Court Bears Witness to Comic Relief

Most comedians wouldn’t attempt to conduct a cross-examination any more than most lawyers would try to headline in a comedy club.

And though no one will mistake the Van Nuys courtroom where jurors are considering whether actor Robert Blake killed his wife for the Laugh Factory, both sides have exploited humor as a tool for making their case.

Amid gruesome testimony on blood-spatter patterns and ballistics, defense attorney M. Gerald Schwartzbach and prosecutor Shellie L. Samuels have waxed comedic on a variety of subjects, including the pitfalls of modern marriage and musings on why some people claim they buy Playboy magazine for the articles.

Moments of levity serve an important purpose within the staid confines of the courtroom by relieving tension, putting witnesses at ease and allowing lawyers to connect with a jury, according to attorneys and legal scholars.

“Humor is not going to change a case,” said San Diego criminal defense attorney Charles Seville, a co-author of two books on courtroom humor.

But if you can make the jury laugh, Seville said, “you are going to be more persuasive.”

Humor can also hammer home a point or deflect an opponent’s argument.

Schwartzbach was sparring recently with an expert on crime scene reconstruction who had studied the trajectories of the bullets that struck and killed Blake’s wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, in a parked car in Studio City four years ago.

It was important for Schwartzbach to undermine the testimony. He wanted jurors to conclude that there was no reliable way the height of the killer could be deduced.

With the timing of a stand-up comic, Schwartzbach asked whether jurors could conclude that Bakley could have been shot by either “Gary Coleman or Shaquille O’Neal.”

The lawyers aren’t the only courtroom cutups.

UCLA professor Ronald Siegel is an expert on the sustained use of hard-core drugs, which several key witnesses for the prosecution admitted using. He drew laughs when he described some of the research on which his credentials are based: tending a cage with crack-smoking monkeys in a basement on campus.

“I crawled into the cage with the monkeys and played monkey to make sure that the smoking tube was working,” Siegel said. “I didn’t become a crazy monkey from any of that. I do like bananas.”

He also drew incredulous glances from several jurors when he spoke of “dweefs,” tiny, mischievous creatures who hide under the furniture and are “common” drug-induced hallucinations.

Street hoodlum-turned-preacher Frank Minucci, who was called to the stand to back up claims from other witnesses that Blake wanted Bakley dead, delivered testimony in a rough New Jersey accent that came across as part sketch comedy, part “Sopranos” episode.

Minucci testified that he had been propositioned by a woman Blake had asked him to intimidate.

Asked by Samuels to elaborate, Minucci paused and said she had asked to see his “whose-a-what’s-it.”

Even Blake, whose tears both in and out of court have been the subject of much debate, laughed during a reference to his lack of home-decorating skills, and again when Schwartzbach described his purple-and-gold van as “hideous.”

In the Blake trial, each attorney has displayed a distinctive style of humor while vying for the hearts and minds of the jury.

Schwartzbach, soft-spoken and formal in ever-present bow ties, tends toward wry and self-deprecating one-liners.

“Stipulate to being married,” the Mill Valley, Calif., lawyer interjected when a witness testified she had ignored her husband at dinner at Vitello’s, the Studio City restaurant where Bakley and Blake had dined immediately before Bakley was slain.

Samuels, a hard-nosed veteran Van Nuys prosecutor who has won 48 out of 49 murder cases, has been particularly caustic off-the-cuff.

As Schwartzbach was directing jurors to look at a blowup of a headline on the cover of a Playboy magazine, Samuels quipped that she was surprised the attorney hadn’t focused on the super-sized image of the scantily clad woman.

At one point in the trial, which began in December, retired Hollywood stuntman Roy “Snuffy” Harrison, who said Blake had asked him to kill Bakley, was being pressed by Samuels on a bit of testimony that seemed to suffer from faulty memory. She handed him a transcript of his earlier testimony and asked him to refer to it, as is common in criminal trials:

Harrison: “I fall on my head for 30 years, and you want me to read this?”

Samuels: “Whose choice was it to fall on his head for 30 years?”

Harrison: “My wife’s.”

Santa Clara University School of Law professor Gerald Uelman, a member of the O.J. Simpson defense team, said many lawyers avoid humor, fearing it could appear rehearsed, or simply fall flat.

In the Blake trial, both lawyers have steered clear of mean-spirited, derisive and personal exchanges that can turn off a jury or earn a rebuke from the judge.

“If you’re ridiculing somebody, the jury generally doesn’t like to see that,” said Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a former federal prosecutor. “Jurors are more likely to identify with witnesses, not with the judge, lawyers or the defendant.”

Even Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Darlene E. Schempp, presiding over the trial, has had her moments of levity.

When one criminalist from the Los Angeles Police Department wrapped up lengthy testimony about the not-very-scintillating science of gunshot residue, Schempp, to the relief of others, told him to “please leave quickly.”

The quip demonstrated another important aspect of courtroom humor, Levenson said. “The best humor reflects what people are thinking.

“If your guy is guilty, the jury is not going to acquit or convict a defendant just because you’re entertaining,” Levenson said. “There is a difference between being a lawyer and being a comedian.”

Eric Dubin, an attorney who has attended almost every day of the trial on behalf of Bakley’s four children, said he hasn’t been offended by the lighter moments. “Cracking jokes during a jury trial is like kissing a girl: You need both timing and permission.”