Prison Board Gives Sirhan New Parole Hearing

Reversing itself, the state Board of Prison Terms announced on Tuesday that Sirhan B. Sirhan, the assassin of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, has been granted a new parole hearing after an administrative appeal by his lawyer.

The new hearing will probably be held in March, parole board officials said.

The panel’s unanimous decision on Monday to give Sirhan an early bid for parolewas made on a motion by Rudolph Castro, a parole board member who was accused of lying to reporters on the length of the deliberations when the board turned down Sirhan’s appeal for freedom last June 26.

Castro, who had chaired the three-member panel that rejected Sirhan’s seventh bid for parole from Soledad State Prison, told reporters at the time that the closed-door deliberations at the Northern California penal facility had taken 45 minutes.

But reporters, who had been covering the hearing from a separate room via closed-circuit television, disputed how long the discussion had taken. They told Castro that they had overheard the executive session deliberations, punctuated with laughter and expletives, when a microphone was inadvertently left on.

When told by reporters that according to their calculations the hearing had lasted only about three minutes, Castro declined to comment.

Sirhan’s lawyer, Luke McKissack, was outraged and declared that Castro had not told the truth. The attorney, who had analyzed a tape recording of the session, charged at an August news conference that in fact the deliberations lasted only one minute and 40 seconds.

But on Tuesday, David E. Brown, the parole board’s legal counsel who also attended the June 26 parole hearing, said the proceeding actually lasted “approximately 45 minutes.”

The problem at the time, Brown said in a telephone interview from the board’s Sacramento office, was that “the reporters did not hear the total deliberations. They heard only three minutes.”

Castro could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

In any case, Brown said that Monday’s decision was not linked to the controversy over the open microphone.

Instead, he said, the board did not follow a recent decision by the California Supreme Court, which held that when the parole board postpones a new hearing for two years, as it did in Sirhan’s case last June, board members must specifically spell out the reasons for the delay.

At the time, board members said they questioned the sincerity of Sirhan’s expressions of remorse and doubted his “partial amnesia” about the assassination. They did not delineate why he could not come back for a parole hearing until 1987.

The board’s decision Monday came on an 8-to-0 vote with one member absent, Brown said. Sirhan, 41, fatally shot Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, after the New York senator won the California Democratic presidential primary.

Convicted of first-degree murder in 1969 and sentenced to death, Sirhan’s penalty was reduced in 1972 to life in prison when the state Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional. He was then given a Sept. 1, 1984, release date--which was revoked in May, 1981.

Sirhan, a Jordanian immigrant, has served the last 10 1/2 years of his life sentence in Soledad’s maximum security section.

“Sirhan said (the board’s decision) was the only good Christmas present I’ve had in over 17 years,” McKissack said Tuesday. “He said he was very grateful to the media for spotlighting his case and paying attention to it. He said if the media was not there (last June) he would not have received this result.”

The Monday decision by the parole board came after McKissack filed an appeal with prison officials on Nov. 23.

McKissack said his appeal turned on “the three-minute or less deliberation in a (complicated) case, and done in an atmosphere of frivolity. It was not the kind of hearing that Sirhan should receive under the American system of justice.”