By Carlos Rico / The San Diego Union-Tribune / October 28, 2025
Teaching and helping innocent people, especially those from underrepresented communities, is the mission and passion of Justin Brooks, a criminal defense attorney, author and law professor at the University of San Diego.
Brooks has spent the last 26 years living in Ocean Beach, after growing up in the Bronx and Puerto Rico, and attending college in Philadelphia and law school in Washington, D.C.
What brought him to San Diego was an innocent Puerto Rican woman from Illinois who was facing the death penalty in 1995. While living and teaching criminal law in Michigan, Brooks read about this woman in a newspaper, drove down to meet her, and with the help of his students got her off death row and all charges dropped of a double homicide.
“As I worked on our case, I realized there are innocent people in prison who need help, and it’s the best way to train these students is to work on real cases,” Brooks said. “So, I told my wife (girlfriend at the time) I’m quitting my tenured faculty position and we’re gonna move to California cause that’s where they need an innocence project the most. It’s the biggest prison system in the United States. It’s got the death penalty, three strikes, mandatory minimums. And so I moved to San Diego and started it here and partnered up with another law professor who was interested in doing it too, and founded the California Innocence Project back in 1999.”
Brooks cofounded the California Innocence Project at the California Western School of Law in San Diego in 1999. He was its director until 2023. Under his leadership, the project freed 40 innocent people from prison, including former NFL player Brian Banks.
Over the last 20 years, Brooks has also been working in Mexico and Chile, training lawyers. He also still returns every year to teach law courses in Puerto Rico, where he attended high school, most of his closest friends live and he still has a resident driver’s license.
“I feel most at home in the Latin culture, to be honest,” he said. “It’s so much more family-oriented. My favorite people are Latinos. I’ve always had a big circle of Latino friends around me, and I just resonate more with that culture. I think most of it really is that sort of feeling of connection of family and friends that will do absolutely anything for you.”
Brooks is the author of “You Might Go to Prison, Even Though You’re Innocent.” He said it explains to readers the top reasons innocent people go to jail, such as faulty forensic science, false confessions and misidentification.
“It was really quite a process going through and writing it because I kind of reflect on everything I’ve learned in 30-some years freeing innocent people from prison,” he said. “It’s a cautionary tale about where we’ve been, where we are and where I hope we can go in terms of this issue. We’ve made some improvements, we’ve made some reforms, but there’s still innocent people going to prison every day.”
In early October, the University of San Diego announced the school’s 13th legal clinic, called the Innocence Clinic, which Brooks will lead. The clinic is in conjunction with the newly formed Innocence Center at USD, where law students will work with attorneys at The Innocence Center on real cases. The Innocence Clinic will offer free legal services to the San Diego County community.
“I’m excited to be able to continue the work of helping students and advocating for innocent people who have been wrongfully incarcerated,” he said. “I tell my students all the time, I’m lucky that I found something I’m passionate about, and so it never feels like hard work because I love doing it.”
He also adores Ocean Beach. He has lived in that neighborhood for almost three decades. He said he has moved seven times since living in San Diego, but has always stayed in O.B.
“When I first came to California and I was thinking of moving here, I spent a day in every beach community, from Imperial Beach all the way up to Del Mar, and I walked around O.B. and I was like, this is a real community with sidewalks, with an elementary school, with people who’ve been here for generations. I love the whole hippie surfer vibe of it. It’s kind of the 1960s, frozen in time, and I love everything about it. It just feels like home to me, and so I’ve never left there.”
Here are five places he likes to eat, shop and explore in Ocean Beach.
Q: Where is your favorite dining option?
A: My favorite restaurant in Ocean Beach is Hugo’s Cocina (formerly Ranchos). It’s fantastic, healthy Mexican food. One of the only places you will find vegan carne asada and shiitake burritos. I’ve been a vegetarian for more than 40 years, so I am a bit biased, but the food is excellent.
Q: What is your favorite small retail business or pop-up vendor to support?
A: Blondstone Jewelry Studio. The owner, Heidi, makes everything by hand in the store. My wife loves her jewelry. It’s not expensive, and she has bailed me out on picking gifts for Valentine’s Day, Christmas and birthdays for many years.
Q: Where is your favorite open space?
A: I love the path along the San Diego River from Dog Beach to the edge of Ocean Beach. It’s beautiful, simple and uncrowded in nature.
Q: Where is the best piece of artwork?
A: Jack Stricker is an amazing artist, and his work decorates the town. My favorite was the mural he painted to ask his wife to marry him. Sadly, it’s now painted over. Then, there’s a woman who paints over all the electric boxes in Ocean Beach, and it’s amazing. She just goes around all these ugly, big gray electric boxes, and she paints beautiful paintings on them. There’s also a guy who does sidewalk art in OB, with chalk, who’s really amazing. He’s @sidewalk_chalk_dad on Instagram, and his name is Erick Toussaint, and he does these amazing chalk drawings on the sidewalks in Ocean Beach.
Q: Where is your favorite entertainment attraction or historic landmark?
A: All of Ocean Beach is an entertainment venue. I have a sign in my house painted by the OB legend Kip Krueger that reads, “Ocean Beach, where the circus is always in town!” I just love that. I mean, that should be our actual official logo because that is what it feels like. You go out there on farmers market day, and there are literally people up on high wires that they’ve put between the palm trees. There are people juggling fire. There are drum circles. We’ve got everything but the elephants and the giraffes. There is a circus vibe to OB that I absolutely love. But then there are all kinds of other days of the year with events. There are always concerts going on. There’s a German festival. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the Ocean Beach holiday parade, but for about 20 years, I had a float in it every year. I actually won the parade one year. My students built this giant float for me to then ask my wife to marry me, in the parade. There’s actually a video on YouTube of it called Parade Proposal. We had this big float, and it was so elaborate that my students had created this whole beautiful thing, and then I had a Bullhorn and then asked my wife to marry me right in the middle of the parade on the ground, on my knees, and she said, yes. So that was good.
There is this lawyer…and then there are the ones that work for the worst people in the world. We usually only hear about the bad ones (and there are SO many of those) that give the entire profession a very bad name, that leaves a nasty putrid stink over all of them.
I’m glad there are at least a few that have a well-developed ethical sense of service to justice instead of the easy way of being a corrupt money-grubbing status-conscious scumbag.
You too, Frank Gormlie. You’re not in that second group but fit in with this man’s peers. Hat off to you.
sealintheSelkirks
Mr. Justin Brooks.
he is an amazing human being.
God bless you kind Sir.