Tag: RFK ASSASSINATION

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To our readers:

Sirhan’s case for parole has been decided in his favor—on the 16^th try. If the entire parole board agrees with the original decision, then the case will be passed up to Governor Gavin Newsom. Please write him letters, in any way possible, and accent the following points:

1. The Parole Board has spoken after a review of Sirhan’s case.
2. Newsom’s decision should be made on the merits and legal doctrine, not on an angry outcry for vengeance.
3. Sirhan has been through 16 parole hearings and at the 15^th one, Paul Schrade, a victim in the Ambassador Hotel’s pantry that night, asked for his release.
4. George Gascon, LA’s progressive prosecutor—who Newsom knows from San Francisco—did not send anyone to argue to the board that Sirhan be kept in prison.
5. Sirhan has served a much longer time in prison, 53 years, than others who have been charged with the same crime. This indicates the reason to keep him behind bars is more political than legal.
6. Sirhan has been a model prisoner. This should be a part of the governor’s decision, since it indicates he is not a danger to society.
7. The law has been changed in regards to prisoners who committed a crime at a young age. The Board said this was a factor in their decision. It should also measure into the governor’s.
8. Finally, at 77, Sirhan qualifies for elderly parole. He has also had his life endangered more than once while in prison, the last time being in 2019. (Click here for details)

There are four ways to contact the governor: snail mail, fax, phone, and email. Click to this page for how to do all four:

Contact the Governor

Try and do this ASAP. There will be a lot of pressure on Newsom to decline the board decision. We need to act fast. This is what KennedysAndKing is all about.

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Update:

If you have sent a letter and still have a copy on your computer, please email a copy to contact@kennedysandking.com with your name on it. If you have not sent the letter yet, please send us a copy, before you snail mail it. Thanks. This is important. We would not ask you if it wasn’t.

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We now have a definite date for Sirhan Sirhan’s upcoming parole hearing. As we all know, the plague of CV–19 has set back trials and hearings throughout the country (e.g. the trial of the notorious millionaire Robert Durst in Los Angeles).

The revised date for Sirhan’s parole hearing is August 27^th, about three months from now, which gives our readers that much longer to compose letters asking for Sirhan to be properly released. This particular hearing should have another advantage to it. The new LA District Attorney, George Gascon, has a different policy than most of his predecessors concerning parole hearings.

Gascon will not allow his assistant DA’s to attend these hearings. That, in itself, is a reversal of a longtime procedure, because almost inevitably, these deputies would argue that the criminal should not be paroled. To his credit, Gascon’s policy has broken with this concept. (Click here for details) As he has said, that former policy assumed the individual had not evolved. Under Gascon’s policy, he will support parole for low or moderate risk cases, which the record says Sirhan certainly was and is.

Due to what former California Attorney General, and now Vice President, Kamala Harris did with the Sirhan case, he probably will not get a new trial. The ambitious Harris understood that if this new trial was granted, Sirhan would likely go free. (Click here for details) She did not want that to occur on her watch.

As Lisa Pease proves in her milestone book on the RFK case, A Lie too Big to Fail, Sirhan was convicted because his defense team was both incompetent and compromised. The case of the murder of Robert Kennedy is even more obviously a conspiracy than the case of John F. Kennedy. As anyone who reads Pease’s book will understand, not only did Sirhan not shoot Bobby Kennedy, he could not have done so. Not with the facts of Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy on the table and demonstrated in court, which they were not. (See Pease, pp. 65–69, 255–91)

Because of the inept performance by Sirhan’s defense team, Sirhan was convicted. And the defendant has been in prison since 1969, a total of about 52 years. The reason for this updated notice is that Sirhan has a new attorney and part of her specialty is these types of hearings. His current attorney, Angela Berry, is requesting that interested parties write the parole board.

But, and this is important, do not focus on the facts of the case in order to prove his innocence. I have done so ever so slightly here only to try and motivate the reader into writing on his behalf. Berry suggests instead that the writer of the letter accent things like Sirhan’s age, his spotless record in prison, the fact that the prisons are overcrowded, and that he is not a threat to anyone.

