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Opening Arguments

Optimist of the year

I can't remember doing it, so please set me free now:

More than four decades after Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, his convicted murderer wants to go free for a crime he says he can't remember.

It is not old age or some memory-snatching disease that has erased an act Sirhan Bishara Sirhan once said he committed "with 20 years of malice aforethought." It's been this way almost from the beginning. Hypnotists and psychologists, lawyers and investigators have tried to jog his memory with no useful result.

Now a new lawyer is on the case and he says his efforts have also failed.

"There is no doubt he does not remember the critical events," said William F. Pepper, the attorney who will argue for Sirhan's parole Wednesday. "He is not feigning it. It's not an act. He does not remember it."

Quite the brass ones, huh? I could make use of this defense myself. I remember hardly anything from 1980, so maybe I didn't even work that year, and the IRS should send me all the money it took from me. Pepper is the one with true audacity. He's the same lawyer who represented James Earl Ray and said he was innocent. He now claims Sirhan Sirhan isn't guilty, either, and he knows who is but won't say.

Comments

Harl Delos
Mon, 02/28/2011 - 5:53pm

At the time he said that, James Earl Ray was still innocent; he hadn't been convicted yet.

And according to Jerry Fletcher (Mel Gibson) in the movie Conspiracy Theory, Sirhan Sirhan must have been a fall guy, because assassins always have three names:

Jerry: David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, Richard Speck...
Alice: What about them?
Jerry: Serial killers. Serial killers only have two names. You ever notice that? But lone gunmen assassins, they always have three names. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, Mark David Chapman...
Alice: John Hinckley. He shot Reagan. He only has two names.
Jerry: Yeah, but he only just shot Reagan. Reagan didn't die. If Reagan had died, I'm pretty sure we probably would all know what John Hinckley's middle name was.

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