Post by Michael Capasse on Aug 28, 2021 4:14:43 GMT -5
August 27, 2021
Sirhan Sirhan was granted parole today - CA prosecutors said they would not challenge the request.
The decision goes to a Parole Review for 90 days and next to CA Gov Newsom who has 30 days after that to grant or deny it.
This is a "crack in the ice" that could lead to a re-examination into the murder of Pres. John F. Kennedy.
The below Washington Post article from 2018 gives a good overview into the cause for conspiracy in the RFK case.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
WASHINGTON POST
June 5, 2018 | By Tom Jackman
www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2018/06/05/did-l-a-police-and-prosecutors-bungle-the-bobby-kennedy-assassination/
LOS ANGELES — For six years after he was shot and wounded while walking behind Robert F. Kennedy in the
Ambassador Hotel in June 1968, Paul Schrade mourned the loss of his friend and stayed out of the public eye. But beginning with a news conference in 1974,
Schrade has demanded answers to the question of whether a second gunman — and not Sirhan Sirhan — killed Kennedy.
Soon after Sirhan’s trial ended with his first-degree-murder conviction in April 1969, journalists noted that Kennedy had been shot in the
back of the head at point-blank range, but witnesses all said Sirhan was standing in front of Kennedy. Bullet holes found in the doors of the
crime scene indicated more shots were fired than could have come from Sirhan’s eight-shot .22-caliber pistol, some witnesses said. Sirhan’s
defense team had not challenged any of the physical evidence at trial.
Fifty years after the assassination, Schrade is still pushing for a new investigation.” I’m interested in finding out how the prosecutor
convicted Sirhan with no evidence, knowing there was a second gunman,” Schrade said. “The truth is not known yet about who killed Robert Kennedy.”
Schrade, now 93, believes Sirhan wounded him and four other people but did not fire the fatal shot into Kennedy.
Schrade has been supported in his calls for a new investigation into the case by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who met with Sirhan in prison last
December and told The Washington Post that “the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father.” Now Robert Kennedy’s daughter
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend has joined Schrade and her brother.
“Bobby makes a compelling case,” the former Maryland lieutenant governor told The Post. “I think it should be reopened.”
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend speaks to members of the media in 2016 at an event in Boston announcing the naming of a Navy ship in honor of her father,
Robert F. Kennedy. Townsend says she thinks the investigation into her father’s assassination should be reopened.
Three other Kennedy children — former Congressman Joe Kennedy, activist Kerry Kennedy and filmmaker Rory Kennedy —
have said they do not think the case should be reopened. Ethel Kennedy, the senator’s widow and now 90, has not commented.
Schrade and a host of authors and researchers point to a number of apparent missteps by the Los Angeles police and prosecutors
in focusing solely on Sirhan, while suppressing evidence of a second shooter, such as:
• Prosecutors withheld the autopsy report from Sirhan’s defense lawyers until six weeks into the trial, showing that Kennedy had been
shot at point-blank range from behind. Five other people in the hotel pantry standing behind Kennedy, including Schrade, were hit by bullets
fired from in front of them.
• Police failed to investigate an armed private-security guard who was walking behind Kennedy at precisely the angle where the fatal shots to
Kennedy’s head and back were fired. He has consistently denied firing his weapon but has told conflicting stories over the years.
• Police officers and FBI agents identified apparent bullet holes in two door frames of the pantry, indicating more than eight shots were fired.
But no evidence of those holes was presented at trial, and the Los Angeles police destroyed the door frames shortly after the trial.
• The lead crime-scene investigator testified at trial that bullets from the wounded victims matched a bullet from Kennedy, but presented no photos
or evidence to support that. When two ballistics experts examined the bullets after the trial, they found the bullets didn’t match.
Subsequent investigations couldn’t match any of the bullets to Sirhan’s gun. The crime-scene investigator was subsequently criticized even by
prosecutors for sloppy work in the case, by a judge for seeming perjury in another high-profile murder, and later suspended by his own police chief.
• Los Angeles police bullied or ignored witnesses whose stories did not match the lone gunman scenario, records show, particularly people
who claimed they saw Sirhan with a dark-haired woman in a white polka-dot dress. Then at trial, prosecutors brought in a blonde-haired woman
with a green polka-dot dress and claimed she was the mysterious woman in question. Sirhan’s lawyers, focusing on a mental health defense,
did not challenge that, either. Los Angeles District Attorney Evelle Younger, seated in the light jacket, introduces his prosecution team for the
murder trial of Sirhan Sirhan in June 1968. In the back row from left, deputy district attorneys Lynn D. Compton, John E. Howard and
David N. Fitts tried the case.
