Alleged Brown Plot to Kill 3 May Bring Death Penalty Call

Last week’s disclosures that Anaheim computer entrepreneur David A. Brown allegedly plotted to kill three key figures in his murder prosecution have persuaded once-doubtful prosecutors to almost certainly seek the death penalty against him.

“Based just on the original murder charge against him, I doubt we’d have had a death penalty case,” Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. James Enright said in an interview.

“Now, I imagine that we’ll almost certainly go for it. The new charges have definitely created an entirely new atmosphere in which we look at this case,” said Enright, who expects to make a decision in the case in the next several weeks.

Prosecutors’ change in attitude on the death penalty question reflects in part what they believe to be the strength of their new evidence of the 36-year-old Brown’s jailhouse murder plot that allegedly targeted his wife and members of the district attorney’s office.

With the new charges against Brown, an official close to the case who requested anonymity suggested, “David Brown has jumped from the proverbial frying pan straight into the fire.”

But one of Brown’s attorneys, Jack Earley, said earlier this week that the district attorney’s office should not be involved in handling any decisions on the death penalty since members of that office were allegedly targeted by Brown.

“Their emotions are running high, and it’s very hard for them to take a step back and view this case fairly. It’s hard to be objective when someone in your own office is involved,” Earley said.

Enright, anticipating such conflict-of-interest concerns, said he may ask the state attorney general’s office to make a final review of the death penalty decision in the Brown case. Ordinarily, Enright himself would have the final say after reviewing the recommendation of his senior staff.

Brown, already awaiting trial on murder charges, was accused just last week of arranging to pay a fellow inmate in the Orange County Jail tens of thousands of dollars to kill a county prosecutor, a district attorney’s investigator and Brown’s current wife, Patricia Bailey--who is also charged with murder but is now a key witness against Brown.

All three alleged targets are central figures against Brown in his murder trial next month on charges that he masterminded the 1985 murder of his wife, 24-year-old Linda Brown, and then set up his daughter to take the blame for the killing.

Brown has denied those charges. He claims that he tried to talk his daughter, 18-year-old Cinnamon Brown, out of killing her stepmother and characterizes Cinnamon’s recent testimony against him as a last-ditch attempt to get out of the California Youth Authority. Cinnamon has been imprisoned for almost 4 years after her conviction for the murder of Linda Brown.

And prosecutors themselves concede that they do not have a “smoking gun” to try to prove that Brown orchestrated the murder. Instead, they will have to rely on the cumulative weight of testimony from Cinnamon Brown and Patricia Bailey, and on secretly taped recordings of Brown himself.

And even if prosecutors can gain a murder conviction, they say, they may lack a strong-enough case to seek the death penalty--largely because Brown had no prior criminal record.

Prosecutors, in bringing the original murder charges against Brown last fall, included “a special circumstance” alleging that Brown profited financially from Linda Brown’s death through $835,000 in life insurance money.

Such an allegation was necessary if prosecutors were to decide to seek the death penalty against Brown, but no decision was ever made on that question.

Based on the strength of the murder charge alone, Enright said, “My gut reaction is that the case might have fallen in the area of a life-without-possibility-of-parole sentence, rather than the death penalty.”

But that opinion changed with last week’s charges that Brown plotted to kill two members of the district attorney’s office and Patricia Bailey.

Prosecutors maintain that they have taped recordings that leave no doubt as to Brown’s jailhouse murder plot, making the new charges less vulnerable to attack than the original murder case.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeoffrey Robinson, who is prosecuting Brown on the original murder charges and was a target of Brown’s alleged murder plot, said, “You can be sure that these new charges will carry some weight when it comes time to decide on the death penalty.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Tom Borris, who brought last week’s new charges against Brown, added: “These charges could potentially be used as an aggravating circumstance in seeking the death penalty in the murder case. This certainly makes the decision an easier one.”

The county district attorney’s office decides to pursue about three to five death penalty cases each year, Enright said, although it considers that option in at least twice as many.

Currently, 19 men who have been sentenced to die by Orange County juries over the last decade are on death row pending their appeals, Enright said.