6 – Sirhan’s Lead Trial Lawyer Was Accused of Ineptitude
Grant Cooper was the lead defense attorney in the murder trial and was accused of ‘throwing’ the case by Sirhan’s subsequent defense teams. One apparent reason for Cooper’s poor performance was the fact he was compromised. At the time, there was a pending indictment against Cooper for the possession of stolen transcripts of grand jury proceedings in another case; the Beverly Hills Friar’s Club card cheating case. There was a possibility of Cooper facing jail time, but instead, he was fined the paltry sum of $1,000. Did he deliberately mess up the Sirhan defense in exchange for a lenient sentence?
Sirhan seemed to think so. When he was on Death Row, the assassin wrote a letter to Cooper which included the following: “Don’t ever forget, you dirty son of a bitch that cost me my life.” While testifying for Sirhan in 1982, Cooper blamed mental illness for Sirhan’s anger at the time. It is alleged that Johnny Roselli, a defendant in the Friars Club case, planted the grand jury papers on Cooper’s desk. Roselli was apparently recruited by the CIA to kill Fidel Castro but was supposedly ‘turned’ by the Cuban leader who asked him to murder JFK.
It seems as if Sirhan’s defense team did not receive all the evidence at the trial. Omissions included the autopsy report which was only shared with the defense after it had stipulated Sirhan’s guilt. By this stage, the defense had settled on a diminished capacity defense and the autopsy did not change this tactic. To be fair, Sirhan behaved bizarrely at the trial and didn’t help himself or his defense team. He used the spotlight to focus on expressing his anti-Semitic views and forwarding the Arab cause.
His later defense teams have tried to get him freed on parole. They cite various omissions of evidence and new discoveries as their basis for Sirhan’s innocence. During his 2011 appeal, Sirhan’s attorneys argued that a bullet had been switched in evidence at the trial. William Pepper was one of the lawyers, and he said that the prosecution at the trial had put fabricated evidence into the court. Pepper said he was confident of overturning the verdict but parole was denied and over six years on, Sirhan remains in prison where he will surely die.