A former public defender who later moved to a firm specializing in representing law enforcement officers has been appointed to the San Diego Superior Court bench, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office announced Thursday.
Miguel A. Peñalosa Jr. will fill the vacancy left by the retirement of Judge Timothy B. Taylor.
Since 2024, Peñalosa has been an attorney at Bobbitt, Pinkard & Fields II, where his work included high-profile local cases. Recent clients have included a Border Patrol agent federally indicted in San Diego earlier this month for the 2022 shooting of an unarmed 19-year-old U.S. citizen and a former San Diego sheriff’s detention deputy convicted of a federal civil rights violation in the fatal shooting of a fleeing detainee. He also represented a deputy convicted of violating an incarcerated person’s civil rights after shoving the restrained man headfirst into a wall, resulting in a head wound and serious spinal injury to the victim.
Peñalosa — whose father was a San Diego police homicide detective — graduated with honors from the Federal Law Enforcement Academy and worked as a Border Patrol agent in the El Centro sector before attending college, then law school, according to his biography on the Bobbitt, Pinkard & Fields website.
After he graduated from California Western School of Law, Peñalosa worked with two firms as a contract attorney in 2013 and 2014, the biography states. That year, he went to work as a deputy alternate public defender at the San Diego Public Defender’s Office. Peñalosa spent 10 years there before moving back into private practice.
Peñalosa is registered without party preference.
There are 135 judicial seats in the San Diego Superior Court. With Peñalosa’s appointment, there are four vacancies.
Superior Court judges in California receive compensation of nearly $245,000 a year. A full term runs six years.