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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, in Los Angeles, just minutes[citation needed] after the senator had won the California presidential primary. Kennedy lived until the early morning hours of June 6, 1968.
Sirhan was born to Palestinian parents in Jerusalem and was raised a Maronite Christian. However, in his adult years he frequently changed his religious thoughts, to Baptist, Seventh-day Adventist, and Rosicrucianism.[1]
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Sirhan fired a .22 caliber Iver Johnson revolver eight times into the crowd surrounding Kennedy in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador HotelinLos Angeles shortly after Kennedy finished addressing supporters in the hotel's main ballroom, possibly 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.
OnMarch 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 The judge didn't accept this confession and it was later withdrawn.[citation needed] As with his brother John F. Kennedy, there are still a large number of people who doubt the officially accepted story of Bobby Kennedy's assissination that casts Sirhan in the role of "lone gunman". Many of these people suspect that the assassination was carried out by or on behalf of faction within the U.S. ruling elite. Such views are becoming more widespread after the evidence cited by Sirhan's most recent lawyer Lawrence Teeter, in the June 11th, 2003 Interview with Sirhan's attorney Lawrence Teeter on KPFA 94.1 / Guns & Butter show
One source of contention is the apparent discrepancies in the forensic evidence. For instance Lawrence Teeter, Sirhan's lawyer until his death in 2005 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. More bullets were fired than could have come from Sirhan's gun. Unfortunately, because the LAPD chose to destroy the wood panelling it had collected from the hotel pantry as evidence, in spite of widespread scepticism about the official story, it has become much harder to establish which bullets went where.
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.[citation needed] In the 1990s, Sirhan proposed the theory that he had been brainwashed. This view has been endorsed by Dr. Herbert Spiegel, a leading expert on hypnosis, although it has been widely denied by others. Those who believe that Sirhan was acting in a hypnotic trance generally believe that CIA's MKULTRA program was responsible for this. Sirhan had once volunteered to be a entranced by a stage hypnotist and had proved to be a remarkably easy person to hypnotise. It has been suggested that it was at this stage show that he was scouted by MKULTRA operatives.[citation needed]
The lead prosecutor in the case was Lynn ComptonofBand of Brothers fame. Attempts by Sirhan's lawyer, Grant Cooper, 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. 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]
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 next possible chance for parole will be in 2011.
