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Lawyer Vows to 'Wipe Smile Off' Robert Blake's Face
Actor Robert Blake reacted with joy when the jury returned with its verdict earlier this week.
A day after actor Robert Blake celebrated his acquittal on charges of murdering his wife, a lawyer for the victim's family said on Thursday he would ''wipe that smile off his face'' in a civil case.
Blake, 71, held a jubilant news conference after being found not guilty on Wednesday in the May 2001 shooting death of his estranged wife of six months, Bonny Lee Bakley.
The star of the 1970s television detective show ''Baretta'' was also acquitted of soliciting a former stuntman to murder Bakley, and the jury deadlocked 11-1 in favor of finding him not guilty of asking a second stuntman to kill her.
But the verdicts did not end Blake's legal saga. He is also the subject of a wrongful death civil lawsuit brought by Bakley's family, which was held over until the conclusion of the three-month criminal trial.
''I'm going to wipe that smile off his face,'' Eric Dubin, the lawyer for Bakley's family, told CNN on Thursday.
Dubin said the family felt Bakley, portrayed in court as a star-struck grifter who ran a mail-order sex business, had been murdered twice -- ''once in the car and once on the stand.''
Blake was charged with fatally shooting Bakley, 44, in his car outside a Los Angeles-area restaurant. The evidence was largely circumstantial, based on the testimony of the two stuntmen whom jurors said they found unreliable.
Dubin said he planned to take testimony for the civil case from Blake within two weeks and have him back in court in July. In civil cases, a verdict is based on the ''preponderance of evidence'' and the jury's verdict does not have to be unanimous -- a lower standard of proof than a criminal trial where a case has to be proved beyond reasonable doubt.
Bakley's adult daughter, Holly Gawron, expressed little bitterness over the outcome, telling the NBC Today show that ''you really need physical evidence to win a case like that.''
''Plenty of people were telling me not to expect anything, and from the beginning, I know he (Blake) was telling people that he was going to get away with it. So I've always had my doubts that he would be convicted,'' Gawron said.
Blake, who shook with emotion when the verdict was read, said after the trial that he planned to ''go out and do a little cowboying'' and celebrate his freedom with a road trip.
Source: AP