The Institute for Criminal Defense Advocacy (ICDA) was founded In 1991 through a generous grant to California Western School of Law and Federal Defenders of San Diego, Inc. from the San Diego Indigent Defense Fund. The Institute's charter is to improve the quality of criminal defense representation.
El Institute for Criminal Defense Advocacy ha creado varios programas incluyendo la Academia de Destreza en Litigación en donde por más de 5 años se ha encargado de capacitar a los mejores abogados de América Latina.
ICDA operates the Street Law San Diego program for inner city high school students.
He received a B.B.A. from Temple University, J.D. from American University, and an LL.M. from Georgetown University Law Center. He has taught at Georgetown Law Center and was the assistant director of Georgetown's Street Law Corrections Clinic. Brooks spent six years teaching at Thomas Cooley Law School, where he taught Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Corrections Law, Law and Literature, and ran a death penalty clinical program in which students worked with him on death penalty cases. He has been a visiting professor at Interamerican University of Puerto Rico Law School and a visiting scholar at the University of Sheffield in England. Brooks has also published extensively on the death penalty, corrections and sentencing law, and other criminal law issues.