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Lawrence Teeter: Sirhan's lawyer dies


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Sirhan lawyer Lawrence Teeter, 56, dies

By Myrna Oliver

Los Angeles Times

Lawrence Teeter, a criminal defense and civil rights attorney who had tried for the last decade to overturn the conviction of Sirhan Sirhan for the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, has died. He was 56.

Teeter died Sunday in Conchitas, Mexico, where he had gone to seek alternative treatment for advanced lymphoma, said attorney Frank Weiser.

Sirhan was convicted and sentenced to death in the June 5, 1968, fatal shooting of Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after a celebration of Kennedy's victory in the California Democratic presidential primary. Sirhan's sentence was reduced to life imprisonment after the California Supreme Court struck down the state death penalty law that existed at that time. Sirhan, 61, is incarcerated at a maximum security state prison in Corcoran, Calif.

Teeter, who signed on as Sirhan's lawyer in 1994, repeatedly petitioned state and federal courts to grant Sirhan a new trial and to conduct it in Fresno rather than Los Angeles, where Teeter said his client could never be tried fairly.

The lawyer maintained that Sirhan at the time of the slaying was in the wrong position and too far away to have fired the bullets that killed Kennedy, and that, although he did fire a gun that night, he did so in a hypnotic trance akin to the fictional film "The Manchurian Candidate."

Teeter said Sirhan was hypnotized and framed, either by the CIA or "the military industrial complex," which feared Kennedy would be elected president and quickly end the Vietnam War. The lawyer also said the Los Angeles Police Department and others destroyed evidence that would have pointed to the real killer.

Among Teeter's other colorful clients was Norma Jean Almodovar, a former Los Angeles Police Department traffic officer turned call girl who ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1986. Teeter tried futilely to save her from a mandatory three-year state prison term for pandering, arguing that the 1982 law specifying the sentence was unconstitutional. His argument was rejected by the state's 2nd District Court of Appeal.

Teeter also handled environmental law cases, including representing a group that opposed the recent remodeling of the Hollywood Bowl concert venue in Los Angeles, and took on many cases without a fee, Weiser said.

Teeter, a Los Angeles native, is survived by his mother, Marian Teeter of Los Angeles, and a half-brother, Anthony Way of Sacramento, Calif.

http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/arti.../508030373/1012

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  • 2 weeks later...
Sirhan lawyer Lawrence Teeter, 56, dies

By Myrna Oliver

Los Angeles Times

Lawrence Teeter, a criminal defense and civil rights attorney who had tried for the last decade to overturn the conviction of Sirhan Sirhan for the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, has died. He was 56.

Teeter died Sunday in Conchitas, Mexico, where he had gone to seek alternative treatment for advanced lymphoma, said attorney Frank Weiser.

Sirhan was convicted and sentenced to death in the June 5, 1968, fatal shooting of Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after a celebration of Kennedy's victory in the California Democratic presidential primary. Sirhan's sentence was reduced to life imprisonment after the California Supreme Court struck down the state death penalty law that existed at that time. Sirhan, 61, is incarcerated at a maximum security state prison in Corcoran, Calif.

Teeter, who signed on as Sirhan's lawyer in 1994, repeatedly petitioned state and federal courts to grant Sirhan a new trial and to conduct it in Fresno rather than Los Angeles, where Teeter said his client could never be tried fairly.

The lawyer maintained that Sirhan at the time of the slaying was in the wrong position and too far away to have fired the bullets that killed Kennedy, and that, although he did fire a gun that night, he did so in a hypnotic trance akin to the fictional film "The Manchurian Candidate."

Teeter said Sirhan was hypnotized and framed, either by the CIA or "the military industrial complex," which feared Kennedy would be elected president and quickly end the Vietnam War. The lawyer also said the Los Angeles Police Department and others destroyed evidence that would have pointed to the real killer.

Among Teeter's other colorful clients was Norma Jean Almodovar, a former Los Angeles Police Department traffic officer turned call girl who ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1986. Teeter tried futilely to save her from a mandatory three-year state prison term for pandering, arguing that the 1982 law specifying the sentence was unconstitutional. His argument was rejected by the state's 2nd District Court of Appeal.

Teeter also handled environmental law cases, including representing a group that opposed the recent remodeling of the Hollywood Bowl concert venue in Los Angeles, and took on many cases without a fee, Weiser said.

Teeter, a Los Angeles native, is survived by his mother, Marian Teeter of Los Angeles, and a half-brother, Anthony Way of Sacramento, Calif.

http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/arti.../508030373/1012

___________________________________

I wonder who, if anyone, will speak for Sirhan Sirhan now.

