Justin Brooks (born 1965) is an American criminal defense lawyer, internationally known for his work in freeing people who are falsely convicted and training judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers. He is one of the founders and currently serves as director of the California Innocence Project (CIP), which has released a number of innocent clients, including former NFL soccer player Brian Banks. CIP is a founding member of the Innocence Network, an affiliate of an organization dedicated to providing legal services and investigation pro bono to people who are legally guilty. Brooks is often interviewed in broadcast media and in the print media about his case and other legal issues.
Brooks is also known for its activism. In April 2013, he walked 712 miles, from San Diego to Sacramento, on behalf of his twelve clients: the so-called "California 12." For decades he has worked on legal reform in Latin America and has established Innocence organizations throughout the region. He is the director of Red Inocente; a project network that releases innocent Latin American prisoners.
Among his numerous honors, Brooks in 2012 won the first annual Roberto Alvarez Award by the American Constitution Society and was selected as one of San Diego's Top Lawyers by San Diego Daily Transcript in 2015. He is twice "California Lawyer Magazine's Lawyer" of the Year "award winner (2010.2012).He currently serves as a permanent law professor at California's Western School of Law (CWSL) in San Diego.
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Brooks was born in New York City in 1965. He lived for most of the youth on the east coast of the United States, but attended secondary school in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 1986, he received a bachelor's degree in business law from Temple University. He earned his PhD from the American University Washington College of Law in 1990. In 1992, he earned his LLM degree in Experimental Advocacy from Georgetown University Law Center.
Brooks has been practicing as a criminal defense attorney in Washington, DC, California, Illinois and Michigan, taking a court-appointed case in DC for three years and a pro bono case for death row in Michigan and Illinois for six years. year.
Maps Justin Brooks
Initial interest in wrongly punished
In the mid-1990s, Brooks read about the case of a 21-year-old Chicago woman, Marilyn Mulero, who had been sentenced to death without trial, based on a plea bargain. The situation did not make sense to Brooks: almost always, the defendant proposed a bargain for a lesser sentence, but Mulero had received the most severe punishment.
Brooks went to the scene to investigate and found that the only eyewitness to the crime could not have seen it from his point of view. Brooks also found that this witness was the girlfriend of one of the victims... a fact never revealed by the police.
Five Brooks students volunteered to help him handle the case. They get a jury to reverse the death penalty, though Mulero's guilty plea still exists. Until the end of 2015, he is still in prison, although there is no death penalty. In November 2015, Brooks petitioned the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention asking them to declare the imprisonment of human rights abuses. he continued to petition the Illinois Governor for clemency.
California California Innocence Project
Origins
Brooks said that "one night, after visiting Mulero, I was sitting in my car on a frozen night in Chicago and I decided that [innocent people liberating] was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. My job California has the largest prison system in the world so I think it will be a great place to start California Western School of Law has a small criminal defense agency that has a little budget for what I want to do.They hire me as a director and I turned it into the California Innocence Project. "
Brooks founded the CIP in 1999. He realized the benefits of getting law students involved in work and gave them "direct 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 flooded with a lot of material from potential clients, as well as by people who visited his office on behalf of friends and imprisoned family members.
Process
Brooks claims that it is far more difficult to reverse the verdict after conviction than to get a release for the defendant in the preliminary hearing, and that the most "draining" aspect of his job is "to say no to people all the time," when the evidence for release is not strong.
The CIP website claims that the organization "has trained over 200 students who have become very successful criminal defense attorneys, prosecutors, Assistant Attorney General, and civil lawyers." By the end of 2016, CIP has acquired 25 clients.
High profile case
CIP has released several high profile clients, some of whom have spent decades in jail. Some examples of such cases are:
Brian Banks
The bank was a promising high school footballer, on track for a possible career in the NFL, when he had a consensual sexual encounter in the schoolyard with a young woman, who later accused him of rape. Arrested, the Bank is faced with the decision to fight the charges, knowing that, if he loses, he will spend decades in prison, or agree to bargain pleadings. He chose the last course, though this would cripple his football career, making it a long experimental period and resulting in lifetime registration as a sex offender. His accused mother then used a plea guilty to sue the school for his perceived weak security, and accepted a $ 1.5 million decision. The Bank is serving a five-year sentence of less than seven years in prison. However, the young woman then retracts her testimony and admits that she has fabricated the allegations of rape. After being examined by the Los Angeles District Attorney's office requested by CIP, the Los Angeles Superior Court reversed the Bank's conviction in May 2012. As Brooks remarked to the interviewer after the release of the Bank: "Brian received a defense because he saw 40 years in jail if he did not and his lawyer told him, hey, that 'he said, he said.' If you want to roll the dice and go to court, you probably will never get out of jail, and this is a 17 year old boy who has to make that decision. "
Timothy Atkins
In July 1987, Atkins was convicted of one count of murder and two charges of robbery. Police were led to Atkins when a woman named Denise Powell, a prostitute, told police that Atkins had admitted her as an accomplice in the murder of a man who had been shot in the chest during an attempted car hijacking. Brooks said, "The jury saw this young black boy... this woman said, 'yes, I think that's the man,' and he's gone for twenty-three years." Powell later testified that he had fabricated the story of Atkins's confession. He retracted his testimony, saying that he had lied to the police about the confession and fear of lies would be revealed if he changed his story. In his decision, the judge stated that Powell's reconciliation, along with "unreliable and changing eyewitness identification" led him to believe that "no reasonable judge or jury would punish Atkins." Wendy Koen, a second-year law student at CIP, works tirelessly to track Powell and get signed declarations.
