenas. After approximately 20 jury trials in two years, Mrs. Wisenberg joined the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the Western District of Texas, where, for six years, she concentrated on federal appellate work in front of the United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.
In order to pursue her interest in defending death penalty appeals and habeas cases, Mrs. Wisenberg re-entered private practice in San Antonio in 1998. Since then she has investigated, briefed, litigated and argued several complex federal capital habeas cases, while continuing to develop her non-capital appellate practice, and her sentencing and pre-trial motions practice, as well.
In 2005, the United States Supreme Court's opinion in United States v. Booker brought sweeping changes to the law governing federal sentencing practice. This made Mrs. Wisenberg's substantial knowledge of social history and mitigation investigations, developed in the capital arena, an invaluable resource in the realm of non-capital federal sentencing. Mrs. Wisenberg, who has handled hundreds of sentencing hearings, expanded her federal criminal appellate, habeas and sentencing practice to focus on statutory post-Booker mitigating factors in federal sentencing hearings, sentencing memoranda and objections to presentence reports.
In March 2006, Mrs. Wisenberg merged her practice with the federal white-collar firm of Solomon L. Wisenberg, PLLC to form Wisenberg & Wisenberg, PLLC, where she concentrated on white collar matters.
A 1989 graduate of St. Mary's University School of Law, Mrs. Wisenberg is Board Certified in Criminal Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization. She speaks, writes and teaches on federal criminal law topics. Mrs. Wisenberg served as adjunct professor at St. Mary's University from 1994 to 1997, where she received the Outstanding Public Justice Faculty Award from the St. Mary's University Public Justice Students' Association. In 2005 and 2006, she was named one of San Antonio's best appellate lawyers by Scene in SA Magazine. Ms. Wisenberg is president of the D.C. Metropolitan Area Chapter of the St. Mary's School of Law Alumni Association, and a member of the St. Mary's School of Law Alumni Association board of directors.
Mrs. Wisenberg is admitted to practice in the State of Texas, the District of Columbia, the U.S. District Courts for the Western, Southern and Northern Districts of Texas, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 3rd, 5th, 6th and District of Columbia Circuits, and the U.S. Supreme Court.