Was RFK's Confessed Assassin the Subject of a Govt. Program to Create Hypnotized Killers?

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In his filing, Pepper writes:

Inadvertantly [sic], the Report begins by actually supporting Petitioner’s claim of actual innocence. It states: “As Senator Kennedy stopped to shake hands with hotel employees, Petitioner walked toward him extending his arm. Instead of shaking Senator Kennedy’s hand, Petitioner shot him.”(CD 199 at p.1)

This recitation of the activity leading up to the shooting is a virtual admission of Petitioner’s innocence since Senator Kennedy was hit by three bullets, fired in an upward angle (indicating that the shooter may have been kneeling behind the Senator) from behind him, by a weapon pressed up against his back with the fatal shot fired about an inch behind his right ear. All shots left powder burns on the back of his jacket and on his skin behind his right ear.

The Report explicitly acknowledges, along with the statements of twelve eye witnesses, that Petitioner was, at all times, in front of the Senator, where, as the Report confirms, the Petitioner could have shaken hands with him.

Petitioner questions whether further comment is necessary in light of this embarrassingly absurd factual foundation for the recommendation that the Petition be dismissed.

Pepper contends that the magistrate, in arguing against a new trial, totally ignored the factual material while focusing on procedural issues. In essence, the dispute comes down to whether those procedural issues can or should trump the notion of “actual innocence.”

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In support of their contention, Sirhan’s team wants to present an audio recording made by a freelance journalist, Stanislaw Pruszynski, in the Ambassador Hotel’s pantry at the time of the shooting:

The sounds on that tape, when analyzed with a computerized technology not available at the time of the assassination, clearly reveal that thirteen shots were fired, coming from two different directions –west to east and east to west.

The magistrate has criticized Sirhan’s team for not bringing the tape forward earlier, since it has been available since 1988. But Pepper says that this is an absurd objection since the technology to analyze the sounds on the tape only became available in 2005. In arguing against a new trial for Sirhan, the magistrate cites competing “naked ear” analyses of the tape by “experts” who did not have access to the computer program. Pepper, in turn, casts doubt on the ability, motive and track record of one of those “experts”.

Not the Ideal Attorney

The fact that at this late date we still can’t agree on what happened on June 5 goes back to the very beginnings of the case. If Sirhan had been represented by capable attorneys determined to learn the truth about the politically fraught second murder of a Kennedy brother in five years, things might have turned out differently. Instead, his attorneys persuaded Sirhan to plead guilty in hopes of avoiding the death penalty; Sirhan put up no resistance to this strategy since, as he would later reveal, he had zero recall of what happened on the night of the shooting. He was sentenced to the death penalty anyway, though several years later the sentence was commuted to life in prison after California abolished the death penalty.

Pepper, in his recent filing, directs much of his outrage at attorney Grant Cooper:

As a matter of record he accepted, without even the most perfunctory examination or challenge, all of the State’s ballistic evidence…. As a result, defense Counsel Cooper’s indictment [for illegally possessing grand jury proceedings in another case] went away. He was rewarded for obtaining the guilty plea and death penalty sentence….