Warden: Brooks would pose threat in prison
By ANNMARIE TIMMINS
Concord Monitor
CONCORD, N.H. — John “Jay” Brooks would pose an unusual security challenge to the state prison because of his wealth and history of hiring others to kill or harm his enemies, a state prison warden testified yesterday.
Warden Richard Gerry said he’s never had an inmate like Brooks, a multimillionaire convicted of murder for hire and accused of paying to have another inmate assaulted. Inside the men’s prison, Brooks’s conversations would be minimally monitored, and he could have money deposited in other inmates’ commissary accounts, Gerry said.
“We haven’t dealt with this before that I’m aware of,” Gerry said of inmates like Brooks. “Therefore, it would be unusual.”
State prosecutors called Gerry, warden of the men’s prison in Concord, as their last witness yesterday in their death penalty case against Brooks.
Jurors have already convicted Brooks of two counts of capital murder for hiring men to kidnap and kill Jack Reid Sr. in 2005. With evidence concluded in the penalty phase, jurors will likely begin deciding today whether Brooks deserves the death penalty or life in prison without parole.
Prosecutors want Brooks executed and have tried to convince jurors that Brooks would be a threat in prison, given his wealth, his murder plot against Reid and the freedom he’d have behind bars.
If Brooks is sentenced to death, Gerry said he’d spend his remaining years in the prison’s maximum security unit, where he’d be alone in his cell nearly 23 hours a day and have almost no contact with other inmates or anyone from outside the prison.
But if Brooks, 56, is instead given a life sentence, he’d most likely serve his time in medium security with access to the prison’s gym, hobby shops and recreation yard, a prison warden said yesterday.
Brooks’s telephone conversations with the outside world would be recorded but not necessarily listened to. And his conversations with other inmates inside his housing unit could possibly be heard by correctional officers, but chats on the prison yard most likely wouldn’t be, Gerry said.
The prison houses 65 convicted murderers serving life without parole, and most of them are in the medium security unit, Gerry said. If Brooks behaved in prison, he’d likely work his way there, too, Gerry said.
Brooks would not be able to donate goods to the prison the way he donated microwaves to the Strafford County jail last year, but he could continue to share his money with other inmates.
Gerry said “virtually anybody” could send money to an inmate’s prison account. The name and address of the person sending the money must be legible, but prison staff do not confirm that the information identifies a real person.
An out-of-state prison expert hired by the defense testified previously that the state prison would have no problem safely housing Brooks for the rest of his life.
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Copyright 2008 Concord Monitor/Sunday Monitor