A new request for parole for Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kennedy in 1968, was rejected this Wednesday by a specialized commission in California.
Sirhan Sirhan, 78, has been incarcerated for more than fifty years, despite doubts about his responsibility in this assassination that profoundly disrupted American political life.
In August 2021, another commission had given the green light for his release, but California Governor Gavin Newsom had opposed this decision in January of the following year.
The Democrat-elect had at the time considered Sirhan posed “an unreasonable threat to public safety”, citing several factors to explain his decision, “including Sirhan Sirhan’s refusal to accept responsibility for his crime”.
Sirhan Sirhan was convicted in April 1969 of the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the younger brother of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Nicknamed “Bobby,” the New York senator was campaigning for president of the United States when he was shot dead in a Los Angeles hotel in 1968.
Doubts about his guilt
First sentenced to death, Sirhan Sirhan saw his sentence commuted to life imprisonment several years later.
Doubts about Sirhan’s guilt have lingered since his trial. The hearing had revealed that Bobby Kennedy was shot at point-blank range from behind, but Sirhan stood in front of him according to some witnesses.
It later emerged that 13 shots had been fired, while Sirhan’s gun could only hold eight bullets.
Suspicions about the verdict led Kennedy’s son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to visit Sirhan Sirhan in prison.
“I went there because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence,” he told the Washington Post in 2018. “I was concerned by the idea that no one could be convicted of killing my father.”
He and his younger brother, Douglas, supported Sirhan Sirhan’s attempted release in 2021.
Source: BFM TV
