Roy Brun

Roy Louis Brun (born January 15, 1953) is an attorney and judge in the state First Judicial District Court in Shreveport in Caddo Parish in northwestern Louisiana. As a Republican politician, he served two terms in the Louisiana House of Representatives, a position which he filled from 1988 to 1997. Brun was considered to have been one of the most conservative members of the legislature during his nine years there.

Early life and education

Roy Louis Brun (pronounced BRUNN) was born in 1953 (likely in Baton Rouge)^[1] to Edwin Louis Brun (1925-2013), a native of Shreveport and pharmaceutical salesman, and the former Faye Hendrick (1927-2012), a native of Portland, Maine, who was a history teacher and guidance counselor. The couple while attending Union College, a Seventh-day Adventist institution in Lincoln, Nebraska. Faye Brun worked at Rusheon Junior High School in Bossier City, where she also supervised student teachers.^[2]

During his service in World War II, Edwin Brun was attached to a mobile field hospital in the Solomon Islands, serving in the battles of Guadalcanal and Bougainville in preparation for the Philippines Campaign.^[1] The family settled in Shreveport in 1954, when their son Roy was one year old. There Edwin Brun worked as a science teacher and then a counselor in Caddo Parish. The Bruns also had a daughter Sylvia (born 1956). She became a medical doctor.^[1]

Roy Brun is a 1970 alumnus of Fair Park High School in Shreveport, from which his father had graduated in 1944.^[1] Brun subsequently received his Bachelor of Arts from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and his law degree through the Louisiana State University Law Center.^[3]

Marriage and family

Brun married to the former Kimberly Bourgeois (born 1962). Together they had two sons, Andrew Louis Brun (born 1985), and Blaine MacGregor Brun (born 1987).

Career

Brun practiced law in Shreveport prior to and during his legislative career. He is a member of the Louisiana and Shreveport bar associations. In 1982, Brun was a member of the Caddo Parish Home Rule Study Commission, which laid the groundwork for the structure of the Caddo Parish Commission. This parish governing body which replaced the former police jury system.

Civic activities

Brun is a member of the Caddo-Bossier Association of Retarded Children. He is a past president of the Ark-La-Tex Gun Collectors. He is a member of Kiwanis International. The Bruns are members of the Holy Cross Episcopal Church in downtown Shreveport.

Early political activities

Brun joined the Republican Party, which from the late 1960s began to compete more widely in the state. In 1975, at the age of twenty-two, Brun ran unsuccessfully for the Louisiana State Senate.

At twenty-three and still in law school, Brun was one of the youngest delegates to the 1976 Republican National Convention, which met in Kansas City, Missouri. Like the majority of the Louisiana delegates, Brun was committed to the insurgent challenge of former Governor Ronald W. Reagan of California. When Reagan's intraparty rival, U.S. President Gerald R. Ford, Jr., narrowly won the GOP nomination, Brun agreed to support the party ticket, although with little enthusiasm.

He was part of the Caddo Parish Republican Executive Committee and was a delegate to the Republican conventions of 1980 in Detroit, Michigan, and 1984 in Dallas, Texas.^[4] In 1984 he was a Louisiana elector for President Reagan and Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush.

In 1978, Brun, head of the Republican ballot security program, reported alleged vote-buying in Louisiana's 4th congressional district race between Republican James H. "Jimmy" Wilson of Vivian in Caddo Parish and Democrat Buddy Leach, then of Leesville in Vernon Parish. (He later moved to Lake Charles). Leach defeated Wilson by 266 votes in that race to succeed the retiring Democrat Joe D. Waggonner.

In 1979, Brun uncovered a problem with seals on voting machines in Opelousas in St. Landry Parish during the gubernatorial election. The serial numbers on the seals did not correspond with the tallies on the seals when the polls closed the Saturday night of the election. In that election, Republican David Treen defeated Democrat Louis Lambert.^[5]

1987 legislative election

Brun ran for the legislature when his political mentor, State Representative B.F. O'Neal, Jr., announced his retirement, effective in 1988. Brun entered the October 1987 nonpartisan blanket primary for O'Neal's District 5 seat in the Louisiana House. He was one of eight candidates, four from each major party. He ran second with 3,542 votes (20 percent) to Democrat Walter F. Clawson, who drew 4,128 ballots (23 percent). The majority voted for the combined six other candidates, none of whom exceeded 14 percent of the vote.^[6]

In the November 1987 general election, Brun defeated Clawson, 5,547 votes (54 percent) to 4,656 (46 percent). Clawson gained only five hundred votes between the primary and the general election, but Brun increased his raw vote by some two thousand ballots.^[7] Though his initial election margin was not overwhelming, no candidates opposed Brun when he sought reelection in the primaries of 1991 and 1995.

Brun's legislative record

In 1995 Brun introduced legislation called the "Justifiable Murder of an AIDS Carrier" bill. Had it been approved, the bill would have classified killing an AIDS carrier as "justifiable homicide" if a person had to fight off an attacker whom he knew was carrying AIDS or whom he "believed" was infected.^[8]

Brun served on the Legislative Audit Advisory Council and the Education Oversight Committee.^[4] He worked with Democratic Representative Everett Doerge of Minden to repeal the Louisiana forced heirship law, derived from the Napoleonic code.^[4][9] Brun claimed that the law limited the number of retirees who settle in Louisiana because it restricted their control over their wills.^[10]

In 1996, as his legislative career was winding down, Brun argued for raising the Louisiana speed limit to 70 miles per hour, comparable to the limits in much of neighboring Texas. That same year, he also worked in the unsuccessful campaign waged by U.S. Senator Phil Gramm of Texas to gain the Republican presidential nomination.^[11]

Gramm had been a Democrat in 1976, when he ran unsuccessfully in the party primary election against U.S. Senator Lloyd M. Bentsen. Brun was then a delegate to the Republican National Convention. In 1983, however, Gramm switched to the Republican Party.

Brun was a member of the Caddo Parish Board of Election Supervisors until he was elected as judge. He also served for six years as the Republican national committeeman from Louisiana.^[12]

Judicial career

In 1996, Brun was elected to a six-year term as a state district judge. He was reelected in 2002, 2008, and 2014. After he resigned his legislative seat in 1997, he was succeeded by a fellow Republican, Wayne Waddell. Waddell won a general election (often called the runoff in Louisiana) contest over another Republican, Judy Boykin, a member of the Caddo Parish School Board who was prominent in the religious right in Shreveport.

References