Word: sirhan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
While Cooper handles the day-to-day presentation of Sirhan's defense, Russell E. Parsons will be preparing witnesses and planning appeals, which are his specialty. His most famous was in the 1955 case of People v. Cahan, which involved a bookmaker whose Hollywood apartment was bugged by police. Parsons claimed that law-enforcement agencies had thus electronically crossed Cahan's threshold. His argument successfully established the California law that evidence illegally obtained is inadmissible in a criminal case...
Oldest member of the Sirhan defense team, at 73, Parsons won his law degree at the University of Southern California. In 1935, he defended a murderer named "Rattlesnake" James, who tried to kill his wife by holding her foot in a box full of rattlesnakes. To play it safe, James dispatched her by drowning. Parsons managed to keep his client alive for seven years after conviction in a day when appeals were hard to come by. As for his defense of Sirhan: "It won't be the first time I've defended someone free," he says. "There...
...third member of the team, Emile Zola Berman, was once described by an associate as a "marvelously warm person" who looks like "a living version of Ichabod Crane." Last week he spotted Mary Sirhan shyly working her way through the reporters in the courtroom. Berman bowed gracefully and kissed Mrs. Sirhan's hand-a gesture for which she was obviously unprepared. Nor was her son prepared to be defended by a Jew for a crime he allegedly committed because of his victim's pro-Israeli campaign oratory...
...arguments swing back and forth before him, he smiles hopefully when his side wins a point, frowns when the opposition scores. For Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, the 24-year-old Jordanian immigrant, the trial that began last week will determine whether he was, as charged, the assassin who gunned down Senator Robert Kennedy in a pantry of Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel. If found guilty of first-degree murder, he could die in the gas chamber or spend the remainder of his days in a prison cell...
Textbook Study. From the opening day, it was clear that the trial would be a classic of criminal jurisprudence. Sirhan attracted three of the country's most successful lawyers: Los Angeles' Grant B. Cooper and Russell E. Parsons, New Yorker Emile Zola Berman (see box). The prosecution's three-man team is led by Chief Deputy District Attorney Lynn "Buck" Compton, former U.C.L.A. football star and World War II hero. Presiding is Superior Court Judge Herbert V. Walker, 69, who plans to retire in July. During the course of the first three days, the defense...