Bio & Practice
Chauncey Wood is a criminal defense attorney with over 25 years' experience. Mr. Wood was selected for the Massachusetts Super Lawyers List in the area of criminal defense in 2015 and has been selected each year since. He currently serves as the Amicus Committee Chair for MACDL.
Mr. Wood represents clients in serious criminal matters and other related areas such as Title IX proceedings and professional licensure disciplinary proceedings. He has successfully defended individuals charged with everything from murder, rape and armed robbery to assault and battery, shoplifting and disorderly conduct. He has won jury acquittals of attempted murder and rape charges.
Mr. Wood has extensive experience in criminal appeals and post-conviction proceedings. Mr. Wood has secured full exonerations and has overturned the convictions of clients in multiple homicide cases. He has also convinced the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) to make new law in several areas. Specifically, he has convinced the SJC to extend a defendant's right to the effective assistance of counsel to pre-arraignment custodial interrogations and to adopt a new rule of evidence law, making it easier for a defendant to establish that he or she was acting in self-defense. Mr. Wood has also established that lawyers may contact jurors after a verdict to insure a verdict was fair, and convinced the SJC to extend defendants' right to a speedy trial and the protections afforded juveniles in custodial interrogations. Finally, Mr. Wood has established important precedents in the areas of identification procedures, missing witness instructions, the admissibility of expert testimony on sexual abuse, and the substantive law of attempting to commit a crime.
Mr. Wood received his Bachelor's Degree in English from Harvard College in 1989. In 1994, he graduated with high honors from Boston University School of Law, where he served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Public Interest Law Journal. He has worked at both a large law firm and as a public defender. He founded his current firm, Wood & Nathanson, LLP, in 2009.
Mr. Wood is a member of the CPCS murder panel and the federal Criminal Justice Act post-conviction and habeas panels. He lectures widely on a variety of criminal defense topics including effective client interviews, litigating ineffective assistance of trial counsel, and habeas corpus.