I wonder about a lot....why he has died so young...how long he had this cancer,

and its genesis.

I wonder if he was "Jack Ruby'd".

Dawn

Statement of Lawrence Teeter,

Current Attorney for Sirhan Bishara Sirhan

"Sirhan Sirhan was out of position and out of range and therefore could not have shot Kennedy."

The following is the statement Sirhan Sirhan's current lawyer, Lawrence Teeter, released on the 30th anniversary of the murder of Robert Kennedy. Teeter is the first lawyer Sirhan has had to have ever proclaimed Sirhan's innocence.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

The assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, changed the course of world history. Senator Kennedy had promised to end the war in Vietnam if elected as President, as seemed likely to happen following his victory in the June 4 California Democratic Presidential primary election.

At first glance, the RFK case seems open and shut. After all, Sirhan Sirhan was arrested with a gun in hand at the scene. There the simplicity ends, however. There is an abundance of evidence which refutes the official version of this crime.

1. Sirhan was out of position and out of range and therefore could not have shot Robert Kennedy. The Senator was shot from behind, but all witnesses place Sirhan in front of him in a face-to-face position. All witnesses placed Sirhan's gun at between 1.5 and 5 feet from Senator Kennedy, but the autopsy findings clearly establish that the Senator was shot from a weapon held somewhere between less than 1 inch and no more than three inches away. All witnesses describe Sirhan's gun as having been held horizontally in a normal standing position, but the autopsy report describes all bullet tracks in Senator Kennedy's body as angled sharply upward, as though fired from below.

2. An armed security guard with strong anti-Kennedy views admitted that he was standing directly in contact with the Senator to the rear, that he dropped down when the shooting began and that he then pulled his gun. One witness ignored by police claimed he saw the guard fir. The guard's weapon was never checked. Meanwhile, the one person who photographed the assassination, Jamie Scott Enyart, was tackled and arrested at gun point. His camera was seized by police, and his photographs have never been recovered. Los Angeles Police secretly burned 2, 410 assassination-related photographs in a county hospital incinerator long before Sirhan's trial. A Los Angeles jury later awarded Enyart a substantial verdict for the loss of his photographs.

3. The official autopsy report devastates the prosecution theory that Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy. However, prosecutors illegally withheld this critical document from defense counsel for four months until after the defense had unnecessarily conceded Sirhan's identity as the killer during opening statements to the jury.

4. Bullet holes in a door frame at the crime scene which are documented in FBI photographs show that more bullets were fired than could have come from "Sirhan's" gun. The police never disclosed these bullets, even though their removal by LAPD criminalists was observed by other police personnel. The door frame in question was then destroyed under color of a court order issued immediately after Sirhan's trial without notice to the defense.

5. Police switched bullets in order to fabricate evidence lending apparent support to their theory of the case. As has been noted by Sirhan case researcher Lynn Mangan, Los Angeles police manufactured a comparison photomicrograph using substitute victim bullets and then falsely presented this photograph as evidencing a match between the bullet removed from Senator Kennedy's neck and a test bullet fired from "Sirhan's" gun. The use of substitute bullets in this exhibit (Special Exhibit 10) is clear from the fact that identifying markings on the bases of the involved bullets differ from those recorded by physicians when the bullets were recovered.

6. Police behaved as though two guns were recovered at the crime scene, because they fired two revolvers and obtained test bullets from both weapons. The second gun had been in LAPD custody before the assassination. Despite police denials, official records confirm that this gun was destroyed by the LAPD long before Sirhan's trial.

7. Dr. Herbert Spiegel, a New York psychiatrist who teaches at Columbia University and who is widely regarded as among the country's leading experts on hypnosis, has concluded that Sirhan was probably acting out hypnotic commands when he fired a gun in Senator Kennedy's presence that fateful day. Sirhan himself was so disoriented following his arrest that he did not even know he had yet to be arraigned. During pre-trial psychiatric examinations in his cell, Sirhan proved to be the ideal hypnotic subject, climbing the bars without knowing that he was carrying out post-hypnotic commands. Expert trial testimony established that notebook passages containing repetitions of the phrase "RFK Must Die" were written in a hypnotic trance, and Sirhan spontaneously reproduced this phrase under hypnosis when asked in his cell for a description of the Senator. Sirhan's amnesia about the crime was unshaken by hypnosis and has consistently remained intact.

These and other issues of constitutional dimension are currently before the California Supreme Court, which is considering a habeus corpus petition seeking an evidentiary hearing and a new trial for Sirhan. Meanwhile, this historic crime remains unsolved. Its true perpetrators have never been brought to justice. One victim was killed, and five others were wounded. The seventh victim of this dastardly plot, Sirhan Sirhan, has been confined to thirty years for a crime he did not commit.

