Jury Can Hear Brown’s Alleged Jailhouse Murder Plot : Trial: Judge’s ruling to admit tape-recorded conversations is a major blow to the defense of man accused in the 1985 slaying of his wife.

In a critical blow to murder defendant David Arnold Brown, a judge decided Thursday that a jury can hear about the Anaheim Hills man’s alleged jailhouse plot to hire a hit man to kill three key figures in his prosecution.

Gary Pohlson, the attorney defending Brown on charges that he orchestrated his wife’s 1985 murder and pinned it on his own daughter, said the ruling makes his job “an almost impossible task.”

As part of yet another failed attempt to get evidence thrown out of court, Brown took the witness stand for the first time in his 19 months of legal troubles.

Brown, 37, claimed he “wasn’t really aware of what was going on” when he agreed to talk with police without an attorney present shortly after his Sept. 22, 1988, arrest. Brown said he had gotten very little sleep and was under the influence of medication at the time.

But Superior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin called the police interview “about as voluntary and free as it could be.”

In the police tape, played at Brown’s preliminary hearing last year, he denied having orchestrated the shooting of his wife, Linda, as she slept in their Garden Grove home on March 19, 1985.

But he did acknowledge telling his daughter, Cinnamon, that she should take the blame for the killing--because her youth would preclude a long prison sentence--and showing her how to write a suicide note and concoct a drug mixture to feign suicide after the killing. Cinnamon, convicted in the murder, remains in prison and is now a key witness against her father.

Earlier in the hearing, Pohlson pleaded with McCartin to throw out of court a series of tape-recorded phone conversations from early 1989 between Brown and another former jail inmate detailing their alleged plans to kill Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeoffrey Robinson, Investigator Jay Newell and Brown’s current wife, Patti Bailey--another key witness against him.

Bailey, the victim’s sister, married Brown after Linda Brown’s murder and the pair lived in Anaheim for more than three years after the killing--in part by means of $835,000 they had collected from Linda Brown’s insurance--until Cinnamon recanted her story in 1988.

Pohlson told McCartin the jailhouse plot only showed that Brown was scared--not that he had killed his wife--and that no jury would believe him innocent after hearing about the scheme.

“I honestly can’t conceive of a more damaging piece of evidence to come into a case,” Pohlson said. “If this comes in, we roll over--the jury’s going to roll over us.”

The judge conceded it was damaging and added: “It’s relevant. . . . I don’t see any way I could rule it out unless I lost my sanity.”

Lawyers will begin picking a jury for the case on Monday and trial will start the next week. If convicted, Brown could face life in prison without the possibility of parole--but not the death penalty.