The possibility of another death sentence in the U.S. Courthouse in Brooklyn is emerging with the trial of an insurance agent accused of taking out life insurance policies on alcoholics and homeless men and then arranging their murders.

The trial of insurance agent Richard James and a friend, Ronald Mallay, opened yesterday. The men could face the death penalty for two murders disguised to look like drinking deaths, prosecutors say. Mr. Mallay is also charged in two shooting deaths.

Mr. James’s defense is that the two men whose deaths he is accused of arranging actually died of natural causes spurred by their hard lives.

One man, Basdeo Somaipersaud, died on a park bench in Queens. Mr. James’s attorney, Steven Zissou, told jurors the man had a host of medical problems and was “ready to go.” The other man, Hardeo Sewnanan, died in a rum shack in Guyana, the country from which the defendants emigrated. Mr. Zissou suggested that only the “most rudimentary medical examinations” were conducted and that prosecutors could not prove the cause of death was other than alcoholism.

A prosecutor, Robert Capers, said both men were poisoned, and that Mr. Sewnanan’s rum was mixed with ammonia.

“Although they were drunks, they were flesh and blood,” a prosecutor, Robert Capers, told jurors. “Not insurance checks.”

The deaths, prosecutors say, netted Messrs. James and Mallay, who both lived in the Guyanese-American enclave in Richmond Hill, tens of thousands of dollars in insurance proceeds.

Mr. James, who worked at MetLife Inc., was able to fraudulently take out policies on strangers, prosecutors say.

A lawyer for Mr. Mallay, Kenneth Kaplan, told jurors not to be suspicious about the defendants taking out the life insurance policies.

In Guyana, Mr. Kaplan said, most people do not invest in “hedge funds or municipal bonds.”

“There was something in the 1990s called the Guyanese lottery,” Mr. Kaplan said. “They were investing in life insurance policies.”

MetLife fired Mr. James in 2000, following the company’s suspicions over the frequency with which Mr. James’s clients suffered unusual deaths. Even afterwards, Mr. Capers said, Mr. Mallay “was trying to march drunks into insurance offices.”

This year, a jury here gave a death sentence to a man convicted of murdering two undercover detectives, the first time a federal death sentence has been handed down in the state in half a century.