~ Lawrence Teeter, Attorney for Sirhan Sirhan

Return to the Robert Kennedy Assassination Collection

(This statement is being reprinted from Lisa Pease's web site)

Dawn

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  • 2 weeks later...
Guest John Gillespie

Dawn,

This may be a foolish question, knowing the breadth of your research and contacts, but have you read Robert Morrow's "The Senator Must Die"? It still remains the definitive work for me and something I recommend in the utmost.

It's also known for having very interesting, substantial and "out of the box" sections on the JFK assassination, as recently noted on this site.

Regards,

JohnG

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I met Larry Teeter briefly in Dallas last year, and he appeared to be in very poor health, taking only a few steps between stops. His lung problems were clearly in evidence. I doubt there is anything suspicious about his death.

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Dawn,

  This may be a foolish question, knowing the breadth of your research and contacts, but have you read Robert Morrow's "The Senator Must Die"?  It still remains the definitive work for me and something I recommend in the utmost.

  It's also known for having very interesting, substantial and "out of the box" sections on the JFK assassination, as recently noted on this site.

Regards,

JohnG

[right]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/right]

Hi John,

No I have not read that book, Been meaning to. Dr. Phil Melanson's "The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination- New Revelations of the Conspiracy and Cover-Up",

is a pretty definitive book I believe.

Does Marrow deal with the MC issue? (I hope).

I have long thought this is the easiest case to "solve".

But with Larry Teeter gone, I wonder who will step in to speak for Sirhan.

He had the most amazing "trial" I have ever heard of: The DA and defense "STIPULATED" that Sirhan's gun had killed RFK!!

I noted in another thread that John was taking issue with Tim Gratz insinuating that lawyers are honorable, and abide by attorney/client privilege. Not the ones in these cases. (Until Teeter and and James Earl Ray's atty. Dr. Pepper).

Dawn

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  • 3 months later...
I met Larry Teeter briefly in Dallas last year, and he appeared to be in very poor health, taking only a few steps between stops. His lung problems were clearly in evidence. I doubt there is anything suspicious about his death.

Teeter lived in a bad section of LA, Cheech and Chong territory, and when he died, some blacks, claiming to be his family, evicted the live in maid/housekeeper, took over the house and began selling the computers, TVs, furniture, etc.

COPA secretary John Judge, in DC, got a lawyers group to get a court to order to force LAPD to secure the house and lock it up. I don't know what happened to the comptuers and files, but I would hope they were retrieved.

BK

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Pat, Dawn, John,....

After Teeter died, a group of people entered his home, evicted his live-in housekeeper, and ransacked the house for three days before Teeter's girlfriend and mother could get the local Bar Association to intervein and take custody of his papers.

When the housekeeper and Teeter's girlfriend first complained to the LAPD, they considered it a domestic issue and not a criminal one, especially when told it was SBS's attorney, and only acted with the Bar Association, who now has custody of the hard copy documents and records. Teeter's computer disapeared, and was probably sold.

If any attorney would like to inquire about this further, I can provide names and numbers. I also have the auto license plate numbers, descriptions of cars and names of those who did this, which the LAPD consideres a petty crime.

BK

bkjfk3@yahoo.com

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[quote name='William Kelly' date='Dec 15 2005, 08:33 PM' post='48954']

Pat, Dawn, John,....

After Teeter died, a group of people entered his home, evicted his live-in housekeeper, and ransacked the house for three days before Teeter's girlfriend and mother could get the local Bar Association to intervein and take custody of his papers.

When the housekeeper and Teeter's girlfriend first complained to the LAPD, they considered it a domestic issue and not a criminal one, especially when told it was SBS's attorney, and only acted with the Bar Association, who now has custody of the hard copy documents and records. Teeter's computer disapeared, and was probably sold.

If any attorney would like to inquire about this further, I can provide names and numbers. I also have the auto license plate numbers, descriptions of cars and names of those who did this, which the LAPD consideres a petty crime.

BK

bkjfk3@yahoo.com

Bill,

Given the manner that the LAPD dealt with this case, destruction of evidence and all, I would not be surprised if that's who is really behing this crime. Burg. of a Habitation is a second degree felony here in Tx. (highest felony is first degree). Carries 2-20 years in the pen and up to a $10,000 fine. I suspect it's the same level in CA. Hardly "petty".

