Sirhan Sirhan

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

Sirhan Bishara Sirhan سرحان بشارة سرحان
Sirhan Sirhan
Born	Sirhan Bishara Sirhan (1944-03-19) March 19, 1944 Jerusalem, British Mandate of Palestine
Criminal status	Incarcerated
Parent(s)	Bishara Sirhan and Mary Muzhea
Criminal charge	Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
Penalty	Death; commuted to life imprisonment in 1972

Sirhan Bishara Sirhan (Arabic: سرحان بشارة سرحان, born March 19, 1944) is a Palestinian American who was convicted for the assassination of United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy. He is serving a life sentence at Pleasant Valley State Prison, California.

Early life

Sirhan was born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian Christian family. When he was 12, his family emigrated, moving briefly to New York, and then to California. He attended Eliot Junior High School (now known as Charles W. Eliot Middle School) in Altadena, California, John Muir High School and Pasadena City College. Sirhan's father Bishara was characterized as a stern man who often beat his sons harshly, and shortly after the family's move to California, he would return alone to the Middle East.

As an adult, he changed church denominations several times, joining Baptist and Seventh-day Adventist churches, and also allegedly dabbling in the occult. He was employed as a stable boy in 1965 at the Santa Anita race track in Arcadia, California.

Robert F. Kennedy assassination

Main article: Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy

On June 5, 1968, Sirhan fired a .22 caliber Iver-Johnson Cadet revolver at Senator Robert Kennedy and the crowd surrounding him in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after Kennedy had finished addressing supporters in the hotel's main ballroom. George Plimpton, Rosey Grier, author Pete Hamill, and 1960 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 people 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.

Prosecution

Despite Sirhan's admission of guilt, recorded in a confession made while in police custody on June 6, a lengthy trial followed. The court judge did not accept his confession and denied his request to withdraw his not guilty plea so that he could plead guilty. Years later, Sirhan recanted his confession, claiming not to remember making it.

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. Sirhan announced to the court judge, Herbert V. Walker, that he wanted to withdraw his original plea of not guilty in order to plead guilty as charged on all counts. He also asked that his counsel "...disassociate themselves from this case completely." When the judge asked him what he wanted to do about sentencing, Sirhan replied, "I will ask to be executed."

Judge Walker denied the motion and stated, "This court will not accept the plea..." The judge also denied Sirhan's request for his counsel to withdraw; when his counsel entered another motion to withdraw from the case of their own volition, Walker denied this motion as well. Judge Walker subsequently ordered that the record pertaining to the motion be sealed.

The trial proceeded, and opening statements began on February 12, 1969, a mere two days later. The lead prosecutor in the Sirhan case was Lynn "Buck" Compton, a World War II veteran and now retired Justice of the California Court of Appeal. The prosecution's opening statement, delivered by David Fitts, was replete with examples of Sirhan's devious and deliberate preparations for murder. The prosecution was able to show that just two nights before the attack, on June 3, Sirhan was seen at the Ambassador Hotel, apparently attempting to learn the building's layout; evidence proved that he visited a gun range on June 4. Further testimony by Alvin Clark, Sirhan's garbage collector, who claimed that Sirhan had told him a month before the attack of his intention to shoot Kennedy, seemed especially damning.

Sirhan's Defense Counsel, which included Attorney Grant Cooper, had hoped to demonstrate that the killing had been an impulsive act of a man with a mental deficiency, but when Judge Walker admitted into evidence pages from three of the journal notebooks that Sirhan had kept, it was clear that the murder was not only premeditated, but also "quite calculating and willful."

On March 3, 1969, in a Los Angeles courtroom, Cooper asked Sirhan point blank if he had indeed shot Senator Kennedy. Sirhan replied immediately: "Yes, sir." but then stated that he did not bear any ill-will towards Kennedy. Sirhan also testified 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.

