Sirhan Sirhan

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Sirhan Bishara Sirhan
Sirhan Sirhan
Born	March 19, 1944 (age 63) Jerusalem, Palestine
Occupation	Assassin
Parents	Bishara Sirhan and Mary Muzher

Sirhan Bishara Sirhan (March 19, 1944–) is the convicted assassin of United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy. He is currently serving a life sentence at the state penitentiary in Corcoran, California.

Contents 1 Personal information 1.1 Motives 1.2 Prosecution 1.3 Conflicting Evidence 2 Applications for parole 3 References 4 Further reading 5 External links

[edit] Personal information

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]

Main article: Robert F. Kennedy assassination

On June 5, 1968 Sirhan fired a .22 caliber Iver Johnson revolver into the crowd surrounding Senator Kennedy in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after Kennedy finished addressing supporters in the hotel's main ballroom. Rosey Grier, an NFL player (and Kennedy's close friend/bodyguard), and Olympic gold medalist Rafer Johnson subdued Sirhan, with Grier jamming his thumb behind the hammer of the gun to prevent further shots from being fired.

Robert Kennedy was shot three times, with a fourth bullet passing through his jacket, and died 25 hours later. Five other persons in the pantry also were shot, but all five recovered: Paul Schrade, head of the United Automobile Workers union; William Weisel, an ABC TV unit manager; Ira Goldstein, a Continental News Service reporter; Elizabeth Evans, a friend of Kennedy press secretary Pierre Salinger; and Irwin Stroll, a teenaged Kennedy volunteer.

On February 10, 1969, a motion to enter a plea of guilty to first degree murder in exchange for life imprisonment (rather than death penalty) was made in chambers and denied. The court ordered that the record pertaining to the motion be sealed.^[1]

On March 3, 1969, in a Los Angeles courtroom, Sirhan claimed 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 The judge didn't accept this confession and it was later withdrawn.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Motives

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, though a single entry obsessed over a desire to kill Kennedy. When confronted with this entry, Sirhan couldn't deny writing them, but rather expressed bafflement. In the 1990s, Sirhan proposed the theory that he had been brainwashed.

[edit] Prosecution

The lead prosecutor in the case was Lynn "Buck" Compton. 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 decision in California v. Anderson 64 Cal.2d 633, 414 P.2d 366, (Cal. 1972), resulted in the invalidation of all pending death sentences imposed in California prior to 1972.^[1] 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]

[edit] Conflicting Evidence

As with the assassination of his brother John F. Kennedy, there are still questions about the validity of the the official story that casts Sirhan in the role of "lone gunman".

All the witnesses in the kitchen pantry that day placed Sirhan in front of Senator Kennedy, at a distance no closer than approximately 3 feet and, more significantly, most of them placed the tip of his gun no closer than a foot to Kennedy's head. Yet according to Dr. Thomas T. Noguchi, who performed the autopsy, the fatal shot - the one to the head - was fired one inch behind the Senator's right ear [3]. According to Noguchi's book "Coroner", published in 1983, he was first made aware of this possibility when an LAPD criminologist came to his office the day after the autopsy saying they had found gunpowder residue and soot in the hair shavings taken from Kennedy's head prior to surgery. Thus, the gun must have been only inches away. The angle was also wrong.

The phantom jet theory was also inconsistant as the dates of the "diary" were two days earlier.

Also disputed is the number of bullets fired that night. Even according to the official story, there is a problem. Author Dan E. Moldea (see below) reports that RFK was hit three times, a fourth bullet passed harmlessly through his clothes, and five victims were each hit once. That makes nine shots, yet Sirhan's gun only held eight bullets. However, this discrepancy can be easily made up because the bullet that "passed harmlessly" through his clothes could easily have hit someone behind him.

Photographic evidence exists of at least five additional shots. In Philip H. Melanson's "The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination" are two photos. One shows Dr. Noguchi pointing out two "bullet holes" (as identified by the FBI) in a doorframe. The other photo shows LAPD criminologist DeWayne Wolfer pointing to a ricochet mark. Another photo, in Dan E. Moldea's "The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy", shows Noguchi pointing to two different bullet holes than those featured in the Melanson book's photo. In Noguchi's own book "Coroner", published in 1983, he believes twelve shots were fired that night: three bullets hit RFK, one passed through his jacket, five hit the victims, and three were found in the ceiling. Unfortunately for the doorframe evidence, the LAPD destroyed all the wood paneling it had collected from the hotel pantry.

All of these things could have been used in the defence but were not.

[edit] Applications for parole

Sirhan has been routinely eligible for parole, but as of 2007 parole had been denied 13 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.

On 10 May, 1982, Sirhan Sirhan told a parole board: "If Robert Kennedy were alive today, he would not countenance singling me out for this kind of treatment."

[edit] References

• Moldea, Dan E.: The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy. W. W. Norton & Company, 1997, ISBN 978-0393315349
• Turner, William V., and Jonn Christian. The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: The Conspiracy and Cover-up. Carroll & Graf, 2006, ISBN 978-0786719792

• 'GUIDE TO THE LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT RECORDS OF THE ROBERT F. KENNEDY ASSASSINATION INVESTIGATION.' Archives of the California Secretary of State. <http://www.ss.ca.gov/archives/pdf/rfkguide.pdf>. Last Accessed Feb 10, 2007.

[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.

[edit] External links

• Sirhan Sirhan at the Internet Movie Database
• Sirhan Sirhan at the Notable Names Database
• 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.
• "Part II: Why Sirhan Sirhan Assassinated Robert Kennedy" Mel Ayton, Crime Magazine, September 6, 2005.