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CNN Live Sunday

Blake Expected to Be Formally Charged Tomorrow

Aired April 21, 2002 - 18:16   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL LIN, CNN ANCHOR: Los Angeles is gearing up for another high profile murder case involving a celebrity suspect. Actor Robert Blake is expected to appear in court tomorrow to be formally charged for the murder of his wife, Bonnie Lee Bakley. CNN's Thelma Gutierrez examines the strategy behind this case.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

THELMA GUTIERREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): May 4, 2001, 44-year-old Bonnie Lee Bakley is shot and killed. All eyes turn to husband Robert Blake.

HARLAND BRAUN, ATTORNEY FOR BLAKE: The more they investigate, they'll find out he didn't do it.

GUTIERREZ: The very next day, prominent criminal attorney Harland Braun stands before cameras and sets the potential defense strategy in motion.

BRAUN: She's been involved in these kind of con schemes where you milk lonely men out of money. She obviously was out to get pregnant by a celebrity. She's been running a 25-year con game. We suspect that someone from her past was after her.

IRWIN CHEMERINSKY, USC LAW PROFESSOR: Harland Braun has an excellent reputation as a defense attorney and I believe that what he's doing with the media now is very calculated to keep the public from forming a premature conclusion of Blake's guilt.

GUTIERREZ: USC law professor Irwin Chemerinsky.

CHEMERINSKY: Harland Braun stood in front of this house from the very beginning to help put the victim on trial. Harland Braun was saying, this is a woman who trapped Robert Blake into marrying her. It's a woman with a very questionable past. This is Harland Braun's way of trying to get the public, the future jury pool, to have reasonable doubt about who killed Bonnie Bakley.

GUTIERREZ: Braun took his theories to the media.

BRAUN: She had such a strange business of defrauding and cheating men out of money for sexual reasons and romantic reasons that there could be any number of people out there would have a motive to kill her. GUTIERREZ: To further his case, Braun released audio tapes of some of Bakley's private phone conversations.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BONNIE LEE BAKLEY: It's my business and if I want to, you know, like fool guys in the mail and say that I'm somebody else, you know, what's the difference.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CHEMERINSKY: There's no doubt that a key part of Braun's strategy now is to try to show that Bakley was a person with a very questionable past, so there were many people with the motive to kill her. Leaking the tapes was part of that.

GUTIERREZ: Bakley's sibling publicly accused the actor of being responsible for her death.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm 99.9 percent sure it was him.

MARGERRY BAKLEY, BONNIE LEE'S SISTER: There was nobody else who wanted to kill her but Mr. Blake and he actually told her, I'm Bobbie Blake and I can get away with killing you and I will.

GUTIERREZ: Questionable as Bakley's past may be, Chemerinsky says besmirching the victim can sometimes backfire.

CHEMERINSKY: There is always a danger in putting the victim in a murder case on trial. On the one hand, this may be the way here of raising reasonable doubt, arguing that there are other people who had the motive to kill.

On the other hand, there is a dead woman and there's a real danger that the jury might sympathize with the victim and turn against the defendant and defense counsel who besmirched her reputation.

GUTIERREZ: Now that Blake has been arrested for murder, Braun will not say what his defense strategy will be. He says he must review some 35,000 pages of prosecution documents.

Thelma Gutierrez, CNN, Los Angeles.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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