At night, some of DeLand’s ghosts and spirits step out of the courthouse shadows, still pondering their final move.
Stand quietly, and you’ll see the ghost of Charles Browne Perelli sitting at a table by the wall, his neck still caught in a hangman’s noose. You’ll also see his attorney, Rose Falls Bres, who fought to save his life.
“Charlie Brown,” as the locals called him, was tried here, sentenced here, and executed in a jail yard across the street in April 1927.
Brown, 29, murdered a cab driver in Daytona Beach. He was headed for the electric chair when his attorney, Rose Fall Bres, made a last-ditch effort to save his life by insisting upon the letter of the law. Electrocution was the new law of the land, but she argued that Brown had been sentenced to death by hanging, and that was the penalty he should receive.
Bres didn’t get the dismissal she wanted. Instead, she got a checkmate. Within days, a judge resentenced Brown to hang, the governor signed a new death warrant, and the sheriff brought Charlie Brown back to the Volusia County Jail, where a pinewood scaffold had been hastily constructed.