The Los Angeles police have heard all this criticism before, did some reinvestigation in the 1970s that confirmed their own work,
and now consider the case closed. The Los Angeles district attorney’s office referred inquiries to the California attorney general’s office,
which repeatedly defeated Sirhan’s appeals, and which declined to respond beyond court filings. The California and federal courts have
consistently held that Sirhan was guilty of murder, even with new discoveries made in the decades after the early morning of June 5, 1968.
“Considering all of the evidence,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Wistrich wrote in 2013, “old and new, incriminatory and exculpatory,
admissible and inadmissible, the Court cannot say that it is more likely than not that no reasonable juror would have found [Sirhan]
guilty of the assassination of Senator Kennedy beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Lisa Pease, author of a forthcoming book on the investigation’s failures, said: “In ignoring the myriad evidence of conspiracy in this case,
the LAPD and DA’s office created the seventh pantry victim: the truth. We have a guy in prison, provably by the evidence, for a crime he didn’t commit.”
There are facts that are not in dispute, namely that Sirhan had a .22-caliber pistol in the hotel pantry on June 5, 1968, and that he emptied all eight
shots as Kennedy stood in front of him. Two Ambassador Hotel employees, Karl Uecker and Edward Minasian, said repeatedly that Uecker grabbed Sirhan’s
wrist after two shots, slammed it to a table, and that Sirhan continued to fire wildly while being held down but never got close to Kennedy.
Sirhan Sirhan, right, being escorted to court by attorney Russell E. Parsons in June 1968 to face charges in the shooting of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
The defense team did not challenge the police investigation, in part leading to Sirhan’s first-degree-murder conviction.
“I have told police and testified [to the grand jury],” Uecker said in a 1975 affidavit, “that there was a distance of at least one and one-half feet
between the muzzle of Sirhan’s gun and Senator Kennedy’s head. The revolver was directly in front of my nose. … There is no way that the shots described
in the autopsy could have come from Sirhan’s gun. … Sirhan never got close enough to a point-blank shot, never.”
But at trial, neither prosecutors nor Sirhan’s defense team focused on the distance between Kennedy and Sirhan. Though Sirhan and prosecutors reached a
plea deal in January 1969 for Sirhan to admit guilt and receive a life sentence — a deal the judge rejected — and trial began on Jan. 7, records show
prosecutors did not provide coroner Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy report until about Feb. 22. By that time, the defense had already decided to concede
that Sirhan had shot Kennedy and was trying simply to avoid the death penalty by claiming he was mentally ill.
Noguchi found that four shots had been fired at Kennedy from at most three inches away. Three shots appeared to be in contact with Kennedy’s back and shoulder,
based on powder burns to his jacket, Noguchi said, with one shot passing through the jacket’s shoulder pad and not touching Kennedy.
All three were fired sharply upward. The fourth shot was fired into the back of Kennedy’s head from three inches away, Noguchi concluded,
by test-firing a similar gun to determine how much gunpowder sprayed at various distances.
“Thus I have never said,” Noguchi wrote in his autobiography, “that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy.” At a conference last month of RFK
assassination authors, Pittsburgh coroner Cyril Wecht pressed Noguchi as to whether there was a second gunman, but the 91-year-old pathologist said,
“That’s not my duty.” He also told Wecht that defense attorneys never spoke with him before the trial and did not ask him about the muzzle distance at trial.
Los Angeles County Coroner Thomas Noguchi in 1970. His autopsy of Robert F. Kennedy revealed that the senator was shot from the back,
but the report was not provided to Sirhan’s lawyers until six weeks into the trial.
Prosecutors and some authors have theorized that Kennedy turned and raised his arm as the shots began, thus enabling Sirhan to hit him in the back.
The government notes that the jury heard the evidence, convicted Sirhan and sentenced him to death, which was later commuted to a life term.
But there was plenty of evidence the jury never heard. An appeal Sirhan’s current lawyers have pending to the Inter-American Commission on Human
Rights says Sirhan suffered from ineffective assistance from his legal team.
The defense attorneys also went lightly on Los Angeles police criminalist DeWayne Wolfer, who oversaw the crime-scene investigation.
He and Noguchi were both photographed pointing to bullet holes in the pantry, and police removed those door frames. Numerous witnesses, i
ncluding police officers and FBI agents, said the holes were made by bullets. But between the bullets which hit Kennedy and those which hit
Schrade and four others, all the bullets from Sirhan’s gun had been accounted for by Wolfer.
“I’ve inspected quite a few crime scenes in my day,” FBI Special Agent William Bailey told authors William Klaber and Philip Melanson for their book,
“Shadow Play: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy.” “These were clearly bullet holes; the wood around them was freshly broken away and I could see
the base of a bullet in each one.” Many other people saw these holes, reports show.
