Sirhan B. Sirhan, convicted of the 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, will face a California parole board for the 16th time Friday in a prison outside San Diego, reported The Washington Post. But unlike the first 15 times, no prosecutor will stand to oppose the release of Sirhan, who is now 77.
Sirhan was arrested at the scene of Kennedy’s shooting in
Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to
death for the slaying of a U.S. senator who appeared headed for the Democratic
presidential nomination. The assassination, along with that of the Rev. Martin
Luther King Jr. two months earlier, created a turning point in American history
with the sudden elimination of the charismatic leaders of the American civil
rights movement and the Democratic Party respectively.
When California abolished the death penalty, Sirhan’s
sentence was reduced to life with the possibility of parole. And now Sirhan,
who has been incarcerated for 53 years, may benefit from a new push among
progressive prosecutors to seek the release, or not oppose the release, of
convicts who have served decades behind bars, no longer pose a threat to
society and will be costly to treat medically in their later years.
Newly elected Los Angeles County District Attorney George
Gascón told The Washington Post shortly before his inauguration in December
that he was creating a sentencing review unit to revisit the cases of about
20,000 prisoners for possible resentencing, analyzing both the fairness of long
sentences and the cost savings for releasing low-risk or older inmates. Gascón
issued a directive that his office’s “default policy” would
be not to attend parole hearings and to submit letters supporting the release
of some inmates who had served their mandatory minimums, while also assisting
victims and victim advocates at parole hearings if requested.
In Sirhan’s case, Gascón’s office is remaining neutral. The
office said it will not attend the parole hearing, as Los Angeles prosecutors
have done historically, but it also will not send a letter in support of
Sirhan’s parole.
“The role of a prosecutor and their access to information
ends at sentencing,” said Alex Bastian, special adviser to Gascón. “The parole
board’s sole purpose is to objectively determine whether someone is suitable
for release. If someone is the same person that committed an atrocious crime,
that person will correctly not be found suitable for release. However, if
someone is no longer a threat to public safety after having served more than 50
years in prison, then the parole board may recommend release based on an
objective determination.”
Kennedy is survived by his wife, Ethel Kennedy, and nine
children, many of whom declined to comment. The family has not submitted any
letters taking a position on Sirhan’s parole and has not requested to speak at
Friday’s hearing.
In 2018, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told The Post that he thought
that Sirhan had not killed his father and that he had met with Sirhan in prison
to tell him so. Kennedy said this week that he supports Sirhan’s parole
application and that he still thinks a second gunman committed the
assassination but that he would not participate in the parole process and
declined to comment further. Robert Kennedy Jr.’s stance against vaccines, most
recently the coronavirus vaccine, has drawn controversy.
Former Maryland lieutenant governor Kathleen Kennedy
Townsend said in 2018 that she supported her brother’s call for a
reinvestigation of their father’s assassination. She declined to comment before
the parole hearing, as did human rights activist Kerry Kennedy and former
congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II.
After Gascón’s announcement that his office would not appear
at parole hearings, Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva announced that
members of his department would attend the hearings, “in support of those who
have been victimized by violent crime.” But Villanueva’s office declined to
comment on whether they would appear in the Sirhan case, and they did not file
a request to be present.
Sirhan has a new parole lawyer for this hearing, who does
not raise any claims about Sirhan’s involvement in the shooting, in which five
other people standing behind Kennedy in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel were
wounded. Instead, lawyer Angela Berry focuses on Sirhan’s age at the time — 24
— his clean record in prison, his remorse and his unlikely chance of
reoffending if released.
Berry does not mention Kennedy in her prehearing brief,
other than to argue that “denying parole on an opinion that Mr. Sirhan’s actions
‘changed the course of history’ or ‘disenfranchised millions of Americans’
violates due process.” She cites the California Supreme Court’s guidance on
parole consideration, which says that an analysis “cannot be undertaken simply
by examining the circumstances of the crime in isolation, without consideration
of the passage of time or the attendant changes in the inmate’s psychological
or mental attitude.”
