Sirhan Attorney Assails Parole Unit, Asks New Hearing

The attorney for convicted assassin Sirhan B. Sirhan castigated members of a three-member state parole panel Tuesday as frivolous and prejudiced and called for a new hearing to decide whether his client should be paroled for the 1968 murder of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

Attorney Luke McKissack told reporters at a press conference that he planned to mail Ron Koenig, chairman of the Board of Prison Terms, a 20-page petition requesting a meeting of the full nine-member Board of Prison Terms to reconsider a parole for Sirhan.

Three members of the board, meeting at the California Correctional Training Facility at Soledad, on June 26, rejected Sirhan’s tearful bid for freedom after about three minutes of deliberations. It was the seventh parole hearing for Sirhan.

“The deliberations of the June, 1985, panel as measured by their length, attitude of frivolity, lack of deliberation, biased and irrational response and followed up by telling the press brazen lies on national television, remove all doubt that minimally this panel was prejudiced against Sirhan and failed to perform their serious responsibilities in a lawful manner,” McKissack said.

Reporters who had viewed the hearing on Sirhan’s parole on closed-circuit television inadvertently heard the brief deliberations that followed because someone apparently had forgotten to turn off the microphone.

McKissack played a partial, electronically enhanced tape of the panel’s discussion and gave reporters a transcript he had prepared that contained both quotes from panel members and parenthetical explanations by McKissack.

The transcript picks up after Sirhan had concluded his plea for parole. Chairman Rudolph Castro, board member Raymond Jaurequi and speakers identified only as “voices” are reported to have said:

Castro: For the record the time is 2:40. Prisoner will leave first.

(Pause, footsteps, papers being shuffled.)

You’re all excused.

(Everybody leaves the deliberation room except the three panel members and conceivably the board attorney. There is unintelligible conversation and horseplay.)

Jaurequi: Is it all right if I kiss you on the forehead? (Interrupted at the end by someone.)

Voice: (Spanish vulgarity for sexual intercourse.)

Voice: (Inaudible words) somebody kissing him in the bucket.

Voice: He kissed you, why can’t I?

Castro: (Spanish vulgarity.)

Jaurequi: (Spanish vulgarity.) Get the bum to do it.

Castro: (Spanish vulgarity.)

Jaurequi: (Spanish vulgarity.) He kissed you in the elevator.

According to McKissack, Castro, Jaurequi and Joseph Aceto had discussed the Sirhan hearing for only a minute and 40 seconds when Castro enumerated the reasons for denying Sirhan a parole.

“Those are the three reasons: the lack of sufficient programming, the crime itself, the need for in-depth diagnostic evaluation,” the transcript quoted Castro as saying. “Agree?”

Minutes later, after further discussion of the Sirhan parole request, the panel members were heard discussing whether the microphone was still on. A voice said, “Let’s make sure the sound is off.”

“Oh, hey, that is very important,” Castro said. Another voice said, “Terrific.” There was laughter and a voice said, “The whole world will know.”

Length of Deliberations

Meeting with reporters after the board reached its decision on Sirhan, Castro estimated that the deliberations had lasted about 45 minutes, but he fell silent and declined to answer further questions “on advice of counsel” after reporters told him that they had overheard discussions that had taken about three minutes.

In his letter to Koenig, McKissack said no legislative body can enact a meaningful statute spelling out how long a jury or parole panel should deliberate, but he maintained that what happened to Sirhan was “clearly beyond the pale.”

“To me, this is the first case I know in American jurisprudence where we have recordation of the deliberations of a panel and where we hear them laughing like hyenas, deciding the case in less than three minutes, speaking of . . . ‘putting his ass on the mainline and keeping him there as long as possible,’ ” McKissack told reporters.

Sirhan had requested a transfer from Soledad, where he has been held for 10 years, to the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo. The parole panel approved the transfer, but Jaurequi was quoted on McKissack’s transcript as suggesting that prison officials should “try him out in the main general population and keep his ass down there if you can.”

Commenting on Jauregui’s remark, McKissack said, “I think it’s just more than a joke. . . . Basically it’s a sentence of death. . . . Every custodial person I’ve talked to has said he (Sirhan) would not be safe in the mainline.”

Grounds Disputed

After disputing each of Castro’s grounds for denying Sirhan a parole, McKissack said that failure to hold a new hearing for his client will “cast a blight” on the principle of equal justice under the law.

Attempts by The Times to reach the parole panelists were unsuccessful, but William Elliott, executive officer of the Board of Prison Terms, said in a telephone interview from Sacramento that his office has reviewed the tape of the deliberations.

“At this point, we don’t see any basis for considering a hearing,” Elliott said. “There’s nothing that has been presented to us up until this time that warrants for us to schedule Mr. Sirhan for another hearing. We will certainly look at Mr. McKissack’s petition and evaluate the issues that he raises.”

Elliott said the frivolity that McKissack referred to was “just idle talk during a recess in the hearing room.”

Easing of Tensions

“It had nothing to do with Mr. Sirhan,” he said. “The panel had been locked up in the hearing room most of the day. During the recess, there was an easing of tensions, but when they went back to deliberations it was in a very serious and businesslike vein.”

The lawyer also told reporters he had prepared a letter to Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy requesting a statement from the Kennedy family that all the Kennedys seek in the Sirhan case is “basic fundamental justice.”

The June meeting at Soledad was the second since a 1984 release date for the 41-year-old native of Jordan was canceled three years ago. Sirhan must wait two more years for another bid for parole unless his attorney wins a new hearing through the administrative process or eventually succeeds in getting a court to act on Sirhan’s behalf.