| Sirhan Bishara Sirhan سرحان بشارة سرحان |
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|---|---|
Sirhan Sirhan |
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| Born | Sirhan Bishara Sirhan March 19, 1944 Jerusalem, British Mandate of Palestine |
| Charge(s) | Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy |
| Penalty | Death; commuted to life imprisonment in 1972 |
| Status | Incarcerated |
| Parents | Bishara Sirhan and Mary Muzhea |
Sirhan Bishara Sirhan (Arabic: سرحان بشارة سرحان, born March 19, 1944) is a Jordanian citizen who was convicted for the assassination of United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy. He is serving a life sentence at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, California.
Sirhan was a Christian Arab born in Jerusalem who strongly opposed Israel. In 1989, he told David Frost "My only connection with Robert Kennedy was his sole support of Israel and his deliberate attempt to send those 50 bombers to Israel to obviously do harm to the Palestinians". Some scholars believe that the assassination was one of the first major incidents of political violence stemming from the Arab Israeli conflict in the Middle East.[1] His defense attorneys have filed motions for a new trial, citing he "should be freed from prison or granted a new trial based on 'formidable evidence' asserting his innocence and 'horrendous violations' of his rights."[2]
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Sirhan is a Christian Arab with Jordanian citizenship[3] born in Jerusalem. When he was 12 years old, 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, Bishara returned alone to the Middle East.[4]
As an adult, Sirhan changed church denominations several times, joining Baptist and Seventh-day Adventist churches, and also allegedly dabbling in the occult.[5] He was employed as a stable boy in 1965 at the Santa Anita race track in Arcadia, California.[6] Sirhan has retained his Jordanian citizenship and has not become a U.S. citizen.[3]
On June 5, 1968, Sirhan fired a .22 caliber Iver-Johnson Cadet revolver[7] 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, once in the head and twice in the back, with a fourth bullet passing through his jacket, and died nearly 26 hours later.[8] 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;[9] Elizabeth Evans, a friend of Pierre Salinger, one of Kennedy's campaign aides; and Irwin Stroll, a teenaged Kennedy volunteer.[10][11]
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.[12] 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 "...dissociate 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." [12]
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.[12] Judge Walker subsequently ordered that the record pertaining to the motion be sealed.[13]
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.[14] The prosecution's opening statement, delivered by David Fitts, was replete with examples of Sirhan's deliberate preparations to kill Kennedy. 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.[12]
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."[12]
On March 3, 1969, in a Los Angeles courtroom, Cooper asked Sirhan directly 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.[12] Sirhan also testified that he had killed Kennedy "with 20 years of malice aforethought". He explained in an interview with David Frost in 1989 that this referred to the time since the creation of the State of Israel.[15] He has maintained since being arrested that he has no memory of the crime.[16]
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".[12][17] 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.[12]
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.[18] Sirhan's behavior throughout the trial was indeed bizarre, and at one point, he became outraged during testimony about his childhood.[12]
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, owing 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.[13]
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.[19] The defense moved for a new trial amid claims of set-ups, police bungles, hypnotism, brainwashing, blackmail and government conspiracies.[20][21] 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.[20][21] 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.[22] 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.[20][21] 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.[12] The motion was denied. Teeter died in 2005, and Sirhan declined other counsel to replace him.[23] On November 26, 2011, Sirhan's defense teams filed new court papers for a new trial, saying that "expert analysis of recently uncovered evidence shows two guns were fired in the assassination and that Sirhan's revolver was not the gun that shot Kennedy."[2]
A motive cited for his actions is the Middle East conflict.[17] After his arrest, Sirhan said, "I can explain it. I did it for my country."[17] Sirhan believed he was deliberately betrayed by Kennedy's support for Israel in the June 1967 Six-Day War,[24] 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".[12][17] 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.[25]
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?.[26]
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 Mehdi, later 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..."[23]
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.[20][21][22]
As of 2011, Sirhan is confined at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, California, where he is housed in a cell by himself.[27] 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.[28] Prior to 1992 he had been at the Correctional Training Facility (CTF) in Soledad, California.[28][29]
In a 1980 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.[23]
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."[30][31]
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 assassination 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.[32]