Brady defeated previous
district attorney Charles Fickert, who was responsible for the conviction of
Tom Mooney and
Warren Billings in the
Preparedness Day bombing. By 1926, he was convinced that Mooney and Billings were unjustly convicted. In a letter to Governor Friend W. Richardson, Brady wrote "If these matters that have developed during the trials could be called to the attention of a court that had jurisdiction to grant a new trial, undoubtedly a new trial would be granted. Furthermore, if a new trial were granted, there would be no possibility of convicting Mooney or Billings." In 1935, he empaneled a grand jury and hired private investigator
Edwin Atherton to report on police corruption in the
San Francisco Police Department. Brady presided over numerous high-profile cases in the 1920s and 1930s, including the three
Fatty Arbuckle murder trials, and the arrest and roundup of Communists. His conduct in the Arbuckle trials have been harshly condemned by later commentators. Driven by intense political ambition, aiming for the governorship, he pressured witnesses to give false testimony, suppressed evidence of Arbuckle’s innocence, and relied on a primary accuser, Maude Delmont, whom he knew to be an unreliable extortionist and never actually called to testify. In 1936, Brady was D.A. during the infamous sterilization plot charged by
Ann Cooper Hewitt, 21-year-old heiress, and daughter of
Peter Cooper Hewitt, against her mother, Marion Jeanne Andrews, accused of sterilizing her daughter, Ann, to thwart an inheritance dependent on the young woman having children, in a climate of California
Eugenics law, and aided by Dr. Tilton E Tillman and Samuel G. Boyd. He was defeated for reelection by
Pat Brown in 1943, which was the second time the two had competed for the office. ==References==