Jeremiah Donovan

Jeremiah Donovan is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard, where he acted in the Hasty Pudding show and won a prize for the best thesis in English literature. After a year as the Harvard Scholar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University (where he spent more time playing lacrosse for the university than in serious scholarship), he was drafted into the United States Army. He was taught Mandarin at the Presidio of Monterey and served as a translator with the 7th PSYOP Group in Taiwan. After his discharge, he attended the Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. Following a year with a New York City international law firm, he was appointed Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut. He served as a federal prosecutor for eleven years, representing the United States in a variety of violent, white-collar and drug-related prosecutions, as well as in a civil proceedings. He left the United States Attorney's office in 1989 to practice law in Old Saybrook, Connecticut with his wife, family-law attorney Terry Donovan. He has defended some of Connecticut's most notorious criminal cases and has argued a number of far-reaching appeals. He teaches trial practice as an adjunct at the Yale Law School. His final argument in Connecticut's most colorful RICO case is the subject of a literary exegesis in P.N. Meyer, "Desperate for Love: Cinematic Influences Upon a Defendant's Closing Argument to the Jury," 18 Vermont Law Review 721 (1994), He is regularly listed among the Best Lawyers in Connecticut, Best Lawyers in the United States, and Best Lawyers in the New York region. He has three daughters: Lotus Donovan Testa, a vice-president of Stiefel Entertainment, Lindsay Seifert, a Connecticut attorney, and Alexis Sablone, an MIT-trained architect who is one of the top street-skateboarders in the world.

Of his role as himself in the chilling but thoughtful documentary "The Cheshire Murders" he has said, "It is the role I was born to play."