Behind Steel Doors

The frail young man in the grey suit, blue shirt and dark tie rocks slightly in the big leather swivel chair. Occasionally he throws a salute to his grey-faced mother Mary and two brothers, Munir and Adel. The windows of the courtroom are sealed with quarter-inch steel armor plate, and the lighting overhead accentuates his dark stubble, arching cheek bones and deep-set eyes.

As the 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.

As they have since that tragic summer night, the Los Angeles authorities are going to extraordinary extremes to make certain that their city does not become another Dallas. Only 75 witnesses, sheriffs and newsmen are allowed in the 8th floor courtroom of the Hall of Justice. Others must watch the proceedings on closed-circuit TV four floors below.

After showing a seat pass, reporters going to the courtroom are ushered by helmeted deputies to two successive steel doors, each manned by a deputy, who peers through a wire-glass window. Pockets must be emptied, purses checked. Handkerchiefs are shaken, contact-lens fluid sniffed, ballpoint pen cartridges removed and examined. Everyone is frisked, and then a deputy passes a metal-detecting device over each person. The deputies themselves are scrupulously searched before every session.

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's tactics were clearly displayed. These were to lay groundwork for an eventual appeal and to try for a further postponement. Judge Walker noted that the trial had already been continued four times, and he denied a series of intricate defense motions.

When the trial finally gets beyond the preliminaries, the prosecution is expected to lead off with a long line of witnesses to prove first-degree murder. Among them: Karl Eucker, the Ambassador's assistant maitre d'hotel, who was shaking Kennedy's hand at the moment he was shot and was the first to grab Sirhan. He had described the shooting to the grand jury as "very deliberate." Two of Kennedy's companions, former L.A. Ram Lineman Roosevelt Grier, who wrestled with Sirhan, and Decathlon Champion Rafer Johnson, who knocked the pistol from his grasp, should be on hand, as well as Author George Plimpton, who also joined in the fray. When the time comes for them to recall their movements, the prosecution will produce a scale model of the pantry, with warming tables, tray stackers and an ice machine. To establish premeditation and deliberation, the prosecution is likely to call the two men who say they saw Sirhan shooting a pistol at a target range on the afternoon before the murder.

For its part, the defense plans to put Sirhan on the witness stand. It will try to convince the jury that even if their client did shoot Kennedy, he bore "a diminished responsibility" for the act. Explains Defense Attorney Russell Parsons: "We ask: Can a man maturely and meaningfully premeditate? If the answer is no, what might otherwise have been first-degree murder could be instead second-degree." Toward this end, the defense will probably call Sirhan's former employer, Food-Store Owner John Weidner, who worried about Sirhan's irrational temper. Sirhan's mother and brothers are expected to claim that his personality deteriorated after he fell from a horse and landed on his head while working on a ranch two years before the murder.

His Own Battle. To the complicated, often oblique strategy of the defense--much of it in the privacy of the judge's chambers--yet another twist was added. With his client safely locked away in his windowless, heavily guarded cell on the 13th floor, Attorney Cooper himself was facing a grand-jury investigation at the federal courthouse across the street. While representing a client in a sensational card-cheating trial, Cooper illegally "obtained a secret federal grand-jury transcript. Admitting that he had lied in court about how he got the transcript, Cooper refused to divulge his source on the ground that he would violate the attorney-client relationship.

Claiming that publicity of his troubles might adversely affect his client, Cooper attempted to get the Sirhan trial postponed until he cleared up his own case, but was overruled by Judge Walker. Cooper is expected to stay on as Sirhan's chief counsel, relegating his personal crisis to off-hours. Even so, it seemed unlikely that the trial could be concluded in less than two months.

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