Selectivity in Los Angeles

In Los Angeles, lawyers completed the selection of a jury of twelve to try Sirhan Bishara Sirhan for the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy. Technicians are heavily represented among the eight men and four women chosen. The jury includes two computer programmers, three telephone-company workers, a gas-company employee, a mechanic, a plumber, a high school math teacher, two city water-and-power-department workers and a retail businessman. Seven jurors said they were Republicans and five, Democrats. Four appear to be of Spanish-American ancestry, a group for which Senator Kennedy had a particular concern.

Prosecution lawyers, who often tend to favor stable, relatively affluent jurors, shunned anyone they thought likely to feel undue sympathy for the underdog. While examining jury panel members last week, the state exercised peremptory challenges against the only Negro who had been provisionally seated, against a woman who had worked with psychiatric patients and against another woman suspected of having antiwar views.

Though Sirhan is a Palestinian Arab who is known to be strongly anti-Zionist, Defense Attorney Grant Cooper had made no secret of the fact that he wanted a Jewish juror or two, saying: "I find them a very compassionate people." One Jewish juror was chosen, Benjamin Glick, 60, who runs a clothing business. Like the prosecution, the defense had some definite ideas about who would make an unsatisfactory juror. Sirhan's lawyers admitted that they tend to distrust bankers (they are too used to saying "no"), overly beautiful women (too self-centered) and anybody who seems too eager to serve. Accordingly, they turned down the attractive blonde wife of a mortician.

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