Defense Rests; Blake Doesn’t Testify

Robert Blake’s defense closed Wednesday without his testimony, gambling that jurors wouldn’t buy the state’s largely circumstantial case accusing the actor of shooting the wife he despised after failing to find someone else willing to commit the crime.

M. Gerald Schwartzbach called 38 witnesses to emphasize the lack of evidence directly linking his client to the 2001 murder of Bonny Lee Bakley, and to attack the quality of the Los Angeles Police Department investigation, which focused early on Blake.

Schwartzbach has closely followed a blueprint he laid out for jurors in his opening statement. And he avoided previous counsel’s “trash the victim” strategy, which dominated the early stages of the case with accounts of Bakley’s involvement in a mail-order pornography business.

“For a celebrity case, it was tried like a pretty standard criminal case,” with the defense focusing on reasonable doubt, said Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

She noted that Blake, 71, would not only face life imprisonment if convicted of murder, but could get up to nine years if found guilty of another charge, solicitation to murder.

“For Blake, there are a lot of ways to lose,” Levenson said. “At his age, it could be very close to a life sentence.”

Although Bakley hasn’t emerged unscathed at trial, Schwartzbach suggested that someone from her past was out to harm her and that Blake was concerned enough with the threat that he began to carry a gun for protection.

Prosecutors have built their case on the testimony of stuntmen Gary McLarty and Ronald “Duffy” Hambleton, who each said Blake asked him to “pop” or “snuff” Bakley, laying out multiple scenarios to kill her, including one involving the restaurant near which she was slain May 4, 2001.

The defense’s strongest moment came during the cross-examination of McLarty, when he acknowledged a long-term cocaine addiction and a drug-induced breakdown in which he thought police were tunneling under his home and satellites were monitoring his every move.

To a lesser degree, Schwartzbach tried to discredit Hambleton -- who testified that he hadn’t used drugs since 1999 -- with witnesses who told jurors he had done so as late as 2001.

“Clearly, they didn’t make the best witnesses,” said Robert Pugsley, a professor at Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles. “On the other hand, that’s all the prosecution had.... Even people on drugs can tell the truth.”

Still, legal experts say that by keeping Blake off the witness stand, the defense will leave jurors focused on the credibility of those who did testify.

When a defendant takes the stand, “it becomes, ‘Do we believe the defendant?’ ” said Peter Keane, a former public defender who teaches at Golden Gate University School of Law in San Francisco.

But there is what Levenson called “the Peterson effect,” referring to Scott Peterson, who did not testify at his murder trial and was convicted of killing his wife, Laci, and unborn child.

Jurors want to hear from the defendant, Levenson said. They want to hear that side of the story.

Yet there’s an obvious risk for any defendant who takes the stand.

“As a general rule in a criminal case, if you can keep your client from testifying, you do,” Keane said.

Blake’s case has an added problem. If he had done well, prosecutors would have claimed he was merely acting, Levenson said, calling it a no-win situation.

Despite extensive pretrial publicity about Bakley’s tawdry past, legal experts said, Schwartzbach was smart to avoid dirtying her name.

“One of the things that turns jurors off is tarnishing the victim,” Keane said. “Jurors resent it.”

And the experts said Blake’s earlier lawyers, most notably Harland Braun, excelled in influencing the jury pool by painting Bakley as a scam artist who bilked men answering her ads in lonely-hearts magazines.

The experts downplayed Schwartzbach’s accusations that police mishandled evidence and homed in too early on Blake.

Since the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial, “we have not had a case where the LAPD has not been accused of mishandling evidence,” Pugsley said.

And it is common for police to focus immediately on the spouse of a murder victim.

“In most domestic-partner killings, the surviving partner is the usual prime suspect. That doesn’t mean Blake did it,” Pugsley said, “but statistically he was the most likely suspect.”

Throughout his case, Schwartzbach tried to shore up the account Blake gave to investigators: that he often parked on the street behind Vitello’s restaurant in Studio City, that he kept large amounts of cash at home and that at least once he left his handgun in the same booth as he told police he did on the night of the murder.

But the defense, like the prosecution, kept circling back to the star witnesses, the stuntmen.

Schwartzbach opened his case with Cole McLarty, who testified that his father, Gary, said Blake had offered the stuntman $10,000, not to kill Bakley, but to beat up a stalker.

Prosecutors countered that the younger McLarty had sold his story to tabloid publications.

Schwartzbach also called two admitted drug users, including one with a state prison record, who testified that they used methamphetamine manufactured in a pool cabana at Hambleton’s Lucerne Valley ranch. They said the stuntman had frequent delusions that included sightings of a 4-foot horned animal and intruders dressed as sagebrush and Joshua trees. But that raised the issue of deciding which drug user to believe.

The defense closed with a play for jurors’ heartstrings.

Their final witness was Father George Horan, the senior chaplain at Men’s Central Jail, who regularly met with Blake while the actor was behind bars.

“The basic emotion was one of sadness and, secondarily, that he had pretty much given up the idea he was going to survive in jail,” Horan said.