In fact, he once said that if he ever got out, he would like to live a quiet life somewhere and help people if he could. (William Klaber and Philip Melanson, Shadow Play, p. 318) One might also add that Sirhan has served a much longer time than others convicted of homicide.

Also, there is a new law in effect (see pages 7 and 9 of Youth Offender Parole here). This says that people under age 26 at the time of the crime—Sirhan was 24—should have their youth weighed higher in the parole decision. Berry adds that a key factor in a parole hearing can be public opinion. Hence, this appeal for you to write. That, plus Gascon’s new policy, could be influential in the outcome.

Letters should be mailed to:

State of California

Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, Board of Parole

Post Office Box 4036

Sacramento CA 95812-4936

Open with “Dear Parole Board” and ask them to parole Sirhan in accordance with the fact that he has served his time. Under normal conditions, being a model prisoner, Sirhan likely would have been released in 1985. (Shane O’Sullivan, Who Killed Bobby?, p. 3)

Please do this ASAP. You will get a note in reply to certify your letter has arrived.

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Anyone who knows anything about the assassination of Robert Kennedy should understand that his assassination is in some ways even more clearly a conspiracy than the murder of President Kennedy. The true facts of the case were covered up by the local authorities, and the defense team was—to put it mildly—rather less than zealous in their obligations to their client, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. The best analysis of Sirhan’s phony trial is in Lisa Pease’s book A Lie Too Big to Fail. (See pp. 135–95) And in this author’s opinion, that is the best, most comprehensive book we have on the Bobby Kennedy case.

As both Lisa Pease and the late Philip Melanson have noted, Sirhan’s defense was so inept—as we shall see, it may have been compromised—that they let the prosecution’s psychiatrist talk directly to their client. This is something he was not supposed to do and it would appear to be an ethical violation by Sirhan’s lead lawyer, Grant Cooper. What makes this more than just odd is that, as Pease notes, Cooper was accused of bribing a court clerk in order to pilfer grand jury transcripts and then lying to a judge about it. His investigation for these violations was going on at the time of Sirhan’s trial. (See Pease’s earlier article, “Rubik’s Cube”, Probe Magazine, Volume 5 Number 4)

It then gets even more curious. After his inept defense of Sirhan, Cooper got off with a slap on the wrist for this offense: he was fined a thousand dollars. The late Larry Teeter, one of Sirhan’s attorneys, thought the light penalty for the serious violations was a result of Cooper’s rather dubious performance for Sirhan. Teeter voiced this opinion with the author in an in-person interview in late 2002.

Perhaps that is one way to explain the direct interviews that the prosecution’s Seymour Pollack had with Sirhan. Pollack was a forensic psychiatrist from USC employed by the prosecution. That Cooper allowed this to occur was so unethical that defense assistant and later author on the RFK case, Robert Blair Kaiser, tried to say it did not happen. (Kaiser, RFK Must Die!, p. 151) But it did and the forensic psychiatrist spent hours with Sirhan trying to supply him with a motive for why he really killed Bobby Kennedy. What was that motive? Because he was standing up for the Arabs against Israel. (Philip Melanson, The Robert Kennedy Assassination, p. 152) In fact, Pollack went as far as to say that it would be better for his case if he did say this, than to say that he did not really know what his motive was. What is even more remarkable about this is that Cooper’s own psychiatrist, Bernard Diamond, ended up joining Pollack in trying to get Sirhan to say this. In fact, Diamond did this when he had Sirhan under hypnosis. (Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail, pp. 417–18)

