Justin Brooks

Early life, education and early legal career

Brooks was born in New York City in 1965. He resided for most of youth on the east coast of the United States, but attended high school in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 1986, he received a bachelor's degree in business law from Temple University. He obtained his J.D. from American University Washington College of Law in 1990. In 1992, he earned an LL.M in Trial Advocacy from Georgetown University Law Center.

Brooks has practiced as a criminal defense attorney in Washington, D.C., California, Illinois and Michigan, taking court-appointed cases in D.C. for three years and pro bono cases for death row inmates in Michigan and Illinois for six years.

Beginning of interest in the wrongly convicted

In the mid-1990’s, Brooks read about the case of a 21-year-old Chicago women, Marilyn Mulero, who had been sentenced to death without a trial, based on a plea bargain. The situation made no sense to Brooks: virtually always, a defendant plea bargains for a lesser sentence, yet Mulero had received the harshest possible sentence.

Brooks went to the crime scene to investigate and discovered that the only eyewitness to the crime could not possibly have witnessed it from her vantage point. Brooks also discovered that this witness was the girlfriend of one of the victims... a fact never revealed by the police.

Five of Brooks' students volunteered to help him with the case. They got a jury to reverse the death sentence, though the guilty plea against Mulero still stood. As of late 2015, she was still in jail, though not on death row. In November 2015, Brooks submitted a petition to the United Nations' Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions asking them to declare her incarceration a human rights violation. he continues to petition the Governor of Illinois for clemency.

Origins

Brooks said that "one night, after visiting Mulero, I was sitting in my car on a freezing Chicago evening and I decided this [exonerating innocent people] is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I quit my job. California has the largest prison system in the world, so I thought this would be a great place to start. The California Western School of Law had a small criminal defense institute that had a little bit of budget for what I wanted to do. They hired me on as director and I turned it into the California Innocence Project."

Brooks co-founded the CIP in 1999. He realized the benefits of getting law students involved in the work and giving them "a live clinical training, the same way doctors learn in hospitals." When The Los Angeles Times published an editorial praising the founding of the project, Brooks was inundated by innumerable boxes of material from potential clients, as well as by people visiting its office on behalf of incarcerated friends and family members.

Process

Brooks claims that it’s much harder to reverse a verdict after conviction than to obtain acquittal for a defendant at the original trial, and that the most "draining" aspect of his job is "saying no to people all the time," when the evidence to exonerate is not strong.

The CIP website claims that the organization "has trained more than 200 students who have gone on to become highly successful criminal defense attorneys, criminal prosecutors, Assistant Attorneys General, and civil attorneys." At the end of 2016, CIP had freed 25 clients.

High-profile cases

The CIP has exonerated a number of high-profile clients, some of whom had spent decades in prison. A few examples of such cases are:

Brian Banks

Banks was a promising high school football player, on track for a probable career in the NFL, when he had a consensual sexual encounter on the school grounds with a young woman, who then falsely accused him of rape. Arrested, Banks was faced with the decision of either fighting the charges, knowing that, if he lost, he would spend decades in prison, or agreeing to a plea bargain. He chose the latter course, even though this would cripple his football career, subject him to a lengthy probation period and result in lifetime registration as a sex offender. His accuser's mother then used his guilty plea to sue the school for its allegedly lax security, and received a $1.5 million judgment. Banks served a little over five years of a seven-year sentence. However, the young woman later recanted on camera her testimony and admitted that she had fabricated the rape accusation. After a review by the Los Angeles District Attorney's office prompted by the CIP, the Los Angeles Superior Court reversed Banks' conviction in May 2012. As Brooks told an interviewer after Banks' release: "Brian took a plea deal because he was looking at 40 years in prison if he didn't and his lawyer told him, hey, it's 'he said, she said.' If you want to roll the dice and go to trial, you may never walk out of prison. And this is a 17-year-old kid who's got to make that decision."

Timothy Atkins

In July, 1987, Atkins was convicted of one count of murder and two counts of robbery. The police were led to Atkins when a woman named Denise Powell, a prostitute, told police that Atkins had confessed to her to being an accomplice in the killing of a man who had been shot in the chest during an attempted carjacking. Brooks said, "The jury sees this young black kid... this woman says, 'yeah, I think that's the guy,' and he goes away for twenty-three years." Powell later testified that she had fabricated the story of Atkins’s confession. She recanted her testimony, saying that she had lied to police about the confession and had been afraid the lie would be revealed if she changed her story. In his decision, the judge stated that Powell’s recantation, together with the "unreliable and changing [eye-witness] identification" led him to believe that "no reasonable judge or jury would have convicted Atkins." Wendy Koen, then a second-year law student at the CIP, worked tirelessly to track Powell down and get a signed declaration.

