About Us
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Who we are
Lauren Faraino
Lauren attended Harvard University and the University of Chicago Law School. Following law school she worked as an Associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz in New York. She returned to Alabama in 2019. While working in finance in Birmingham, she took on Nathaniel Woods’s case pro bono during his final appeals. After Nathaniel’s execution, Lauren turned her attention to criminal justice reform full-time, founding the Woods Foundation.
Luke Collins
Luke graduated from Yale University in 2022. He worked for Clive Stafford Smith and the Woods Foundation in the summer of 2021 as part of a team investigating Nathaniel Wood’s execution in preparation for the New York Times documentary To Live and Die in Alabama. He has now joined the Foundation full time, carrying out casework and overseeing operations. Luke plans to attend Law School in 2023.
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Our mission
Built on the wrongful conviction and execution of Nathaniel Woods in 2020, The Woods Foundation is a public nonprofit organization that provides investigative services to individuals with wrongful convictions or excessive sentences in the United States. The Woods Foundation also illuminates cases of potential wrongful execution as part of the “Post Mortem Project”.
Nathaniel Woods
Nathaniel Woods was convicted of capital murder for the killings of three police officers in Birmingham, Alabama. Though he didn’t pull the trigger, Nathaniel was accused by the state of being an accomplice to the shooter and sentenced to death. Despite widespread opposition to his conviction and sentence, Nathaniel was executed in 2020.
Nathaniel’s case was the subject of the 2021 New York Times documentary To Live and Die in Alabama, which was nominated for an Emmy.