Sirhan Sirhan was granted parole today - CA prosecutors said they would not challenge the request.
The decision goes to a Parole Review for 90 days and next to CA Gov Newsom who has 30 days after that to grant or deny it.
This is a "crack in the ice" that could lead to a re-examination into the murder of Pres. John F. Kennedy.
The below Washington Post article from 2018 gives a good overview into the cause for conspiracy in the RFK case.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
WASHINGTON POST
June 5, 2018 | By Tom Jackman
www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2018/06/05/did-l-a-police-and-prosecutors-bungle-the-bobby-kennedy-assassination/
LOS ANGELES — For six years after he was shot and wounded while walking behind Robert F. Kennedy in the
Ambassador Hotel in June 1968, Paul Schrade mourned the loss of his friend and stayed out of the public eye. But beginning with a news conference in 1974,
Schrade has demanded answers to the question of whether a second gunman — and not Sirhan Sirhan — killed Kennedy.
Soon after Sirhan’s trial ended with his first-degree-murder conviction in April 1969, journalists noted that Kennedy had been shot in the
back of the head at point-blank range, but witnesses all said Sirhan was standing in front of Kennedy. Bullet holes found in the doors of the
crime scene indicated more shots were fired than could have come from Sirhan’s eight-shot .22-caliber pistol, some witnesses said. Sirhan’s
defense team had not challenged any of the physical evidence at trial.
Fifty years after the assassination, Schrade is still pushing for a new investigation.” I’m interested in finding out how the prosecutor
convicted Sirhan with no evidence, knowing there was a second gunman,” Schrade said. “The truth is not known yet about who killed Robert Kennedy.”
Schrade, now 93, believes Sirhan wounded him and four other people but did not fire the fatal shot into Kennedy.
Schrade has been supported in his calls for a new investigation into the case by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who met with Sirhan in prison last
December and told The Washington Post that “the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father.” Now Robert Kennedy’s daughter
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend has joined Schrade and her brother.
“Bobby makes a compelling case,” the former Maryland lieutenant governor told The Post. “I think it should be reopened.”
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend speaks to members of the media in 2016 at an event in Boston announcing the naming of a Navy ship in honor of her father,
Robert F. Kennedy. Townsend says she thinks the investigation into her father’s assassination should be reopened.
Three other Kennedy children — former Congressman Joe Kennedy, activist Kerry Kennedy and filmmaker Rory Kennedy —
have said they do not think the case should be reopened. Ethel Kennedy, the senator’s widow and now 90, has not commented.
Schrade and a host of authors and researchers point to a number of apparent missteps by the Los Angeles police and prosecutors
in focusing solely on Sirhan, while suppressing evidence of a second shooter, such as:
• Prosecutors withheld the autopsy report from Sirhan’s defense lawyers until six weeks into the trial, showing that Kennedy had been
shot at point-blank range from behind. Five other people in the hotel pantry standing behind Kennedy, including Schrade, were hit by bullets
fired from in front of them.
• Police failed to investigate an armed private-security guard who was walking behind Kennedy at precisely the angle where the fatal shots to
Kennedy’s head and back were fired. He has consistently denied firing his weapon but has told conflicting stories over the years.
• Police officers and FBI agents identified apparent bullet holes in two door frames of the pantry, indicating more than eight shots were fired.
But no evidence of those holes was presented at trial, and the Los Angeles police destroyed the door frames shortly after the trial.
• The lead crime-scene investigator testified at trial that bullets from the wounded victims matched a bullet from Kennedy, but presented no photos
or evidence to support that. When two ballistics experts examined the bullets after the trial, they found the bullets didn’t match.
Subsequent investigations couldn’t match any of the bullets to Sirhan’s gun. The crime-scene investigator was subsequently criticized even by
prosecutors for sloppy work in the case, by a judge for seeming perjury in another high-profile murder, and later suspended by his own police chief.
• Los Angeles police bullied or ignored witnesses whose stories did not match the lone gunman scenario, records show, particularly people
who claimed they saw Sirhan with a dark-haired woman in a white polka-dot dress. Then at trial, prosecutors brought in a blonde-haired woman
with a green polka-dot dress and claimed she was the mysterious woman in question. Sirhan’s lawyers, focusing on a mental health defense,
did not challenge that, either. Los Angeles District Attorney Evelle Younger, seated in the light jacket, introduces his prosecution team for the
murder trial of Sirhan Sirhan in June 1968. In the back row from left, deputy district attorneys Lynn D. Compton, John E. Howard and
David N. Fitts tried the case.