William Richards

Shortly after midnight on August 11, 1993, in a desert area of San Bernardino, Pamela Richards was found by her husband, William "Bill" Richards, strangled and beaten to death, her skull crushed, outside the motor home they shared. Bill Richards had to call 911 three times before the arrival of the local police, who failed to secure the crime scene. As a result, before detectives began investigating the murder in the morning, dogs had invaded and contaminated the scene. The police and detectives also failed to conduct routine time-of-death testing to determine whether or not Pamela might have been killed while Bill was still at work. Because the police had no other suspects, they charged Richards with the crime, despite his having no injuries suggesting he had struggled with his wife and despite the lack of a confession. After three trials (the first two had resulted in hung juries), Richards was found guilty and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. The CIP, taking up Richards' case, established at a 2009 hearing that there were DNA traces from the crime scene that belonged to neither Pamela nor Bill. They also produced two bite mark experts who had testified against Richards at his original trials, who now claimed that current science exonerated Richards. The judge reversed his conviction. However, the district attorney appealed the judge's decision to the California Court of Appeal, which reversed it, and in 2013 the California Supreme Court upheld the Court of Appeal's judgment. Two years later, the CIP successfully introduced legislation that allowed experts to recant their testimony in California trials. In May, 2016, the California Supreme Court reversed Richards' conviction. In the following month, Richards walked free after 23 years behind bars.

Matthew and Grace Huang

In 2012, a couple from Los Angeles, Matthew and Grace Huang, moved to Doha, in Qatar, where Matthew, an engineer, was working on a long-term project. The Huangs had three adopted African-born black children. On January 15, 2013, one of these children, the Huangs’ eight-year-old daughter, Gloria, died suddenly. Officials arrested Matthew and Grace the following day and subsequently charged them with murdering Gloria, on the theory that the couple must have had some nefarious purpose (perhaps organ harvesting) for adopting Gloria in the first place, as she was black and therefore could not (they argued) really have been wanted by the Huangs. Ultimately, although the prosecution presented no substantial case (medical evidence showed that Gloria had not died of starvation – indeed, the autopsy failed to establish cause of death – and no other evidence of abuse surfaced), the couple were convicted on a lesser charge of child endangerment and sentenced to three years in prison, though the prosecution still wanted to charge them with the more serious offense of child trafficking. Representatives of the Huangs created a YouTube video to plead their case, in which Brooks is filmed saying, "In my 25 years of practicing criminal law, I have never seen as outrageous a prosecution theory as there is in this case" and "this case completely lacks any type of due process." In November, 2014, the Huangs' convictions were reversed by the Qatari Appeals Court and they were found innocent; they returned to Los Angeles on December 3. CIP represented the Huangs along with the David House Agency, an organization devoted to freeing innocent Americans from overseas incarceration.

Advocacy

Through the CIP, Brooks frequently serves as an advocate for clemency for the wrongfully convicted, and for legislation that would make it more difficult to convict innocent people or make it easier to overturn wrongful convictions. In April 2013, Brooks identified twelve clients of his with strong claims to exoneration: the “California 12.” Accompanied by two attorneys, Alissa Bjerkhoel and Mike Semanchik, Brooks walked 712 miles from San Diego to Sacramento. His purpose was to deliver clemency petitions for the California 12 to Gov. Jerry Brown, and to raise consciousness of the plight of the wrongfully convicted. In November 2014, Michael Hanline was released, the first of the California 12 to be freed. He had served 36 years in prison: the longest-ever incarceration, in California, of a person whose conviction was ultimately overturned. As of the end of 2016, 4 of the 12 have been released (Mike Hanline, Kim Long, Alan Gimenez and Bill Richards).

The CIP frequently sponsors legislation that favors the wrongfully convicted. In September, 2016, a new California law (SB 1134), co-sponsored by the CIP, passed, which would make it easier for wrongfully convicted persons to prove their innocence. Brooks said, after the legislation passed, “For many years California has been the most difficult place in the United States to bring a new evidence claim on behalf of innocent clients. Finally, we have a standard where the courts can reverse a conviction based on new evidence that would have led to an acquittal had it been introduced at trial.” In the same month, another law (SB 1389), also co-sponsored by CIP, was signed into law by Governor Brown. The law was designed to reduce the number of false confessions by requiring police in California to record murder interrogations. Said Brooks: "Recording interrogations makes a clear record of what was said and also allows a fact finder to judge context, stress and sincerity. It helps in getting to the truth, which is in everyone's interest."

Among the referenda submitted to California's voters in 2016, the CIP and Brooks opposed Proposition 66, a law designed to speed up capital executions, and supported Proposition 62, which would end the death penalty in the state.

Teaching career

Brooks’ first full-time teaching post was at Georgetown University Law Center where he taught corrections law and was appointed Assistant Director of Georgetown’s Corrections Clinic. In that position, he co-founded, with Professor Richard Roe, Georgetown’s Family Literacy Project — a program devoted to teaching inmates how to teach their children how to read, and then providing family literacy activities in which the children could go to the prison and be taught by their parents.

Brooks’ second full-time teaching job was at Thomas Cooley Law School where he taught Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Corrections Law, and Death Penalty Law. He also directed a death penalty clinical program and the national moot court programs.

In addition to his position with the CIP at California Western School of Law, Brooks currently teaches criminal law, criminal procedure, federal criminal law, trial advocacy, and comparative criminal procedure.

Other positions

Brooks also serves in the following positions:

Brooks has been a visiting professor at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, Universidad Interamericana, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, New England School of Law’s Summer Law Program in Galway, Ireland, and South Texas College of Law’s Summer Law Programs in Malta and the Czech Republic. He has taught multiple times in California Western School of Law’s Chile Summer Program.

Awards and recognition

Academic publications