Actor Robert Blake Acquitted in Shooting Death of His Wife

Prosecutors "couldn't put the gun in his hand," said jury foreman Thomas Nicholson. "I felt the primary thing from what I saw was that the circumstantial evidence was flimsy."

Blake, 71, who would have faced life in prison if convicted, shook from apparent emotion when the verdict was read by the clerk for Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Darlene E. Schempp.

The jury of seven men and five women deliberated for nine days in a Van Nuys courthouse before acquitting Blake of charges that he had killed Bonny Lee Bakley, 44. The mother of four, Bakley was shot as she sat in Blake's car on May 4, 2001, near Vitello's, the Studio City restaurant where the couple had just had dinner.

The jury also found Blake -- the star of the 1970s detective series "Baretta" -- not guilty of soliciting a stuntman, Gary McLarty, to kill Bakley. They deadlocked 11 to 1 on a charge that Blake had solicited a second stuntman, Ronald Hambleton. After the verdict, the judge dismissed that charge "in the interest of justice."

The jurors, who ranged in age from 24 to 78, included an air-conditioning technician, a legal secretary, a retired librarian and a postal worker. They cited concerns about the circumstantial nature of the case against Blake, in which prosecutors were never able to link him to the murder weapon or produce a witness who could place him at the scene at the time of the murder.

"As things progressed, it just turned out there were a lot of gaps," said Michael Pollack, 47, an alternate juror who said that when the trial began, he believed Blake didn't stand a chance of acquittal.

In the absence of direct evidence, jurors were asked to believe testimony from the stuntmen, who testified that Blake had asked them to kill Bakley two months before she was slain. But Blake's attorney, M. Gerald Schwartzbach, was able to undermine their credibility by presenting evidence that their admitted use of cocaine and methamphetamine could have caused them to be delusional.

"I didn't believe either one of them," said Charles Safko, a 50-year-old truck driver from Winnetka. "I thought they were both so full of it, it was unbelievable."