Some of Mr. Brown’s high-profile prosecutions involved police officers accused of unjustified killings.
Richard A. Brown, the Queens County district attorney since 1991 who prosecuted police officers accused of committing unjustified killings, men who executed potential witnesses and a doctor convicted of murder for fatally botching an abortion, died while under hospice care in a rehabilitation center in Redding, Conn., on Saturday morning. He was 86.
The cause of death was complications connected to Parkinson’s disease, his son, Todd, said.
In January 2019,Mr. Brown said he would not seek re-election.
A former judge who left the calm of an appellate court for the pressures of a big-city prosecutor’s office, Mr. Brown was also known in his early years on the job for showing up at crime scenes, an unusual practice for the city’s district attorneys.
He said those visits, which sometimes occurred shortly after he had rolled out of bed in the middle of the night, gave him a better understanding of the cases his office would be handling. Those who knew Mr. Brown said the visits also reflected his hands-on disposition and his conspicuously high energy levels.
Mr. Brown was an associate justice of Brooklyn’s Second Department of the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court, when Mario M. Cuomo, a fellow Democrat who was then the governor, named Mr. Brown the district attorney of Queens County in June 1991, succeeding John J. Santucci, a 14-year incumbent who retired in the middle of his fourth term.
Among the cases Mr. Santucci bequeathed to Mr. Brown was the most rancorous one then pending in the city’s courts. It involved murder charges against five New York City police officers that Mr. Santucci’s office had obtained from a grand jury weeks before in the death of a car-theft suspect. The office said that one officer had choked the man, and that the other four officers had “acted in concert.” Witnesses said the officers had punched and kicked the man.
The officers said that they had struggled to subdue the man, who they said was violently resisting arrest. Some legal experts called the murder charges against the four who were not accused of the choking prosecutorial overreach.
Mr. Brown agreed, dropping all charges against those four shortly after taking office. He reduced the charges against the officer who allegedly did the choking to manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, which Mr. Brown called more appropriate. (The officer was acquitted of both counts at trial.)
The family of the dead man, Federico Pereira, and his supporters were outraged by the actions of Mr. Brown, accusing him of doing what he thought would bolster his chances of winning a full term at a special election later in 1991.
