Brooke Burns

Ever since she was seven years old, Brooke Burns knew she wanted to be a lawyer. She understood the law to be a tool that helped people and knew more than anything else that it was what she wanted to do. At 14, Brooke’s parents saw this spark and encouraged her to seek volunteer opportunities at a local law firm. Though most firms weren’t interested in hiring ninth graders, Brooke was fortuitously connected to James Johnson, a former public defender in Hamilton County, Ohio, who established the Summer Work Experience in Law program, a program to place students in legal internship positions in an effort to diversify the field of law. That summer Brooke began the first of eight years of legal internships before she even set foot in law school. Brooke did everything from researching transactional and civil rights issues to hand-delivering documents the court but found herself consistently rooting for the underdog despite the “side” she was supposed to be on.

That experience, coupled with her desire to help people, set Brooke on a path to public interest law. While in law school at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, Brooke participated in the Justice for Children practicum and represented young people in delinquency cases. Along with her personal commitment to working with youth through volunteering with youth organizations, tutoring, and coaching youth volleyball, this clinic experience solidified Brooke’s desire to work in children’s law. Following law school, after one year of representing adults, Brooke joined the Ohio Office of the Public Defender’s (OPD) juvenile unit and has since represented countless youth in delinquency proceedings. Brooke has been at the OPD’s juvenile unit for the last 14 years, working her way through the organization to become the current Managing Counsel of the Juvenile Unit.

As a mentor, Brooke is charged with grooming a new class of juvenile defenders each year. While many see juvenile defense as a training ground, Brooke actively tries to dispel that myth, teaching them that there is nuanced and specific expertise to practice in juvenile defense. She reasons that because of the lifelong consequences of system involvement, kids who are caught up in the juvenile justice deserve passionate, meticulous, and skilled defense attorneys, which is just what Brooke is and what she strives to train her team to be.

Brooke is a seasoned juvenile defense attorney and is fearless in her advocacy, living by a philosophy of hope. She counsels incoming attorneys that the only way to make strides is to “argue the impossible.” In Brooke’s time at OPD, the landscape of juvenile jurisprudence has shifted, with the U.S. Supreme Court setting forth a standard of differential treatment for children in conflict with the law. Brooke encourages the attorneys in her unit to see these recent rulings as opportunities; people tend to think that the constitutional challenges she and her staff raise are too lofty, but the Court’s understanding of youth means that now “the impossible is normative.” One strategy Brooke and her team have used to garner support of their “lofty” goals is to incrementally chip way at an unconstitutional practice through a series of challenges.

In 2012, in a case Brooke argued before the Ohio Supreme Court, Ohio became the first state in the country to find juvenile sex offender registration to be cruel and unusual punishment. Brooke used an incremental strategy, first challenging the retroactive application of the statutory scheme to children, then arguing that mandatory, public, lifetime registration was unconstitutional. The court ultimately found portions of Ohio’s juvenile sex offender registration law to be unconstitutional, in violation of due process, equal protection, and the Eighth amendment. This resulted in children being removed from public registration in Ohio and conferred discretion to juvenile courts to make tier determinations under the law. Brooke’s advocacy and the court’s decision subsequently became a guidepost for successful challenges to youth registration in other states, including in New Jersey, Colorado, and Pennsylvania.

“As a defender, it’s easy to get weighed down by how often we lose and how often the system doesn’t want us to win.” She reasons that carrying optimism helps to keep pushing when defenders know the arguments they’re making are right and just. Her team is now using that optimism in several additional constitutional challenges underway in Ohio courts, including challenging the practice of transferring youth to adult court and in representing people who were given juvenile-life-without-parole sentences in parole proceedings. Her hope is that through the development of caselaw and policy, she and her team inject “bravery and kindness into the juvenile defense bar and understanding into this system” in which they work.

It is also with hope and dedication that Brooke approaches leadership in her office and across the state. Throughout her career, Brooke has confronted the racial injustices of the juvenile and criminal justice systems. As a Black attorney, Brooke has faced prejudice in the courtroom with judges and court staff questioning her presence without ever thinking she could be the child’s attorney. The bias she has faced provides a glimpse into the magnitude of bias that her clients face. The population of youth in secure detention and placement in Ohio is disproportionately Black. Brooke has worked hard over these last few years to challenge other juvenile justice stakeholders to examine the disproportionality in the state juvenile justice system. “The work I do now is driven in those spaces where we are trying to get more awareness raised around how our practices and choices collectively contribute to disproportionality.”

Although this past year several state supreme courts—including the Ohio Supreme Court’s Chief Justice—have issued broad statements condemning racial inequity and vowing to address disparities in their systems, the racism in the juvenile and criminal justice systems are rooted in history, and Brooke questions whether true systemic change is possible absent stakeholder commitment to examine what role they each personally play in contributing to disparities. She now works with committees that include stakeholders, judges, and other players in the juvenile court system. When examining data, she says that some people easily default to a belief that Black children are engaging in more crime than their White peers rather than seeing the way policing and prosecution biases lead to the disparities. Brooke encourages,

We have to ask the hard questions; what do the numbers tell us? We can start to ask ourselves some extra questions to see that there’s another story here. Until people are willing to get uncomfortable and recognize how their own bias may be impacting their decisions, they won’t see how they influence the disproportionality in the system.

Brooke’s commitment to her juvenile defense and passion for systemic reform demonstrate what a fearless advocate she is, perhaps beyond the imagination of her seven-year-old self. 

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