During Sirhan's testimony, Cooper asked him to explain his reasons for the attack on Kennedy. Sirhan launched into "a vicious diatribe about the Middle East conflict between Arab and Jew". Defense counsel Emile Zola Berman, who was Jewish, was upset by Sirhan's statements and expressed his intentions to resign [yet again] from the defense team. Berman was eventually talked out of resigning by Cooper and stayed until the end of the trial.

During the trial, the defense primarily based their case on the expert testimony of Bernard L. Diamond, M.D. a 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's behavior throughout the trial was indeed bizarre, and at one point, he became outraged during testimony about his childhood.

Sirhan was convicted on April 17, 1969, and was sentenced six days later to death in the gas chamber. Three years later, his sentence was commuted to life in prison, due to the California Supreme Court's decision in People v. Anderson, (The People of the State of California v. Robert Page Anderson, 493 P.2d 880, 6 Cal. 3d 628 (Cal. 1972)), which ruled capital punishment a violation of the California Constitution's prohibition of cruel or unusual punishment. The California Supreme Court declared in the Anderson case that its decision was retroactive, thereby invalidating all prior death sentences imposed in California.

Appeals

Sirhan's lawyer, Lawrence Teeter, later argued that Grant Cooper was compromised by a conflict of interest and was, as a consequence, grossly negligent in defense of his client. The defense moved for a new trial amid claims of set-ups, police bungles, hypnotism, brainwashing, blackmail and government conspiracies. On June 5, 2003, coincidentally the 35th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination, Lawrence Teeter petitioned a federal court in Los Angeles to move the case to Fresno. He argued Sirhan could not get a fair hearing in Los Angeles, where a man who helped prosecute Sirhan is now a federal judge: U.S. District Judge William Matthew Byrne, Jr. in Los Angeles was a deputy U.S. attorney during Sirhan's trial, and part of the prosecutorial team. Teeter, who had been trying since 1994 to have state and federal courts overturn the conviction, argued that his client was hypnotized and framed, possibly by a government conspiracy. He was granted a June 30 hearing. During the hearing, Teeter referred to testimony from the original trial transcripts regarding a prosecution eyewitness to the attack, author George Plimpton, in which he said that Sirhan looked "enormously composed. He seemed—purged." This statement coincided with the defense's argument that Sirhan had shot Kennedy while in some kind of hypnotic trance. The motion was denied. Teeter died in 2005, and Sirhan declined other counsel to replace him.

Motives

A possible motive cited for his actions is the Middle East conflict. After his arrest, Sirhan said, "I can explain it. I did it for my country." According to Mel Ayton, Sirhan believed he was deliberately betrayed by Kennedy's support for Israel in the June 1967 Six-Day War, which had begun exactly one year to the day before the assassination. During a search of Sirhan's apartment after his arrest, a spiral-bound notebook was found containing a diary entry which demonstrated that his anger had gradually fixated on Robert Kennedy, who had promised to send 50 fighter jets to Israel if he were elected president. Sirhan's journal entry of May 18, 1968, read: "My determination to eliminate R.F.K. is becoming the more and more [sic] of an unshakable obsession...Kennedy must die before June 5th". They found other notebooks and diary entries which contained his growing rage at Zionists, particularly at Kennedy; his journals also contained many nonsensical scribbles, which were thought to be his version of "free writing".

The next day, on June 6, the Los Angeles Times printed an article, which discussed Sirhan's motive for the assassination, confirmed by the memos Sirhan wrote to himself. Jerry Cohen, who authored the article, stated:

"When the Jordanian nationalist, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, allegedly shot Kennedy, ostensibly because of the senator's advocacy of U.S. support for Israel, the crime with which he was charged was in essence another manifestation of the centuries-old hatred between Arab and Jew."

Dr. M.T. Mehdi, then secretary-general of the Action Committee on American-Arab Relations, believed that Sirhan had acted in justifiable self-defense, stating: "Sirhan was defending himself against those 50 Phantom jets Kennedy was sending to Israel." Mehdi wrote a 100-page book on the subject called "Kennedy and Sirhan: Why?".

