Sirhan Sirhan

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This article is about Robert F. Kennedy's assassin. For the Tanzim militant see Sirhan Sirhan (militant).
Sirhan Bishara Sirhan
Sirhan Sirhan
Born March 19, 1944 (1944-03-19) (age 64)
Jerusalem, British Mandate of Palestine
Penalty death, commuted to life imprisonment 1972
Status incarcerated
Parents Bishara Sirhan and Mary Muzher

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 California State Prison, Corcoran.

Contents

[edit] Personal information

Sirhan was born in Jerusalem[1] to Christian Palestinian 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.[2] 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 and Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California and was employed as a stable boy in 1965 at the Santa Anita Race Track in Arcadia, California.[3]

[edit] 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 Robert 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.[4]

Kennedy was shot three times, with a fourth bullet passing through his jacket, and died nearly 26 hours later.[5] Five other persons at the party were also 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.[6]

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.[7]

On March 3, 1969, in a Los Angeles courtroom, Sirhan said 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.[8]The judge did not accept this confession and it was later withdrawn.[9]

[edit] Motives

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Sirhan supposedly believed he was deliberately betrayed by Kennedy's support for Israel in the June 1967 Six-Day War,[10] 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.[11] 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 didn't deny writing them, but rather expressed bafflement.[citation needed]

[edit] Prosecution

The lead prosecutor in the case was Lynn "Buck" Compton.[12] Attempts by Sirhan's lawyer, Grant Cooper, to move his case to Fresno where he claimed he could be given a fair trial, failed.[citation needed] During the three-month-long sentence hearing, (There was no trial, as he had pled guilty) 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.[13] Sirhan was convicted on April 17, 1969 and was sentenced to death in a gas chamber 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), invalidated all pending death sentences imposed in California prior to 1972.[7] 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. [14] Teeter died in 2005.[15]

[edit] Imprisonment

[edit] Applications for parole

A parole hearing for Sirhan is now scheduled every five years. On March 15, 2006, he was denied parole for the 13th time.[16] Currently he is confined at the California State Prison. 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.[17]

On May 10, 1982, Sirhan told a parole board: "I sincerely believe that if Robert Kennedy were alive today, I believe he would not countenance singling me out for this kind of treatment. I think he would be among the first to say that, however horrible the deed I committed 14 years ago was, that it should not be the cause for denying me equal treatment under the laws of this country."[18]

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0802805/
  2. ^ http://www.crimemagazine.com/05/robertkennedy,0508-5.htm
  3. ^ Robert Kennedy Assassination: Revisions and Rewrites
  4. ^ http://www.christiannewstoday.com/Christian_News_Reports_380.html
  5. ^ http://www.sirhansresearcher.com/i.pdf
  6. ^ http://www.citizinemag.com/politics/politics_0506_rfk_twhite.htm
  7. ^ a b People v. Sirhan, 7 Cal. 3d 710, June 16, 1972
  8. ^ http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/state/20030306-2018-ca-sirhanparole.html
  9. ^ http://www.warphead.com/modules/news/makepdf.php?storyid=984
  10. ^ http://crimemagazine.com/05/sirhansirhan,0906-5.htm
  11. ^ http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Assassination_of_Robert_Kennedy
  12. ^ http://crimemagazine.com/04/bobbykennedy,0527.htm
  13. ^ http://www.gach.com/Gach/l1696-01.htm
  14. ^ Teeter Statement of June 5, 1998
  15. ^ Juliana Barbassa. Robert Kennedy's convicted killer denied parole for the 13th time.
  16. ^ Warren Kozak (2006-03-17). One Common Link. NY Sun.
  17. ^ http://www.ksdk.com/printfullstory.aspx?storyid=93784
  18. ^ Oppenheim, Carol. "RFK would OK parole, Sirhan says", Chicago Tribune, 1982-05-11, p. 9. 

[edit] Sources

[edit] 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.
  • Ayton, Mel, The Forgotten Terrorist - Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy Washington DC, Potomac Books, 2007.

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirhan_Sirhan"
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