Sirhan Sirhan

This article is about Robert F. Kennedy's assassin. For the Tanzim militant see Sirhan Sirhan (militant).

Sirhan Bishara Sirhan (born March 19, 1944) is the convicted assassin of United States Senator Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy. He is currently serving a life sentence at the state penitentiary in Corcoran, California.

Personal information

Sirhan was born in Jerusalem to Palestinian Christian parents and was raised in the Maronite Church. In his adult life however, he made several religious conversions, joining Baptist and Seventh-day Adventist churches, and dabbled in the occult. His family, which moved to the United States when Sirhan was 12, briefly lived in New York, and soon moved to California. He attended John Muir High School in Pasadena, California and was employed as a stable boy in 1965 at the Santa Anita Race Track in Arcadia, California.[1]

Robert F. Kennedy assassination

Main article: Robert F. Kennedy assassination

On June 5, 1968, Sirhan fired a .22 caliber Iver Johnson Cadet revolver into the crowd surrounding Senator Kennedy in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. This occurred shortly after Kennedy had finished addressing supporters in the hotel's main ballroom. George Plimpton, Rosey Grier (a writer, NFL defensive lineman, and Kennedy's close friend/bodyguard), and Olympic gold medalist Rafer Johnson were among several men who subdued and disarmed Sirhan after a lengthy struggle.

Kennedy was shot three times, with a fourth bullet passing through his jacket, and died nearly 26 hours later. Five other persons in the pantry also were shot, but all five recovered: Paul Schrade, an official with the United Automobile Workers union; William Weisel, an ABC TV unit manager; Ira Goldstein, a reporter with the Continental News Service; Elizabeth Evans, a friend of Pierre Salinger, one of Kennedy's campaign aides; and a teenager, Irwin Stroll, a Kennedy volunteer.

On February 10, 1969, a motion by Sirhan's lawyers to enter a plea of guilty to first degree murder in exchange for life imprisonment (rather than the death penalty) was made in chambers and denied. The court judge, Herbert V. Walker, ordered that the record pertaining to the motion be sealed.^[1]

On March 3, 1969, in a Los Angeles courtroom, Sirhan claimed that he had killed Kennedy "with 20 years of malice aforethought," although he has maintained since being arrested that he has no memory of the crime. The judge did not accept this confession and it was later withdrawn.^{[citation needed]}

Motives

Sirhan had long dealt with anger over Israel's creation in 1948, during which many Palestinians fled or were driven out into surrounding nations. Sirhan supposedly believed he was deliberately betrayed by Kennedy's support for Israel in the June 1967 Six-Day War, which had begun exactly one year before the assassination. However, the "RFK must die" diary entries started before Kennedy's support of Israel became public knowledge. After his arrest, these journals and diaries were discovered. Most of the entries were incoherent and repetitive, though a single entry obsessed over a desire to kill Kennedy. When confronted with this entry, Sirhan couldn't deny writing them, but rather expressed bafflement.

Brainwashing theory

In the 1990s, Sirhan proposed the theory that he had been brainwashed. Sirhan was hypnotised in prison by Dr. Bernard Diamond, who instructed Sirhan to climb the bars of his cell like a monkey. He did so. After the trance was removed, Sirhan was shown tapes of his actions. He insisted that he "acted like a monkey" of his own free will - he claimed he wanted the exercise. ^[2]

Prosecution

The lead prosecutor in the case was Lynn "Buck" Compton. Attempts by Sirhan's lawyer, Grant Cooper, to move his case to Fresno where he claimed he could be given a fair trial, failed. During the three-month-long trial, the defense primarily based their case on the expert testimony of Bernard L. Diamond M.D., a well known professor of law and psychiatry at University of California, Berkeley, who testified that Sirhan was suffering from diminished capacity at the time of the murder. Sirhan was convicted on April 17, 1969 and was sentenced to death six days later. The sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1972 after the California Supreme Court, in its decision in California v. Anderson 64 Cal.2d 633, 414 P.2d 366, (Cal. 1972), resulted in the invalidation of all pending death sentences imposed in California prior to 1972.^[1] Sirhan's most recent lawyer, Lawrence Teeter, adamantly maintained that Grant Cooper was compromised by a conflict of interest and was, as a consequence, grossly negligent in defense of his client. This, according to Teeter, led to a gross miscarriage of justice.[2]

Applications for parole

Sirhan has been routinely eligible for parole. As of 2007, his parole had been denied 13 times. Currently he is confined at the California State Prison in Corcoran. Sirhan's attorney Lawrence Teeter died on July 31, 2005, in Mexico. Sirhan was again refused parole on March 15, 2006. He did not attend the hearing, nor did he appoint a new attorney to represent him. His next possible chance for parole will be in 2011.

On May 10, 1982, Sirhan Sirhan told a parole board: "If Robert Kennedy were alive today, he would not countenance singling me out for this kind of treatment." ^{[citation needed]}

References

^ ^a ^b People v. Sirhan, 7 Cal. 3d 710, June 16, 1972
^ William Bowart, Operation Mind Control, Dell, New York 1978

Moldea, Dan E.: The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy. W. W. Norton & Company, 1997, ISBN 978-0393315349
Turner, William V., and Jonn Christian. The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: The Conspiracy and Cover-up. Carroll & Graf, 2006, ISBN 978-0786719792
GUIDE TO THE LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT RECORDS OF THE ROBERT F. KENNEDY ASSASSINATION INVESTIGATION. Archives of the California Secretary of State. Last accessed February 10, 2007.

External links

Sirhan Sirhan at the Internet Movie Database