Other Controversies
As DA, Brown was involved in several controversies. In 1975, he dropped twenty-six felony counts against Commissioner of Agriculture and Forestry Dave L. Pearce on grounds of Pearce's age and the state of Pearce's health. In 1984, as his tenure wound down, Brown was indicted by a federal grand jury for extortion, mail fraud, and perjury after he failed to indict two men for possession of ten grams of cocaine. The day after the East Baton Rouge Parish grand jury declined to take action against the two suspects, the wealthy father of one of the men lent Brown $168,000. A state district judge testified that Brown had asked him to suppress evidence in the case. Brown was acquitted and said that God wanted him to seek a third term. He had during his tenure crusaded against narcotics and pornography. Though Brown had been the first EBR DA in memory to have been unopposed for a second term in 1978, he was defeated in 1984 by the Republican Bryan Edward Bush, Jr., who was unseated after one term.
In 1973, Brown prevented Baton Rouge theaters from showing the X-rated film The Last Tango in Paris with Marlon Brando. So had the Rapides Parish District Attorney Edwin O. Ware, III, acted accordingly. In 1979, Brown blocked the showing of the comedy, “Monty Python’s Life of Brian”. Brown asked Baton Rouge magazine distributors not to offer the March 1977 issue of Hustler, which a state court judge in Ohio ruled obscene.
In 1980, the black attorney Murphy Bell filed suit against the city of Baton Rouge and District Attorney Brown regarding civil rights protection for African-American suspects. The suit, which stemmed from the accidental fatal shooting by police of a black teenager named Clarence Morrison, Jr. (born ca. 1963), claimed, among various allegations, that Brown had used the grand jury investigative procedure as a "legal backup" to support arbitrary actions by the police department. The city and Brown, however, prevailed in the initial court and on appeal.
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