Very disturbing. If you have this info I am assuming the LAPD has it too. Any arrests?

thanx,

Dawn

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Bill,

Given the manner that the LAPD dealt with this case, destruction of evidence and all, I would not be surprised if that's who is really behing this crime. Burg. of a Habitation is a second degree felony here in Tx. (highest felony is first degree). Carries 2-20 years in the pen and up to a $10,000 fine. I suspect it's the same level in CA. Hardly "petty".

Very disturbing. If you have this info I am assuming the LAPD has it too. Any arrests?

thanx,

Dawn

Dawn,

There was a women attorney from North Calif. who submitted a peition-request for a grand jury to investigate the LAPD's action/inaction regarding the RFK assassination, which failed because no prosecutor worth his salt is going to ask a grand jury to investigate the cops he has to work with every day.I would have asked the grand jury investigate the psycho-doctors who screwed with SBS before and after the assassination.

Teeter was also trying to get some new legal action for Siran, they wanted to preserve the Ambassador kitchen as a crime scene, and Phil Melanson talked to Donald Trump about getting in there before the demolished it. There was some more legal action being contimplated though I'm not familiar with the details -gee I can only try to solve one political assassination at a time.

While the LAPD were told whose home was being vandalized, they were reluctant to act for a number of reasons, but were not behind the theft of the computer. That's one of the things that had some value for fencing, while the paper files didn't.

No arrests, but like I said, I got licenses plate #s, etc., though I don't think it worth pursing, though Teeter's girlfriend might need some help now in securing the files from the bar association.

BK

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  • 3 months later...
Dawn,

  This may be a foolish question, knowing the breadth of your research and contacts, but have you read Robert Morrow's "The Senator Must Die"?  It still remains the definitive work for me and something I recommend in the utmost.

  It's also known for having very interesting, substantial and "out of the box" sections on the JFK assassination, as recently noted on this site.

Regards,

JohnG

[right]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/right]

Hi John,

No I have not read that book, Been meaning to. Dr. Phil Melanson's "The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination- New Revelations of the Conspiracy and Cover-Up",

is a pretty definitive book I believe.

Does Marrow deal with the MC issue? (I hope).

I have long thought this is the easiest case to "solve".

But with Larry Teeter gone, I wonder who will step in to speak for Sirhan.

He had the most amazing "trial" I have ever heard of: The DA and defense "STIPULATED" that Sirhan's gun had killed RFK!!

I noted in another thread that John was taking issue with Tim Gratz insinuating that lawyers are honorable, and abide by attorney/client privilege. Not the ones in these cases. (Until Teeter and and James Earl Ray's atty. Dr. Pepper).

Dawn

Dawn,

"Stipulations" is a legal term which has nothing to do with interpretation of it.

William Pepper did a great diservice to the MLK case - see the MLK links on this forum. As far as Morrow's book is concerned, it is one of the most ridiculous I have ever read. The information below needs to be read by everyone before they start to grasp Morrow's silly theories:

In its issue of April 4th 1989 Globe magazine published a story which implicated Khalid Khawar in the assassination of Robert Kennedy.The article gave an abbreviated summary of Robert Morrow’s book “The Senator Must Die” (1988) in which the author accused Khawar of having been an Iranian intelligence agent who had been present at the Ambassador Hotel on the night of June 5th and who assisted conspirators in killing Kennedy.The Globe article included a photograph from the Morrow book showing a group of men standing near Kennedy as the Senator gave his victory speech in the Embassy Ballroom.Globe enlarged the image of these men and added an arrow to one of them identifying him as the assassin Ali Ahmand.

In August 1989 Khalid Khawar sued the Globe and Morrow alleging he was the person depicted in the photographs and identified by Morrow as Ali Ahmand.The evidence at the trial showed that in June 1968 when Kennedy was assassinated Khawar was a Pakistani citizen and a free-lance photojournalist on assignment for a Pakistani magazine.At the Ambassador Hotel’s Embassy Room he stood on the podium near RFK so that a friend could photograph him with Kennedy.When Kennedy left the podium Khawar did not follow him and was still in the Embassy Room when Kennedy was shot.Both the FBI and the LAPD questioned Khawar about the assassination but neither agency ever regarded him as a suspect.

In 1989 when the Globe published its article, Khawar was a naturalised American citizen living with his wife and children in Bakersfield, California where he owned and operated a farm.After Khawar read the article he became angry he had been implicated in the assassination.Khawar even received threatening phone calls and his property was vandalised.

The trial soon revealed that Morrow’s allegations were false and that the Globe’s article was not ‘an accurate and neutral report of the statements and charges made in the Morrow book’.Khawar was awarded damages of $1.2 million.

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