A former public defender\u00a0who later moved to a firm specializing in representing law enforcement officers has been appointed to the San Diego Superior Court bench, Gov. Gavin Newsom\u2019s office announced Thursday.<\/p>\n
Miguel A. Pe\u00f1alosa Jr. will fill the vacancy left by the retirement of Judge Timothy B. Taylor.<\/p>\n
Since 2024, Pe\u00f1alosa 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<\/a> for the 2022 shooting of an unarmed 19-year-old U.S. citizen and a former San Diego sheriff\u2019s detention deputy convicted<\/a> of a federal civil rights violation in the fatal shooting of a fleeing detainee. He also represented a deputy convicted<\/a> of violating an incarcerated person\u2019s civil rights after shoving the restrained man headfirst into a wall, resulting in a head wound and serious spinal injury to the victim.<\/p>\n Pe\u00f1alosa \u2014 whose father was a San Diego police homicide detective \u2014 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.<\/p>\n After he graduated from California Western School of Law, Pe\u00f1alosa 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\u2019s Office. Pe\u00f1alosa spent 10 years there before moving back into private practice.<\/p>\n Pe\u00f1alosa is registered without party preference.<\/p>\n There are 135 judicial seats in the San Diego Superior Court. With Pe\u00f1alosa\u2019s appointment, there are four vacancies.<\/p>\n Superior Court judges in California receive compensation of nearly $245,000 a year. A full term runs six years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A former public defender\u00a0who later moved to a firm specializing in representing law enforcement officers has been appointed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30505,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[147],"tags":[544,1664,8802,542,2182,1960,50,20839,20838],"class_list":{"0":"post-30504","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-gavin-newsom","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-courts","10":"tag-crime-and-public-safety","11":"tag-gavin-newsom","12":"tag-latest-headlines","13":"tag-local-news","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-san-diego-county","16":"tag-top-stories-sdut"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116422005402680229","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30504\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}