One of the most oft repeated external indications of this motive was one that was used not just by the prosecution, but again, by the defense. And not just Sirhan’s original team, but later lawyers like Luke McKissack. It consisted of an entry in Sirhan’s notebooks which contained a notation on May 18, 1968, with the refrain “RFK must die”. The original story made up by the prosecution was that Sirhan saw a TV special that day in which candidate Kennedy endorsed a sale of fighter aircraft to Israel made by President Johnson. There is a very large problem with this allegedly incriminating scenario. The TV special did not air on May 18^th, but on May 20^th. (Philip Melanson and William Klaber, Shadow Play, pp. 136–37). Further, there was no mention of the weapons sale in the program. (ibid) Yet, the tall tale has grown so long, that years later Kennedy was supposed to be endorsing the deal in the program while in a temple wearing a yarmulke. This was a myth meant to supply Sirhan with some kind of motive, since initially he said he did not recall the circumstances of the shooting and did not know why he performed the act.

As anyone who has read Pease’s book understands, not only did Sirhan not shoot Bobby Kennedy, he could not have shot the senator. It is simply a physical impossibility in light of Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy. (See Pease, pp. 65–69; pp. 255–91) All the indications are that Sirhan was under post hypnotic suggestion at the time of the shooting and, further, that he was being manipulated by a young, attractive woman in a polka-dot dress. This woman actually led Sirhan into the pantry after they had drank coffee together. And they were standing next to each other in the pantry while Kennedy was walking through. (Pease, p. 50) She was one of the very few people who actually ran out of the pantry area after the shooting.

That young woman has all the indications of being the same person who Sandy Serrano saw after the shooting. Serrano was a Kennedy worker, who was standing outside the Ambassador Hotel to get some fresh air. The young lady ran down the stairs to the hotel and she yelled, “We’ve shot him! We’ve shot him!” When Serrano asked who she shot, the reply was, “We’ve shot Senator Kennedy.” When newsman Sander Vanocur interviewed Serrano live on national television, he had delayed reaction to what Serrano said. After a delay, he went back and asked, “Did this young lady say ‘we’?” Serrano replied in the affirmative. (Pease, pp. 35–36)

Serrano never testified at Sirhan’s trial. Yet, her testimony clearly denotes some kind of a conspiracy. Combined with the incompatible forensics of the case, Sirhan should have been acquitted. As Pease demonstrates, for many, many reasons, this did not happen. Between the efforts of the LAPD to cover up the case, the incompetence—or worse—of Sirhan’s attorneys, and a rather sickening performance by the media, Sirhan was convicted. But it’s actually worse than that, because of the three monumental cases of the sixties—the murders of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy—that one became known as the “open and shut case”. In other words, you could not even ask any questions about it. When, as I noted earlier, it is the one in which the facts of the case most easily disprove the guilty verdict.

Unfortunately for both Sirhan and justice, the defendant has been in prison since 1969, a total of over 51 years. The reason for this notice is that Sirhan has a new parole hearing that is coming up on March 21^st. His current attorney, Angela Berry, is requesting that interested parties write the parole board.

But, and this is important, do not focus on the facts of the case in order to prove his innocence. I have done so here only to try and motivate the reader into writing on his behalf. She suggests instead that the writer of the letter accent things like Sirhan’s age, his spotless record in prison, the fact that the prisons are overcrowded and he is not a threat to anyone.

In fact, he once said that if he ever got out, he would like to live a quiet life somewhere and help people if he could. (Klaber and Melanson, p. 318) One might also add that Sirhan has served a much longer time than others convicted of homicide.

Also, there is a new law (see pages 7 and 9 of Youth Offender Parole, prison.law.com) that says people under age 26 at the time of the crime—Sirhan was 24—should have their youth weighed higher in the parole decision. A key factor in a parole hearing can be public opinion. Hence this appeal for you to write.

Letters should be mailed to:

State of California Department of Rehabilitation and Correction
Board of Parole
P. O. 4036
Sacramento, CA 95812-4936

Open with “Dear Parole Board:” and ask them to parole Sirhan in accordance with the fact that he has served his time. Under normal conditions, being a model prisoner, Sirhan likely would have been released in 1985. (Shane O’Sullivan, Who Killed Bobby? p. 3)

Thanks in advance. This kind of activism is what this site is about.