Berry argues that “current dangerousness is the relevant
inquiry by the Board. Statutory and case law dictate that parole shall be
granted unless the prisoner poses a current danger to
public safety.” Under California law in effect in 1968, a life sentence with
parole would have made Sirhan eligible for release after seven years. He has
had no disciplinary violations since 1972, and although he claims not to
remember the act of shooting Kennedy, he has expressed remorse in parole
hearings since the 1980s and said at one, “I have feelings of shame and inward
guilt ... I honestly feel the pain that [the Kennedys] may have gone through.”
Munir Sirhan, Sirhan’s younger brother, continues to live in
the family’s home in Pasadena, Calif., where they grew up after emigrating as
children from Israel, as Palestinian refugees, with their parents. “His home is
ready for him,” Munir Sirhan told The Post, and his neighbors have filed
letters in support of Sirhan’s return. “We’re awaiting the deserved, proper
decision from the parole board.”
Berry’s pleadings raise the possibility that Sirhan could be
deported if paroled, because he did not obtain citizenship before his arrest.
“He has said he would give up his right to live in this country,” Munir Sirhan
said, “and go back to the Arab world. There are a number of countries who have
said they would accept him.”
In California, two parole commissioners conduct the hearing,
corrections department spokesman Luis Patino said. The two-person panel
typically issues its decision and explains its rationale on the day of the
hearing. Following that, the parole board staff has 90 days to review the case,
followed by a 30-day period in which the governor can uphold, reverse or modify
the decision, take no action, or send the decision to the full 17-person parole
board, Patino said.
Looming over all of this are Sirhan’s supporters who say he
did not shoot Kennedy, and who have raised that issue in vain both in the
California courts and in parole hearings. The most prominent of those supporters
is Paul Schrade, now 96, who was also shot while walking behind Kennedy, and
appeared at Sirhan’s last parole hearing to advocate for his release.
Shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, Kennedy was declared
the winner of the Democratic presidential primary in California. He gave a
short victory speech in a packed ballroom, with Schrade standing next to him,
then walked through the hotel pantry toward a news conference. But witnesses
said Sirhan moved forward and began firing a .22-caliber gun, striking Kennedy
and five others. One shot entered Kennedy’s brain, and he died a day later.
Sirhan was tackled immediately and arrested. A jury convicted him in 1969, and
all appeals were rejected.
But Kennedy was shot four times at point-blank range from
behind, one shot passing through his jacket and not striking him, with the
fatal shot fired so close that gunpowder was on his hair, coroner Thomas
Noguchi found. Multiple bullet holes in the ceiling and door frames indicated
that more than eight shots, the capacity of Sirhan’s gun, were fired.
Prosecutors and some experts have said that Kennedy probably turned his back on
the advancing gunman, enabling the wounds to the rear, that the extra bullet
holes weren’t really bullet holes and that Sirhan is lying when he claims not
to remember the shooting.
Schrade said that he and the other people behind Kennedy
were shot by Sirhan but that a second gunman killed Kennedy from behind. He
said the lead crime scene investigator lied when he testified that he test
fired Sirhan’s gun and the bullets matched those taken from Kennedy and two
other victims; subsequent investigation showed that the test bullets did not
match the victim bullets. Prosecutors claimed the mismatch came from a clerical
error, although the crime scene investigator was later found to have bungled
other major cases.
“He’s not the guilty one,” Schrade said of Sirhan. “The
important thing is to get him out, and then identify the second gunman, who’s
never been identified by the LAPD.” The Los Angeles Police Department has
declined to comment on the case in recent years. As a victim, Schrade is
entitled to speak at Sirhan’s hearing, but instead is sending Denise Bohdan, a
lawyer and filmmaker whose father, journalist Fernando Faura, pursued the
Kennedy assassination story for decades.
To read more CLICK HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment