Jurors Begin Deliberations Today in Religious Deprogramming Case : Crime: Attorneys trade barbs as arguments end in the trial of parents who sought to extricate daughter from group.

With the prosecution invoking a Peanuts comic strip about followers of the Great Pumpkin and a defense attorney invoking the story of Br’er Rabbit and the briar patch, the Ginger Brown deprogramming case was given to its Vista Superior Court jury for deliberation late Thursday afternoon--just in time for jurors to go home and sleep on it.

While attorneys for the five defendants, including Ginger Brown’s parents and an older sister, took decidedly different closing tactics in pleading their case, Deputy Dist. Atty. Gary Rempel admonished jurors not to let sympathy for a broken family interfere with their reading of the law.

The five are accused of kidnaping, battery and false imprisonment.

“This is not a family law court, and you cannot solve a family problem here. We’ve pulled aside the veil of respectability and have shown the results of their poor judgment,” Rempel said of the defendants’ five-day attempt to persuade Ginger Brown to disavow her allegiance to a small religious group, Great Among the Nations, and its leader, Ben Altschul.

By the defendants’ own admission, Brown, then 22, was taken from an Encinitas parking lot in May, 1988, and held for five days in an Escondido home before she was released back to the group.

The defendants said they feared for Brown’s safety and believed she had undergone a drastic personality change because of her three-year association with group. They also maintained that the 17 group members devoted to Altschul financially contributed to his comfortable life style, which includes an ocean-front condominium in Coronado and a Mercedes-Benz.

But, Rempel said, no matter how disapproving her parents and others were of Brown’s life style, it was her right as an adult to pursue it.

“She’s varsity (league) all the way, whether in religion, work, rowing or soccer,” Rempel said. “And guess what? That’s legal.”

Rempel then showed the jury a Peanuts comic strip, in which Linus goes door to door, trying to persuade others to join Snoopy and him as followers of the Great Pumpkin. “All leaders of inspiring movements have followers,” Rempel quoted Linus as saying.

He added:

“If Ginger Brown wanted to work all day to make money to put bloomers on lizards, that’s her business, and nobody had the right to interfere with her.”

At the end of his arguments, Rempel turned his attention to Cliff Daniels, the self-described deprogrammer from Los Angeles who was hired by Earle and Dorothy Brown to rescue their youngest daughter.

“Cliff Daniels is trying to sack and pillage a person’s belief,” Rempel said. “His manifesto should be, ‘The ends justify the means,’ and only you can put him out of business. Don’t let Cliff Daniels hide behind the family.”

Daniels’ own attorney, Joe Judge, gave the shortest closing argument of the day--one that lasted less than three minutes and which infuriated Daniels himself, who unsuccessfully pleaded with Judge David B. Moon Jr. for his own, 25-page closing argument to be read to the jury.

Said attorney Judge to the jury: “The way I feel about this and the way my client, Cliff Daniels, feels about this is that you folks better get to work. All the defendants are cloaked with the presumption of innocence. The (prosecution) lost their case before it was filed, lost their case in the opening statements and lost it in the closing arguments. They’ve assassinated characters. Blah blah, woof woof.

“Cliff Daniels is innocent because the Browns are innocent. I’m through with this case. Let’s stop this nonsense and get to work,” Judge said. Then, in reference to the fact that Rempel would get one last chance to argue to the jury, he added, “Oh--don’t forget, there’s going to be another blah blah, woof woof.”

Responded Rempel when he got that last chance:

“It’s undignified, given the amount of work I’ve put in this case, to have my comments referred to as ‘woof woof.’ It made me want to go over and raise my leg.”

Judge, the attorney, said afterward that he kept his closing argument deliberately brief so he could “cut to the quick and let these (jurors) do their job.”

The other defense attorneys spent 30 minutes each summing up their cases, each hammering on the issue of reasonable doubt and suggesting, as they had in their opening statements, that Brown herself had baited her parents to kidnap her so she could then sue for monetary damages. She filed a $2.75-million lawsuit against the defendants a year after the abduction.

“This case has to do with money,” said Herb Weston, the lawyer for Holly Brown, Ginger’s sister. Then, referring to Altschul, he said, “There’s one individual making a lot of money from people, but, slowly and surely, people were leaving this group, and he was losing that money.”

Weston and other defense attorneys argued that, during the five-day deprogramming effort, Brown tried to call group members--but not police--for help.

Saul Wright, Earle Brown’s attorney, questioned why Sheriff’s Department investigators were not called by Rempel to testify about their knowledge of the crime or to Ginger Brown’s state of mind after she was released.

“Let me tell you what I think about this,” Wright said. “They don’t want anything to do with this case. This case is a family matter.”

Wright also argued that Brown was inconsistent in her testimony and exaggerated some facts, thereby making her unbelievable and giving the jurors the right to discount her testimony altogether.

“This case was based on one witness, Ginger Brown, the prosecution’s star witness,” Wright said. “You have to decide whether to believe Ginger Brown, or whether she had reason to fabricate her testimony. And you don’t file $2.75-million lawsuits unless you’re motivated by money.”

Charles Duff, attorney for Hank Erler, whose mother’s Escondido home was used for the deprogramming attempt, argued that Brown baited her parents to kidnap her in the same way that Br’er Rabbit convinced Br’er Fox to throw him in the briar patch.

“Ginger Brown told her parents, ‘Do anything, but don’t kidnap me.’ The only thing she didn’t have was a neon sign saying, ‘OK guys, I want to be kidnaped now.’ ”

Finally, John Patterson, the attorney for Dorothy Brown, the mother, argued that, even though a person is emancipated from parents at age 18, the moral obligation of parents to care for their child’s well-being does not end.

“What the Browns did, they did as parents. They reacted to what they perceived as a danger. The state has no business in this. If (Ginger Brown) felt she was wronged, she has redress in civil law. But I don’t think (criminal) law covers this situation.”

He closed: “Before any of you think of voting guilty on any of the charges, ask yourself, ‘What would I have done?’ ”

The jury returns at 9 a.m. today to begin deliberations.