Retired Judge David Fitts; Prosecutor in Sirhan Trial
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Retired Superior Court Judge David N. Fitts, who as a prosecutor delivered lengthy and complex opening and closing arguments without benefit of notes at the trial of Sirhan Sirhan, died early Friday.
He was 64 and died at his Santa Monica home. The cause of death was not announced.
A 1949 graduate of Stanford University Law School, Fitts spent three years bicycling 10,000 miles through Europe before becoming a deputy district attorney here. He was a veteran criminal jurist years before the Sirhan conviction brought him to prominence.
He and another deputy district attorney under Chief Deputy Lynn D. Compton led the successful prosecution of Sirhan, now in prison for the 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
News accounts of the lengthy trial in 1969 dwell often on Fitts’ ability to instantaneously sift through the mountains of testimony on both sides as he summed up his case for the jury.
He was named to the Superior Court bench by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan shortly after the Sirhan trial and retired last April when he became ill.
He is survived by his wife, Caroline, two sons and a daughter.
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