SIRHAN’S TRIAL Attorney For The Defence

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31881, 8 January 1969, Page 3

SIRHAN’S TRIAL Attorney For The Defence

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RICHARD BOETH

When Sirhan Sirhan, the accused assassin of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, was arrested, the State of California appointed a public defender to act as his attorney. Sirhan said politely that he would prefer to be represented by a man of higher standing in the bar—like, say, Grant Cooper. 1

The indigent Jordanian immigrant’s request s’eemed sheer bravado—like a youngster asking Mohammed Ali to help beat up on the neighbourhood bully. In the pantheon of big-time defence lawyers, Mr Cooper shares equal stature with the likes of Percy Foreman and Edward I Bennett Williams. In fact, at

the time Sirhan’s preference was expressed, Mr Cooper was receiving a reported $2OOO a day to defend five professional card cheats. But Mr Cooper took the case. “He agreed it was something a lawyer should do,” says , American Civil Liberties Union counsel, Mr A. L. Wirin, one of the first lawyers to talk to Sirhan.

The evidence against Sirhan would abash an ordinary lawyer. Scores of eye-wit-nesses are ready to identify him as the man who murdered the senator in a kitchen corridor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. But the dapper, 65-year-old leader of Sirhan’s three-man defence team has made a career out of performing the impossible. Notable Acquittals He won an acquittal for a woman accused of the firstdegree murder of her husband a few years ago. Mr Cooper contended that the eight bullets found in the man’s body were not evidence of premedition, since the murder weapon was a semi-automatic rifle. He so muddled another jury that they could not decide how to judge a woman accused of bashing her employer’s head in with a vacuum cleaner and then setting fire to him. And in his most famous case, Mr Cooper pulled Dr Bernard Finch through two trials which ended in divided juries. His definition of “reasonable doubt” was said to have convinced one jury not to convert: “Reasonable doubt is like love,” he said. “You can’t define it, but you know when you’ve got it.” (The pressures of other cases made Mr Qpoper turn Finch’s third trial over to an asso-

ciate, and in 1961 the doctor was convicted.) Grant Burr Cooper had no adolescent dreams of becoming a lawyer. He dropped out of a New York high school at the age of 14 and knocked around in a number of jobs before signing on as a wiper —“The lowliest job there is” —on an oil tanker bound for California. After several illfated voyages, Cooper left the sea, sick and disgusted, and went to see an uncle who offered him a job as a law clerk. Although he had no academic qualifications whatsoever, he was admitted to Southwestern University Law School and in 1927 he was awarded a degree. He practised privately for two years, then became a deputy district attorney. Opponent of Death Penalty He remembers himself as a “tough prosecutor” and says he secured “six or seven death penalty verdicts, but only two actually resulted in executions.” He has since changed his feeling about capital punishment and is one of its most vigorous and vocal opponents. In 1942, he re-entered private practice. “In the first year, I grossed $21,000,” he says. “It’s been going up ever since. Criminal practice was not particularly aimed at; it just came along and seemed to offer greater opportunity.” Mr Cooper refuses to discuss how he will handle Sirhan’s defence, or what, if any, chance he foresees for an outright acquittal. The best guess is that when the trial begins on January 7, Cooper will concentrate on Sirhan’s motivations, sanity and capacity for true criminal intent.

Cooper’s personal rewards for his work will be intangible. He has agreed to serve without a fee, but the publicity value of such a spectacular trial is incalculable. He claims to be unconcerned. “I took the case,” he says, “because I have been making talks, not only here (New York), but in other states on the duties and obligations of the legal profession and lawyers to represent unpopular causes. It was time to practice what I preached.” Copyright, 1969, “Newsweek” Feature Service.