Later in prison, Sirhan stated that his motivation was anger fueled by liquor. An interview with Sirhan in 1980 revealed new claims that a combination of liquor and anger over the anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war triggered his actions the night he assassinated RFK. "You must remember the circumstances of that night, June 5. That was when I was provoked," Sirhan says, recorded in a transcript of one of his interviews with Dr. Mehdi, now president of the New York-based American-Arab Relations Committee. "That is when I initially went to observe the Jewish Zionist parade in celebration of the June 5, 1967, victory over the Arabs. That was the catalyst that triggered me on that night." Then Sirhan said, "In addition, there was the consumption of the liquor, and I want the public to understand that..."

At a June 30, 2003 hearing, Lawrence Teeter, in an attempt to get Sirhan a new trial, claimed that Sirhan had been hypnotized into firing at Kennedy and that he may have been using blanks; that Sirhan couldn't possibly have fired the fatal shot from where he was standing; that prosecutors blackmailed his defense attorney to throw the case and that police and government agencies whitewashed or bungled investigations. The motion was denied.

Imprisonment

As of 2011, Sirhan is confined at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, California, where he is housed in a cell by himself. From 1992 to 2009, Sirhan had been confined at the California State Prison (COR) in Corcoran, California and lived in COR's Protective Housing Unit until he was moved to a harsher lockdown at COR in 2003. Prior to 1992 he had been at the Correctional Training Facility (CTF) in Soledad, California.

Applications for parole

In a 1980 transcripted interview with M.T. Mehdi, Sirhan claimed his actions were fueled by liquor and anger. He then complained that the parole board was not taking these "mitigating" circumstances into account when they continually denied his parole.

On May 10, 1982, Sirhan told the 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."

A parole hearing for Sirhan is now scheduled every five years. On March 2, 2011, after 42 years in prison, Sirhan's 14th parole hearing was held, with Sirhan represented by his current attorney, William Francis Pepper. At his parole hearing, Sirhan testified that he continues to have no memory of the assasination nor of any details of his 1969 trial and confession. His parole was denied on the basis that Sirhan still does not understand the full ramifications of his crime.

See also

• RFK (2002 film)
• RFK Must Die (2007 film)
• Bobby (2006 film)
• Notable Inmates at California State Prison, Corcoran
• Robert Kennedy in Palestine (1948)
• Palestinian Christians

References

http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/03/01/california.sirhan.parole.hearing/index.html?hpt=C1

Further reading

• Jansen, Godfrey, Why Robert Kennedy Was Killed: The Story of Two Victims, New York, Third Press, 1970. OCLC 137100
• 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. ISBN 978-1-59020-070-4
• Kaiser, Robert Blair, "R.F.K. Must Die!": Chasing the Mystery of the Robert Kennedy Assassination, New York, Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc. 2008. ISBN 978-1-59020-124-4
• Melanson, Philip H., Who Killed Robert Kennedy?, Berkeley, California, Odonian, 1993. ISBN 978-1-878825-12-4
• 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. ISBN 978-0-394-40273-4
• Ayton, Mel, The Forgotten Terrorist - Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy Washington DC, Potomac Books, 2007. ISBN 978-1-59797-079-2
• Mehdi, Mohammad Taki, Kennedy and Sirhan: Why?, New World Press, 1968. Edition: Illustrated Paperback, 100 pages. ISBN 978-0-911026-04-7

External links

• Sirhan Sirhan at IMDb
• Crime Library biography
• Interview with Sirhan's attorney Lawrence Teeter on KPFA 94.1 / Guns & Butter show
• The Robert Kennedy Assassination - Statement
• "The Robert Kennedy Assassination: Unraveling the Conspiracy Theories," Mel Ayton, Crime Magazine May 8, 2005
• Los Angeles Daily Mirror story about Sirhan working as a delivery boy at a Pasadena health food store
• The lost significance of Sirhan's case. Los Angeles, Organization of Arab Students, University of Southern California 1969