Brown's health has deteriorated since he was sent away. He suffers from severe diabetes, asthma, and other ailments. His complaints about medical neglect were validated in Maryland when a court awarded him $2500 in damages for one incident, a rare success for an inmate.
Ron Huber, who was the first to broadcast Brown's complaints to the outside world on his call-in program on WRFR, a Rockland community radio station, worked with Ponte to design the new "right of return" policy, as Huber calls it.
Serving 59 years for 19 burglaries in the 1990s, Brown was well liked by many inmates, guards, and others at the Maine State Prison.
M.D. Harmon, a Portland Press Herald conservative columnist who supports Brown's transfer back to Maine, met him when he was a lay minister at the Warren prison. He says Brown was "one of the least likely guys you would ever think would be doing hard time. He deserves whatever consideration the system could provide him."
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, Prisons, Deane Brown, Portland Press Herald, Maine prisons, Ponte, Less 
