Sirhan Asks U.S. Court to Review Conviction

A day after being turned down by the California Supreme Court, Sirhan Sirhan filed a petition in Los Angeles federal court Thursday challenging his conviction in the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

Sirhan contends that Los Angeles police and prosecutors altered, destroyed and suppressed evidence that would have cleared him of the crime.

Among other contentions, his habeas corpus petition says that police substituted a fake bullet for the one recovered from Kennedy’s neck and that prosecutors covered up evidence that a second gunman was involved.

Evidence of a second gunman was lost forever, he says, when police destroyed ceiling panels and a door frame that may have been hit by gunfire.

Sirhan also contends that he was poorly represented at his trial because his lawyer, the late Grant Cooper, refused to investigate the possibility that he was hypnotically programmed to kill Kennedy without being able to recall the event afterward.

Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968, minutes after claiming victory in California’s Democratic presidential primary. Sirhan, a Palestinian immigrant, was wrestled to the ground with a gun in his hand.

At his trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court, he was portrayed as a rabid anti-Zionist who killed Kennedy because the Democratic senator from New York was an outspoken supporter of Israel.

Sirhan, now 57 and housed at Corcoran State Prison, maintains he is innocent and suffers from amnesia about all events on the night of Kennedy’s murder. He has been denied parole repeatedly.

On Wednesday, the state Supreme Court refused to review his conviction, declaring in a one-sentence statement that his petition was without merit and untimely.

It took the court three years to act, an unprecedented delay, according to Sirhan’s lawyer, Lawrence Teeter of Los Angeles. The vote was 6 to 0, with Chief Justice Ronald George abstaining. In the 1970s, George was a deputy state attorney general and defended Sirhan’s conviction during an earlier appeal.

Teeter, who has represented Sirhan since 1994, said Thursday that the Supreme Court’s refusal “does not constitute the last word on this case.”

He expressed confidence that the federal court will grant Sirhan a new trial.

“Police misconduct of the type which the Rampart scandal has recently exposed pervades every aspect of the Sirhan case on a scale that is far more sinister than anything which that scandal has brought to light,” he said.