CAMARILLO : Parole Denied for Killer of Stepmother

A state board meeting at a Camarillo detention center denied early release Tuesday to Cinnamon Brown, the Orange County girl who at 14 carried out her father’s orders to kill her stepmother.

In rejecting a prosecutor’s request that Brown be freed, the youth parole board gave her no credit for the crucial testimony that sent David Brown to jail last year as mastermind of the 1985 murder of his fifth wife, Linda Bailey.

“Her testimony against her father, which led to his conviction, should not be considered in determining Cinnamon’s parole readiness,” the three-member panel said after a four-hour hearing at the Ventura School, a California Youth Authority center on Wright Road.

The panel dismissed the request from Jeoff Robinson, an Orange County deputy district attorney who argued that Brown, now 20, has made great strides, passing a high school equivalency test, taking college-credit courses and working for three years as an airline ticket agent at the Ventura School.

Robinson said many of the panel’s objections to parole were not stated but centered on members’ belief that she has not shaken the brainwashing by her father. In a rare move for a prosecutor, Robinson said his office will pursue an appeal of the decision.

“At this point in her life, I think she has broken free,” he said. “She loves her father, but she is not under the influence of David Brown.”

But the panel of the state Youthful Offenders Parole Board claimed that Brown is manipulative--a trait the board said was employed to perfection by her father--and that she “has not addressed the reasons why she became involved in this cold-blooded and calculated crime.”

She is scheduled to be released on her 25th birthday in July, 1995, said Allison Zajac, the detention center’s spokeswoman.

The hearing Tuesday was Brown’s sixth annual review.