Vanessa Carroll

Vanessa Carroll joined the Impact Litigation Unit as a Senior Attorney in 2021. Vanessa began her career in Mississippi in 2007, where she represented children in individual and class action proceedings to challenge inhumane conditions in detention centers and mental health facilities, the State’s failure to provide appropriate community-based mental health care to children under Medicaid and the Americans with Disabilities Act, the denial of special education services in school districts throughout Mississippi, and a variety of civil commitment and detention practices that violated state and federal law.

Vanessa has also litigated the right to counsel in Louisiana and played an instrumental role in securing resentencing hearings for children sentenced to life without parole in Mississippi and entitled to relief following the Supreme Court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama.

In 2013, Vanessa began representing individuals sentenced to death in state and federal habeas corpus proceedings in Mississippi and moved to Georgia in 2017 to continue this work at the Georgia Resource Center.

Vanessa earned her B.A. in History from New York University and a J.D. from the University of Wisconsin Law School. She is admitted to practice in Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana.