Sirhan Sirhan
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- This article is about Robert F. Kennedy's assassin. For the Palestinian militant see Sirhan Sirhan (militant).
Sirhan Bishara Sirhan (born March 19, 1944) was convicted of murdering Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Sirhan shot Kennedy shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968 just minutes after the senator had won the California presidential primary. Kennedy lived until the early morning hours of June 6, 1968.
Personal information
Sirhan was born to Palestinian parents in Jerusalem. Though he is incorrectly thought to be a Muslim, he is a Christian. However, in his adult years he frequently changed his religious thoughts, to Baptist, Seventh-day Adventist, and Rosicrucianism.[link]
Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
Sirhan fired a .22 caliber Iver Johnson revolver eight times into the crowd surrounding Kennedy in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after Kennedy finished addressing supporters in the hotel's main ballroom, hitting Kennedy three times, with a fourth bullet grazing Kennedy's jacket. Others at the Ambassador Hotel rally were also injured. Sirhan was quickly detained at the scene by bystanders (including among them Rosey Grier, a large Los Angeles Rams NFL football player) and then arrested. Shortly after the shooting, it was reported that Jesse Unruh, Kennedy's campaign manager, had been hit, along with Paul Shrade, head of the United Automobile Workers union. Four hours later, added to the list were William Weisel , an ABC unit manager; Ira Goldstein, a California news service reporter; Elizabeth Evans, a political supporter; and Irwin Stroll, a teenage bystander.
On March 3, 1969, in a Los Angeles courtroom, Sirhan confessed 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 - it is so thoroughly blocked out that numerous leading questions asked under hypnosis were unable to produce a cohesive narrative. The judge didn't accept this confession and it was later withdrawn.[[Citing sources citation needed]] As with his brother John F. Kennedy, conspiracy theories regarding Robert Kennedy's assassination persist.
Furthermore, his lawyer stated that Sirhan was out of position to shoot Kennedy. Kennedy was shot from behind, while witnesses stated Sirhan was in front of him. The bullet holes in the senator's body were angled upward as if from below, he said.
Motives
Sirhan supposedly believed himself 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, obsessing over a desire to kill Kennedy, among other things. When confronted with these, Sirhan couldn't deny writing them but rather expressed bafflement.[[Citing sources citation needed]] In the 1990s, Sirhan proposed the theory that he had been brainwashed, which some conspiracy theorists attribute to the CIA's MKULTRA program.Prosecution
The lead prosecutor in the case was Lynn Compton of Band of Brothers fame. Attempts by Sirhan's lawyer, Lawrence Teeter, to remove his case to Fresno where he claimed he could be given a fair trial, failed. During the 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 and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1972 after the California Supreme Court in its People v. Anderson decision resulted in the invalidation of all pending death sentences imposed in California prior to 1972.
Current state
Sirhan has been routinely eligible for parole, but as of 2006 parole had been denied 13 consecutive 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 possible next chance for parole will be in 2011.
Sources
- The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy, Dan E. Moldea
Further reading
- Jansen, Godfrey. Why Robert Kennedy Was Killed: The Story of Two Victims. New York: Third Press, 1970.
- Kaiser, Robert Blair. "R.F.K. Must Die!": A History of the Robert Kennedy Assassination and Its Aftermath. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co, Inc. 1970.
- Melanson, Philip H. Who Killed Robert Kennedy? Berkeley, California: Odonian, 1993.
- Turner, William V., and John G. Christian. The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: A Searching Look at the Conspiracy and Cover-up 1968-1978. New York: Random House, 1978.
External links
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