Julia Yoo

Five Days

Daniel Chong was a University of California, San Diego engineering student swept up in an April 2012 drug raid. Agents interviewed him, decided not to charge him, and told him he would be released.

Then they closed the door of a five-by-ten-foot holding cell, and no one came back.

He remained there, handcuffed, without food or water, from April 21 until April 25. Four DEA employees saw or heard him during those days, and each assumed someone else was responsible for him. Three case agents and an on-scene supervisor had responsibility for the people detained in the operation, yet no custody record, no assigned official, no system existed to confirm that a man ordered released had actually left the building. The San Diego division had no dependable custody tracking, no end-of-day cell inspection, no assigned monitor, no reliable entry record, no effective camera coverage of the individual cells, no specialized holding-area training. Chong survived on his own urine and was hospitalized near death.

Julia Yoo represented him with Eugene Iredale, and the United States paid $4.1 million in 2013. But the money was half the result. The DEA adopted nationwide procedures — routine holding-cell inspections, an assigned agent or task-force officer for the detention area, an occupancy ledger — so that responsibility for every person in a cell now has a name attached, and a missed check leaves a reviewable record. The failure that nearly killed Daniel Chong had been the absence of a system. The case built one.

The Woman Who Gave Up Her Place in Line

Yoo's custodial work began immediately after law school, at the Denver Women's Correctional Facility, where women waited through the day for brief access to a volunteer lawyer.

One day an older woman with a serious breast growth reached the front of the line — and surrendered her appointment so that a younger woman reporting sexual abuse by a guard could be seen first. Yoo watched a person with a potentially life-threatening condition decide that someone else's emergency came before her own, because the system offered them one lawyer between them.

She founded the Law Center for Women Prisoners in 1998, the year she finished law school. Working with University of Colorado externs and volunteers, the project assisted hundreds of incarcerated women — medical care, parental rights, abuse, reentry, the accumulating legal consequences of incarceration. Within a few years the center's litigation had produced completed civil cases for women who suffered serious medical neglect and abuse in custody, pairing compensation with concrete changes in custodial practice as Colorado's correctional system moved to reduce sexual assault and improve medical care. One private facility, after settling, lost its insurance and closed.

Born in Seoul and raised in a Korean immigrant family, Yoo graduated cum laude from Wellesley College and earned her law degree at the University of Colorado. The line she formed in Denver — the conviction that people in custody do not stop being people — runs through everything since.

What the Video Showed

Elisa Serna entered the Las Colinas Detention Facility with acute withdrawal symptoms. Video and medical evidence documented what followed: repeated vomiting, fainting, low blood pressure, seizure activity, and finally her collapse in a medical-observation cell. A nurse and a deputy saw her fall. Effective treatment and continuing observation did not follow.

Yoo and the Iredale Law team represented Serna's parents, estate, husband, and young child, carrying the case through years of motions and discovery toward a scheduled trial. The 2024 settlement totaled $15 million — $14 million from San Diego County, $1 million from Coast Correctional Medical Group — and the agreement reached into the machinery that had failed her: withdrawal protocols, fall response, continuity of care across shift changes, vital-sign checks, compassion training, and possible medical access to cell-monitor video. The sheriff agreed to meet Serna's parents. A federal magistrate judge retained enforcement jurisdiction for a year. Yoo described the family's aim as a path toward more compassionate treatment for people in custody.

Frankie Greer, an Army veteran, told jail medical staff that he had chronic epilepsy, that his prescribed medication was in his clothing, and that he needed a lower bunk. The medication was never provided; the lower-bunk instruction never entered the jail's electronic system; Greer was assigned a top bunk. He suffered a seizure, fell at least six feet, and sustained grave injuries after a delayed emergency response. Yoo and Iredale pursued the case under Section 1983, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act, California civil-rights law, and negligence — a safe lower bunk was both a medical instruction and a reasonable accommodation — and the record included prior critical-incident materials showing recurring failures in communication, medication, monitoring, and emergency response. The federal court allowed claims against individual, supervisory, and County defendants to proceed. San Diego County resolved the case for $7.75 million.

Nine Linguists and a Polygraph

Francisco Bates and eight colleagues worked for Metropolitan Interpreters and Translators, a private contractor supplying linguists for DEA and ICE wiretaps. Metropolitan told them polygraph examinations were mandatory, scheduled the examinations, sought the results, and removed employees who failed or refused — conduct the Employee Polygraph Protection Act forbids a private employer, federal contract or not.

Iredale, Yoo, and Grace Jun carried the nine plaintiffs through a nearly three-week trial. The district court found Metropolitan liable, the jury awarded the linguists $4 million in 2015, and the Ninth Circuit affirmed everything in 2018 — jurisdiction, liability, the verdict, and the allocation of damages between Metropolitan and the federal defendants who had settled before trial. Nine workers who had been told to submit or leave were vindicated in full.

Dublin

Yoo represented a survivor in the individual litigation arising from sexual abuse at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California. In December 2024, the United States agreed to pay $115.8 million to resolve 103 individual survivor claims, with compensation based on each claimant's history — and a separate class settlement established independent monitoring, confidential reporting channels, anti-retaliation protections, public acknowledgment, and review of disciplinary records.

It was the Denver waiting room again, a quarter century later, at national scale: women abused in custody, and a legal response that paired individual compensation with structural change so the next woman would not need to give up her place in line.

The Right to Press Record

While Abade Irizarry filmed a 2019 traffic stop, an officer stood in front of his camera, shone a flashlight into the lens, drove toward him, and followed him after he left. Six federal circuits had already recognized the right to record police performing public duties; the Tenth had not.

Yoo filed an amicus brief through the National Police Accountability Project. In 2022, the Tenth Circuit held that the First Amendment protects that recording, subject to reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions — and that the right, and the protection against retaliation for exercising it, were clearly established by May 2019. The court reversed the qualified-immunity ruling and returned the retaliation claim for further proceedings. Another circuit's worth of the country now records with the Constitution behind it.

Her policy work reaches into statute as well. She contributed a signed analysis of California's SB 2, the law that created a statewide process for investigating and decertifying peace officers after serious misconduct — an accountability division, an advisory board, mandatory agency reporting, public decertification records — and that amended the Tom Bane Civil Rights Act to remove specified immunity barriers to claims involving malicious prosecution and injuries to people in custody. Unlike federal Section 1983 doctrine, the Bane Act does not recognize qualified immunity, and Yoo has been one of the lawyers making sure California's remedy does the work the federal one often cannot.

Leadership and Background

Yoo became president of the National Police Accountability Project in 2020 — the first woman and the first person of color to lead the country's largest organization of civil-rights lawyers — and now serves as immediate past president. NPAP trains lawyers, coordinates appellate strategy, submits amicus briefs, and works with communities and coalition partners; Yoo's role connected cases arising in separate circuits involving recording police, qualified immunity, jail medical care, protest response, and state-law remedies. "Inequities in this country are a complex problem that requires a comprehensive solution," she has said of the work.

She serves on the Consumer Attorneys of California Board of Governors, teaches nationally, and has represented more than one hundred plaintiffs in civil-rights matters, a substantial part of the work performed pro bono. Her honors include the American Constitution Society's Roberto Alvarez Award and the Consumer Attorneys of California's Robert E. Cartwright Award.

She has said she does not separate the work from herself — she carries it with her. From a Denver prison waiting room to a $115.8 million reckoning at Dublin, the carrying shows.