William Stroud, Brown's stepson, is accused of fatally shooting Brown during an altercation in the Northside neighborhood in February 2008.

In a pre-trial motion Monday, Public Defender James Williams urged Superior Court Judge Henry Hight to bar prosecutor Byron Beasley from calling Brown a "victim" during the trial, which begins Wednesday. The motion also asks the judge to avoid using the word in his instructions to the jury. Stroud admits shooting Brown in self-defense.

"[Brown] was killed while he's swinging a deadly weapon at the accused," Williams said. "It's up to the jury to decide if he in fact is a victim. Not everybody who is shot and killed is a victim."

Stroud is charged with voluntary manslaughter, a felony that could carry a sentence as high as 15 years in prison.

Williams' motion says Brown attacked Stroud with a metal baseball bat while Stroud sat with his fiancee, Turquoise Edwards, in his car in a parking lot at Sykes and Gomains streets.

Beasley, the prosecutor, disagreed.

"He clearly is a victim," Beasley said. "He's dead."

After Brown's death two and a half years ago, family members said Brown had bickered with Stroud ever since marrying Stroud's mother four years earlier.

Hight declined to rule on the motion Monday, but said he will entertain Williams' objections during the trial.

"You'll see what I'm going to give to the jury, and it may or may not have that word in there," Hight said.

Williams also urged Hight to keep the term "intent to kill" out of the jury instructions and replace it with "the need to use deadly force."

Brown's death was among those overshadowed by the murder of UNC-Chapel Hill student body president Eve Carson.

Orange and Chatham counties, composing judicial district 15B, had nine homicides within five months in late 2007 and early 2008, the most since there were 19 in 1985.