POHLMEIR INSANE, ATTORNEY SAYS.

Byline: Christopher Noxon Daily News Staff Writer

An undiagnosed affliction that filled the membranes beneath his skull with blood led Alfred Pohlmeir to roll over in bed and strangle his wife one early morning two years ago, defense attorneys told a jury Monday.

Two weeks after convicting the 92-year-old former postal clerk of second-degree murder, a jury was told that Pohlmeir should be declared insane because of a disorder called frontal lobe syndrome. The condition can impede normal brain function and clouded Pohlmeir's sense of right and wrong on the night he killed his wife, said Deputy Public Defender Susan Olson.

``We are not saying he went over the edge after eating too many Twinkies,'' Olson said. ``He had a mental defect . . . Mr. Pohlmeir believed that what he did was right.''

The trial of Ventura County's oldest convicted murderer entered its second stage, with prosecutors strongly objecting to defense attorneys' statements about Pohlmeir's state of mind at the time of the crime.

``There is absolutely no evidence of acting out, loss of impulse control or dementia,'' said Deputy District Attorney Don Glynn. ``Mr. Pohlmeir did understand the nature and quality of his act.''

Prosecutors argued that a severe brain disorder was impossible for a man who faithfully looked after his wife in the years leading up to her death and spoke directly and logically about the crime afterward.

Both sides said they will call medical experts this week to back up their arguments.

Pohlmeir faces a sentence of 15 years to life in the murder of his wife of 62 years. If the jury rules he was insane, he would serve his time in a psychiatric hospital with the possibility of release if doctors declare him cured.

Pohlmeir showed the first real signs of brain damage in the weeks after he admitted to police that he killed his wife, Olson said. Pohlmeir, who has been confined to a medical ward of the county jail since his imprisonment, was seen pushing his bed around his cell, putting on his underwear over his prison blues and picking relentlessly at facial sores, Olson said.

But it wasn't until he fell and hit his head in December that doctors discovered an abnormality on a CAT-scan. That detection led to the diagnosis of frontal lobe syndrome, Olson said.

The condition was demonstrated the morning after the crime, when the former Texan admitted in a police interview that he killed ``the damn woman'' because of her chronic cough. Olson said the matter-of-fact tone recorded on the tape is evidence that Pohlmeir had lost his moral bearings.

``The fact that there is very little remorse shows that he lost the sense of what society expects from him,'' Olson said. ``He could not understand the nature of his act.''