Convicted Killer Pleads With Jury to Spare Him

Flaunting his self-taught legal skills, convicted murderer Robert M. Bloom Jr. took center stage in Van Nuys Superior Court on Thursday as his own advocate in a battle to save himself from the death penalty.

The one-time high school debater--now a bearded 37-year-old inmate--zealously questioned witnesses, subpoenaed a judge and tried hard to tug at jurors’ heartstrings as he opened his defense after dropping an insanity plea earlier this week.

Holding up blowup photos of himself as a child, Bloom locked eyes with jurors, saying: “Do you really want to put that little boy in the gas chamber? Look at how cute I am.” Several jurors smiled.

He asked the jury to protect him from his prosecutors and blamed his plight on a tough childhood.

“If I had been born into a different family . . . maybe it would have been me taking office as . . . the district attorney,” Bloom said. “I’m better than Steve Cooley.”

Bloom was convicted of murdering his father, stepmother and 8-year-old stepsister in a 1982 rampage in their Sun Valley home. He was sentenced to death, but the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned his conviction in 1997, ruling his lawyer had mounted an inadequate psychiatric defense.

During this year’s retrial, Bloom’s court-appointed lawyers--whom he fired Tuesday--argued he had been insane when at age 18 he shot his family.

Jurors have one job left: determining whether Bloom should die for multiple murder. Last month they found him guilty of murdering his father, Robert Bloom Sr., stepmother Josephine Lou Bloom and stepsister Sandra Hughes.

Last week they found him to have been sane when he killed his father, but jurors said Tuesday that they were deadlocked on the question of sanity in the other two killings.

At that point, Bloom withdrew his insanity defense, fired his lawyers and announced he would represent himself.

Bloom knows he has a “sympathetic jury,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Shellie Samuels.

On Thursday, Bloom ridiculed his own insanity plea as “garbage.”

“I have a high IQ and I’m very smart,” Bloom said. Showing off a certificate he said he won from his mock-trial glory days, Bloom said he was “willing to stake this award” against prosecutor Samuels’ degree from Loyola Law School.

Bloom said he played a prosecutor during a mock trial and that he “got a conviction.”

After his 1982 arrest, Bloom became interested in the law. He frequented a jailhouse law library, according to earlier testimony, and has acted as his own lawyer in other matters.

Since he took over his defense Tuesday, Bloom made strenuous objections, some of which were upheld, and made liberal use of legal jargon. He asked Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Darlene Schempp for a directed verdict of life without possibility of parole, which she denied.

He also exasperated prosecutors and the judge with his objectionable questions and commentary. Once, Schempp flung both arms in the air and shouted at Bloom to stop interrupting.

“He’s trying to make a circus of this hearing,” Samuels said.

Bloom’s lawyerly skills have improved since his first trial, when he represented himself and asked jurors to sentence him to death, which they did, according to Josephine Lou Bloom’s uncle, Charles A. Simpson, who testified against the defendant and watched both trials. “He’s had 18 years.”

Simpson also called Bloom manipulative and cunning.

On Thursday, Bloom told the jury his life “has been one disappointment after another.”

“My parents divorced when I was 7 years old . . . I never got the love or affection from my parents.” Bloom said his abusive father “deserved to be killed.”

As his first witness, he called Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Michael R. Hoff, who presided over the early phases of Bloom’s retrial. “During the time I was in your courtroom . . . did I appear to you to be crazy?” Bloom asked.

After a pause, Hoff said no.