About Brennan
Long before I married my wife, Johnna, and had my incredible twin boy and girl, I was raised in Louisiana where my parents named all of their children after trailblazer United States Supreme Court Justices. My father, an attorney who practices appellate law, taught me how how the power of the law could help reunite families, protect liberty, and cause transformative change for our world. I felt like the most important contribution I could give this world was to leave it better than I found it. I started Fontainebleau High School’s first Gay/Straight Alliance, Environmental Club, and spoke at School Board hearings when they attempted to ban First Amendment speech for high school students.
In 2004, I moved to Greensboro to attend Guilford College. Guilford is where I learned about Quakerism and that people of faith have an active duty of stewardship to the community. I served on Student and Community Senate, was the site coordinator for volunteerism at The Servant Center homeless shelter for disable veterans. As I studied political science and religious studies, I fell in love with the Quaker principles of equality, stewardship, and respect for the still small voice inside all of us that gives human beings dignity. I still believe that no one is without value and basic decency to each other is always worth fighting for.
After graduating in 2008, I attended Elon University School of Law where I was president of the Innocence Project and honored to be selected as class speaker during our graduation in 2012. I immersed myself in the active liberty and living breathing constitutional jurisprudence of William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and Stephen Breyer. I became more convinced than ever that the primary purpose of an enduring United States Constitution was to acknowledge the harms that we have caused, the discrimination people have faced, the inequality in the system and confront it head-on with the belief that the arc of the universe bends towards justice as Dr. Martin Luther King said.
Before graduating, I briefly interned at Legal Aid of North Carolina, where I helped indigent clients in civil court who faced unlawful evictions and substandard and dangerous housing conditions. I also interned at the Guilford County District Attorney’s Office, where I obtained a practice certificate and tried a jury trial as a third-year law student.
In 2012, I began my first legal job at the Guilford County Public Defender’s Office. For the next 7 years, I spent my life advocating for indigent clients and trying to show people outside of the economic class of my clients just how vulnerable some of our communities are to hyper incarceration, racial profiling, and an unequal experience of basic criminal justice institutions. Dedicating myself to helping people get access to drug and mental health treatment while reminding others that no human being is without value is one of the most important jobs I may ever have had in my life.
In 2020, I started the law firm of Aberle & Connolly with my law partner, Julie. In the time since I began practicing law, I have tried nearly 100 jury trials, countless bench trials, become board certified as a Criminal Law Specialist by the North Carolina State Bar, served as president of Guilford Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, taught over 45 hours of continuing legal education courses to other attorneys, volunteered as a judge for Teen Court, and worked as an adjunct professor at Elon University School of Law.
