Brent Newton

Brent Newton serves as Of Counsel to Khalil Kinchen, where he brings a command of the federal legal system that few attorneys anywhere can match.

In over three decades of practice, he has represented clients at every level of the federal courts — from jury trials through Supreme Court argument — across both criminal and civil matters, and spent nearly a decade shaping the sentencing guidelines that govern federal courts nationwide.

After graduating from Columbia Law School, where he was a Kent Scholar and senior editor of the Columbia Law Review, Brent clerked for Judge Carolyn King of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He then spent thirteen years as an Assistant Federal Public Defender in Houston, eventually leading the office's trial court division. He has also represented several federal capital defendants in pretrial proceedings as well as several dozens of death row inmates in Texas and Florida in direct appeals and habeas corpus proceedings — work that demanded both technical mastery and the kind of moral resolve that defines a career.

In 2009, Brent was appointed Deputy Staff Director of the United States Sentencing Commission, where he spent nearly a decade advising presidentially-appointed Commissioners on federal sentencing law and policy, working on guideline amendments, and authoring Commission publications and reports to Congress. That experience gave him an institutional understanding of federal sentencing that no practitioner can acquire from the outside.

Since returning to private practice in 2019, Brent has built a broad federal practice spanning criminal defense, civil litigation, and federal appellate practice. He has handled more than one hundred federal appeals across six different circuit courts — the Second, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuits. He argued before the Supreme Court of the United States in 2008, and currently serves as co-counsel in a matter in which the Court granted certiorari in October 2025. That depth of appellate experience is rarely found outside of the largest firms.  It is even rarer to be paired with the kind of trial and sentencing experience that Brent brings.  As an assistant federal public defender, he obtained eleven full acquittals as first-chair or sole defense counsel. And he has worked on hundreds of federal sentencing cases.

On the civil side, Brent's federal practice encompasses complex civil litigation, False Claim Act litigation, and immigration matters in both removal and asylum proceedings. His ability to move between civil and criminal federal practice — fluently and at the highest level — reflects a mastery of federal procedure and advocacy that few lawyers develop over an entire career.

A member of the American Law Institute and the author of three books and dozens of law review articles, Brent has presented on federal criminal law topics at the State Bar of Texas’s Advanced Criminal Law course repeatedly since 1999. He has taught over 100 semester law school courses — including both civil procedure and criminal procedure — at the University of Houston Law Center, Georgetown Law Center, American University's Washington College of Law, and Penn State Dickinson Law.

Brent’s clients benefit not only from his trial experience and appellate skill but also from a perspective on the federal system informed by his practical experience, policy-making experience, and scholarly pursuits.