Brown’s Lawyers, Claiming Vendetta, Want D.A.’s Office Off Case

Lawyers for Anaheim computer entrepreneur David A. Brown sought Wednesday to have the Orange County district attorney’s office removed from his death-penalty case, charging that local prosecutors have an “ax to grind” against Brown.

Prosecutors discounted the charges as a “red herring” that Brown’s attorneys are using only to try to stall the already delayed case. A Superior Court judge is to decide the dispute next month.

Brown, 36, was charged last fall with masterminding the fatal shooting of his wife, then setting up his daughter to take the blame for the crime while he collected $835,000 in insurance money and married the victim’s sister.

While in jail awaiting trial on those counts, Brown was charged additionally in February with trying to hire a hit man to kill two members of the district attorney’s office involved in his prosecution, and also to kill his current wife--who has become a key witness against him.

Defense attorney Joel Baruch maintained in Wednesday’s motion that the district attorney’s office--as the target of the alleged second plot--”has lost all objectivity and impartiality” in the case and is now seeking the death penalty against Brown, largely out of personal motives.

The move to have local prosecutors replaced in the case by the state attorney general’s office also raises questions concerning the practice by the district attorney’s office of securing the cooperation of jail inmates--so-called “snitches”--to cooperate in investigations.

In the motion, Baruch highlighted the role of known jailhouse informant Joe Drake in tipping off prosecutors to Brown’s alleged jailhouse plot as an indication that Brown may have been set up.

In a series of interviews with The Times in recent months, jail inmate Mark Cleveland alleged that Drake told him months before disclosure of the murder plot involving members of the district attorney’s office that he planned to “nail” Brown--in effect, give information about him to prosecutors--in order to help his own case.

Cleveland alleges that this was just one in a long series of cases in which informants have fabricated or manipulated information to curry favor with prosecutors. And Cleveland, who has spent much of his adult life in local jails, said his own cooperation with authorities has enabled him to stay out of state prison despite a number of theft- and drug-related convictions.

But members of the district attorney’s office maintained Wednesday that, no matter how they found out about Brown’s alleged plot to kill key figures in his prosecution, Brown’s complicity is clearly outlined on dozens of tape-recorded telephone calls.

“There’s no jailhouse informant story here, and we certainly don’t have it in for David Brown,” Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. James G. Enright said. “This is all a red herring, a phony issue.”

Added Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeoffrey Robinson--who is prosecuting Brown on the original murder charge and was an alleged target of the jailhouse plot: “If the court chooses to (remove) me, that’s fine--there are lot of other cases to keep me busy.

“But I just don’t see why David Brown should gain an advantage by cooking up this plot and then being able to get rid of the people (in the district attorney’s office) who have the most experience with this case,” he said.