Countywide : Judge Will Rule on Alleged Brown Plot

A Superior Court judge said Tuesday that he sees no reason to bar a jury from hearing evidence on computer entrepreneur David A. Brown’s alleged jailhouse scheme to assassinate three key figures involved in his prosecution on murder charges. But the judge said he would consider the request overnight anyway.

Judge Donald A. McCartin’s comments came at the first day of pretrial proceedings into charges that Brown masterminded his wife’s 1985 murder, then set up his teen-age daughter to take the fall for the crime while he collected $835,000 in insurance and married the victim’s sister.

Lawyers are to start picking a jury in a Santa Ana courtroom on Monday, with the trial expected to last through June. Brown, who turned a process for retrieving data from damaged computers into a multimillion-dollar business, faces life in prison without parole if convicted.

At Wednesday’s hearing, defense attorney Gary Pohlson urged McCartin to ban any mention at the trial of Brown’s tape-recorded plan in early 1989 to allegedly pay $22,700 to a “hit man” for killing two members of the district attorney’s office and his current wife--now a key witness against him.

Brown, 37, of Anaheim Hills, was in jail at the time awaiting his murder trial but had repeated contacts with another inmate who agreed to do the job. The inmate later agreed to cooperate with authorities after another inmate tipped them off to the scheme.

Charging that testimony about the plan would prejudice a jury unfairly, Pohlson said: “We object probably as strenuously as we can to that coming into this trial.”

But McCartin responded that he didn’t “see any problem with that. . . . Off the top of my head, I would say it’s admissible.” He nonetheless agreed to review selected tape recordings made by authorities of the jailhouse plot and to rule on the matter this morning.

Brown’s attorneys concede that admission of the hit-man scheme into evidence would significantly hurt their chances of clearing Brown on charges of murdering his wife, 24-year-old Linda Brown, on March 19, 1985.