Jim Brown's ordeal makes us think

Former Insurance Commissioner Jim Brown came to Denham Springs the other day to spread the word that he is back. Brown, who spent six months in a federal prison and then wrote a book on the injustice that ended his political career, has a compelling story. It gets more compelling every day.

No matter how history ultimately judges him, Brown will always be able to say of himself what Forrest Gump wrote at the beginning of his fictional autobiography: “At least I ain't led no hum-drum life.”

Brown was the longest serving elected official in Louisiana, with 30 years in public life that included stints as state senator, secretary of state and 12 years as insurance commissioner. He took over the regulation of insurance companies at a time when past corruption left a huge mess. Scandals had landed the two previous insurance commissioners in jail and ripped off thousands of Louisiana insurance consumers.

Brown shut down 50 insurance companies that were actuarially unsound and embarked on a mission to reinvent the regulatory structure to bring honest business practices and consumer protection to an industry with a shady reputation in this state.

Yet Brown was destined to become caught up in this state's reputation for shady politics. When he refused to play ball in a federal investigation of former governor Edwin Edwards, he wound up charged with about 57 counts of insurance fraud in a case without merit that was eventually laughed out of court. However, Brown was convicted of giving false statements to an FBI agent during a 15-minute conversation he says involved his dim recollections of another five-year-old conversation he had with Edwards, who was representing an insurance company in the process of shutting down. The conviction was based on the discrepancies between what Brown says he said and what the agent testified he had written down in 15 pages of notes from that conversation.

Brown's defense was never allowed to see those notes, let alone show them to the jury to determine who was telling the truth. In fact, Brown says he is the only criminal defendant in American history every denied access to such potentially exculpatory evidence.

In the end, Brown's trial was a classic case of “he said-she said” - and who is a jury going to believe, a federal law enforcement agent with a badge or a Louisiana politician?

Brown says he was told repeatedly that if he would just would tell the feds something on Edwards, all his problems would go away. He refused, got convicted and had to serve six months in a federal penitentiary in Louisiana. Only after he finished that sentence were the questioned notes made public. Some of his jurors who saw them repudiated their own verdict after realizing many key allegations made by the agent on the stand are nowhere to be found in those notes.

“The evidence is very clear I was telling the truth,” Brown says. Brown went on to write a book , “Justice Denied,” about his experiences. Meanwhile, he continues to appeal the conviction in hopes it will be overturned and his reputation exonerated.

Now it would be easy to shrug and conclude that Brown, a lawyer himself, was a big boy and should have known the stakes when he got into a game of chicken with the FBI. Our tendency has always been to have faith in the integrity of prosecutors and law enforcement officials.

Yet events in the world continue to raise red flags about that faith. One of the reasons we are in Iraq right now has to do with our faith in a blow-hard intelligence network of people who, it is obvious now, did not know what they were talking about. Jim Brown was never accused of concealing weapons of mass destruction, but it's likely he is just as guilty of that as he was of the charges against him, which is to say not guilty of anything.

Put together overzealousness, incompetence and a lack of accountability and you have a potentially deadly combination. Look at the big scandal that broke last week in the death penalty trial of terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui. The French Moroccan is the only person to face a U.S. jury in connection with the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Yet last week a judge disqualified a half-dozen aviation safety witnesses from testifying for the government because they had been tampered with by a prosecution attorney. The attorney's own colleagues have turned on her, calling Carla Jean Martin's tactics of coaching the witnesses and e-mailing trial transcripts to them “boneheaded.”

It reminds me the old caveat that used to come up in the 1960s spy show, “Mission Impossible.” “If you you are captured or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.”

I hope Jim Brown wins his appeal.

Mike Dowty is managing editor of the Livingston Parish News

Jim Brown was Louisiana's Secretary of State and chief elections officer from 1980 to 1988. He can be reached through his Web site at www.jimbrownla.com.