Judge Threatens to Free Gless Fan : Crime: Unless police produce evidence, charges will be dropped against a woman accused of barricading herself in star’s house.

A judge threatened Wednesday to dismiss charges against a woman who barricaded herself in actress Sharon Gless’ Studio City house with a rifle unless police hand over to the woman’s attorney a recording of negotiations that led to her surrender.

San Fernando Municipal Court Judge Paul I. Metzler set a May 3 deadline for the Los Angeles Police Department to give the attorney a copy of the taped conversation with a police negotiator and a written report of the March 30 incident.

“I’m not afraid” to throw out the case, Metzler said. “I expect this order to be honored.”

He issued the order after Deputy Public Defender Mitchell Bruckner complained that police were hampering his efforts to prepare a defense for his client, Joni Leigh Penn, 30, of Garden Grove.

“The fact is I have received no reports on what they recovered and why they made the arrest,” Bruckner said during Wednesday’s brief hearing. “It sounds to me like the LAPD is polluting this matter.”

Bruckner said he believes the Police Department does not want the tape released because it might undermine prosecutors’ contentions that Penn entered the house intending to commit a felony. Such an intent must be proved to convict Penn of the two counts of residential burglary filed against her.

Linda K. Lefkowitz, a deputy Los Angeles city attorney who represents the Police Department, denied the claim and said the department had not received Bruckner’s request.

She said the department intends to make the tape available except for portions that reveal department methods of negotiating with barricaded suspects. Disclosing such methods could jeopardize future negotiations, she said.

Police persuaded Penn to give herself up after she barricaded herself in a bathroom with a .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition, prosecutors said. Police described Penn as an obsessed fan of Gless. Detectives have said Penn told them she entered the house intending to sexually assault the actress and commit suicide.

Gless, the former star of the “Cagney and Lacey” TV series, was not in the house, which her publicist said the actress uses mainly as an office.