The Los Angeles police have heard all this criticism before, did some reinvestigation in the 1970s that confirmed their own work,
and now consider the case closed. The Los Angeles district attorney’s office referred inquiries to the California attorney general’s office,
which repeatedly defeated Sirhan’s appeals, and which declined to respond beyond court filings. The California and federal courts have
consistently held that Sirhan was guilty of murder, even with new discoveries made in the decades after the early morning of June 5, 1968.
“Considering all of the evidence,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Wistrich wrote in 2013, “old and new, incriminatory and exculpatory,
admissible and inadmissible, the Court cannot say that it is more likely than not that no reasonable juror would have found [Sirhan]
guilty of the assassination of Senator Kennedy beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Lisa Pease, author of a forthcoming book on the investigation’s failures, said: “In ignoring the myriad evidence of conspiracy in this case,
the LAPD and DA’s office created the seventh pantry victim: the truth. We have a guy in prison, provably by the evidence, for a crime he didn’t commit.”
There are facts that are not in dispute, namely that Sirhan had a .22-caliber pistol in the hotel pantry on June 5, 1968, and that he emptied all eight
shots as Kennedy stood in front of him. Two Ambassador Hotel employees, Karl Uecker and Edward Minasian, said repeatedly that Uecker grabbed Sirhan’s
wrist after two shots, slammed it to a table, and that Sirhan continued to fire wildly while being held down but never got close to Kennedy.
Sirhan Sirhan, right, being escorted to court by attorney Russell E. Parsons in June 1968 to face charges in the shooting of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
The defense team did not challenge the police investigation, in part leading to Sirhan’s first-degree-murder conviction.
“I have told police and testified [to the grand jury],” Uecker said in a 1975 affidavit, “that there was a distance of at least one and one-half feet
between the muzzle of Sirhan’s gun and Senator Kennedy’s head. The revolver was directly in front of my nose. … There is no way that the shots described
in the autopsy could have come from Sirhan’s gun. … Sirhan never got close enough to a point-blank shot, never.”
But at trial, neither prosecutors nor Sirhan’s defense team focused on the distance between Kennedy and Sirhan. Though Sirhan and prosecutors reached a
plea deal in January 1969 for Sirhan to admit guilt and receive a life sentence — a deal the judge rejected — and trial began on Jan. 7, records show
prosecutors did not provide coroner Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy report until about Feb. 22. By that time, the defense had already decided to concede
that Sirhan had shot Kennedy and was trying simply to avoid the death penalty by claiming he was mentally ill.
Noguchi found that four shots had been fired at Kennedy from at most three inches away. Three shots appeared to be in contact with Kennedy’s back and shoulder,
based on powder burns to his jacket, Noguchi said, with one shot passing through the jacket’s shoulder pad and not touching Kennedy.
All three were fired sharply upward. The fourth shot was fired into the back of Kennedy’s head from three inches away, Noguchi concluded,
by test-firing a similar gun to determine how much gunpowder sprayed at various distances.
“Thus I have never said,” Noguchi wrote in his autobiography, “that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy.” At a conference last month of RFK
assassination authors, Pittsburgh coroner Cyril Wecht pressed Noguchi as to whether there was a second gunman, but the 91-year-old pathologist said,
“That’s not my duty.” He also told Wecht that defense attorneys never spoke with him before the trial and did not ask him about the muzzle distance at trial.
Los Angeles County Coroner Thomas Noguchi in 1970. His autopsy of Robert F. Kennedy revealed that the senator was shot from the back,
but the report was not provided to Sirhan’s lawyers until six weeks into the trial.
Prosecutors and some authors have theorized that Kennedy turned and raised his arm as the shots began, thus enabling Sirhan to hit him in the back.
The government notes that the jury heard the evidence, convicted Sirhan and sentenced him to death, which was later commuted to a life term.
But there was plenty of evidence the jury never heard. An appeal Sirhan’s current lawyers have pending to the Inter-American Commission on Human
Rights says Sirhan suffered from ineffective assistance from his legal team.
The defense attorneys also went lightly on Los Angeles police criminalist DeWayne Wolfer, who oversaw the crime-scene investigation.
He and Noguchi were both photographed pointing to bullet holes in the pantry, and police removed those door frames. Numerous witnesses, i
ncluding police officers and FBI agents, said the holes were made by bullets. But between the bullets which hit Kennedy and those which hit
Schrade and four others, all the bullets from Sirhan’s gun had been accounted for by Wolfer.
“I’ve inspected quite a few crime scenes in my day,” FBI Special Agent William Bailey told authors William Klaber and Philip Melanson for their book,
“Shadow Play: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy.” “These were clearly bullet holes; the wood around them was freshly broken away and I could see
the base of a bullet in each one.” Many other people saw these holes, reports show.