William Richards
Shortly after midnight on August 11, 1993, in the desert area of ​​San Bernardino, Pamela Richards was discovered by her husband, William "Bill" Richards, strangled and beaten to death, his skull was destroyed, 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 scene. As a result, before the detectives began investigating the killing in the morning, the dogs had raided and contaminated the scene. Police and detectives also failed to conduct routine death-time tests to determine if Pamela might have been killed when Bill was still working. Because the police have no other suspects, they accuse Richards of committing a crime, even though he has not suffered any injuries indicating that he has fought with his wife and despite no recognition. After three trials (the first two producing juries), Richards was found guilty and sentenced to 25 years in prison for life. CIP, taking the Richards case, was founded in a 2009 hearing that there were traces of DNA from a crime scene that did not belong to Pamela or Bill. They also produced two bite experts who had testified against Richards in his original trial, who now claims that science is now liberating Richards. The judge reversed his conviction. However, the prosecutor appealed the judge's verdict to the California Court of Appeals, which reversed it, and by 2013 the California Supreme Court upheld the decision of the Court of Appeals. Two years later, CIP successfully introduced a law enabling experts to retract their testimony in California courts. In May 2016, the California Supreme Court reversed Richards' conviction. The following month, Richards walked freely 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 has three black children born in Africa. On January 15, 2013, one of these children, Huang's eight-year-old daughter, Gloria, died suddenly. Officers arrested Matthew and Grace the next day and then accused them of killing Gloria, with the theory that the couple must have some evil purpose (perhaps organ harvesting) for adopting Gloria in the first place, because she is black and therefore can not (they argue) really has been sought by Huang. In the end, although the prosecution did not present a substantial case (medical evidence indicates that Gloria had not died of starvation - indeed, the autopsy failed to establish the cause of death - and no other evidence of abuse occurred), the couple was convicted on a lower charge. endanger children and sentenced to three years in prison, although prosecutors still want to sue them for more serious child offenses. Representatives from Huangs made a YouTube video to defend their case, where Brooks was filmed saying, "In my 25 years of criminal law, I have never seen an outrageous theory of prosecution like the one in this case" and "the case has absolutely no process any law. "In November, 2014, Huang's conviction was reversed by the Qatar Court of Appeals and they were found not guilty; they returned to Los Angeles on December 3. CIP represents Huang along with the David House Agency, an organization aimed at freeing innocent Americans from overseas jails.
Advocacy
Through CIP, Brooks often serves as an advocate for clemency for being wrongly punished, and for legislation that will make it harder to punish innocent people or make it easier to undo the wrong beliefs. In April 2013, Brooks identified twelve of his clients with a strong claim to break free: "California 12." Accompanied by two lawyers, Alissa Bjerkhoel and Mike Semanchik, Brooks runs 712 miles from San Diego to Sacramento. The goal is to grant California 12 grants to Governor Jerry Brown, and to raise awareness of the fate of a convicted person. In November 2014, Michael Hanline was released, the first of 12 California to be released. He has served 36 years in prison: the longest ever detention, in California, from someone whose conviction is finally reversed. By the end of 2016, 4 out of 12 have been released (Mike Hanline, Kim Long, Alan Gimenez and Bill Richards).
CIP often sponsors laws that support people who are wrongly convicted. In September, 2016, the new California law (SB 1134), co-sponsored by CIP, is passed, which will make it easier for guilty people to prove their innocence. Brooks said after the law was passed, "For many years, California is the hardest place in the United States to bring new evidence claims on behalf of innocent clients." Finally, we have a standard in which courts can reverse confidence based on new evidence which would lead to a release if it were introduced at the hearing. "That same month, another law (SB 1389), also 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. Brooks said: "Interrogation records make clear notes about what is being said and also allow fact-finders to assess the context, stress and sincerity.This helps in getting the truth, which is in everyone's interest."
Among referendums submitted to California voters in 2016, CIP and Brooks opposed Proposition 66, a law designed to accelerate capital execution, and support Proposition 62, which will end the death penalty in the state.
Teaching career
The first full teaching post at Brooks was at Georgetown University Law Center where he taught corrective law and was appointed Assistant Director of the Georgetown Destruction Clinic. In that position, he co-founded, with Professor Richard Roe, Georgetown Family Literacy Project - a program aimed at teaching prisoners how to teach their children how to read, and then providing family literacy activities where children can go to jail and taught by their parents.
Brooks' full-time teaching assignment is at Thomas Cooley Law School where he teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure Law, Correction, and the Law of Death Penalty. He also directed the clinical programs of the death penalty and the national pseudo-court program.
In addition to his position with CIP at the California Western School of Law, Brooks currently teaches criminal law, criminal procedures, federal criminal law, court advocacy, and comparative criminal procedures.
More positions
Brooks also serves in the following positions:
- executive director of the Criminal Defense Advocacy Institute, a program devoted to the training of criminal defense lawyers;
- co-director of ACCESO Capacitacion, a program devoted to oral skills training for Latin American lawyers;
- founder and director of LL.M. Advocacy Experiment of Specialization in Federal Criminal Law;
- one of the founders and deputy directors of Redinocente, an organization devoted to creating and supporting innocent programs throughout Latin America.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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