Sirhan Sirhan
- This article is about Robert F. Kennedy's assassin, for the Palestinian militant see Sirhan Sirhan (militant)
Sirhan Bishara Sirhan (born March 19, 1944 in Jerusalem) was convicted of the June 5, 1968 assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, by shooting him just minutes after Kennedy had won the California presidential primary election.
Sirhan, who was born to Palestinian parents in Jerusalem, fired a .22 caliber revolver eight times into the crowd surrounding Kennedy in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel shortly after Kennedy finished addressing supporters in the hotel's main ballroom. Sirhan was quickly detained at the scene by bystanders and then arrested. On March 3, 1969, in a Los Angeles, California court, Sirhan confessed that he had killed Kennedy, although he has maintained since he had been arrested that he had no memory of doing so. But, as with President John F. Kennedy's assassination, many questions persist.
Sirhan 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. After his arrest, Sirhan's journals and diaries were discovered, many entries obsessing over a desire to kill Kennedy. Sirhan later also claimed he acted unconsciously, possibly as the result of "hypnotic brainwashing" which some have attributed to the CIA's MK-Ultra program.
The head prosecutor in the case was Lynn "Buck" Compton of Band of Brothers fame. 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 has been routinely made eligible for parole, but as of March 2003 he had parole denied 12 consecutive times. He is not expected to ever be paroled. Currently he is confined at the California State Prison in Corcoran.
Attempts of his lawyer, Lawrence Teeter, to remove his case to Fresno where he claimed he could be given a fair trial, failed. Teeter died July 31, 2005 in Mexico. The very same Ambassador Hotel in which Kennedy was shot was slated to be demolished just weeks before.