Sirhan Bishara Sirhan (; Arabic: سرحان بشارة سرحان Sirḥān Bišāra Sirḥān; born March 19, 1944) is a Palestinian-Jordanian man who assassinated U.S. senator Robert F. Kennedy, the younger brother of U.S. president John F. Kennedy and a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 1968 United States presidential election on June 5, 1968. Sirhan was 24 years old at the time. On April 17, 1969, he was convicted of first-degree murder, among other charges. He was subsequently sentenced to death by gas chamber. In 1972, this was commuted to a life sentence in the aftermath of People v. Anderson. The circumstances surrounding the attack, which took place five years after President Kennedy's assassination, have led to numerous conspiracy theories.
In 1989, Sirhan told British journalist David Frost: "My only connection with Robert Kennedy was his sole support of Israel and his deliberate attempt to send those 50 fighter jets to Israel to obviously do harm to the Palestinians." Some scholars believe that the assassination was the first major incident of political violence in the United States stemming from the Israeli–Palestinian conflict (Sirhan carried out the attack on the first anniversary of the 1967 Arab–Israeli War), although it occurred at a time when the American public was overwhelmingly focused on the Vietnam War.
Sirhan is incarcerated at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility near San Diego. On August 27, 2021, after 15 years of being denied parole by the local state board, he was granted parole by a two-person panel. Prosecutors declined to participate in or oppose his release in accordance with the directive of Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón that the prosecutors' role ends at sentencing and they should not influence decisions to release prisoners. On January 13, 2022, California governor Gavin Newsom blocked Sirhan's release on parole. He was denied parole again on March 1, 2023.
Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was born March 19, 1944 in Mandatory Palestine, in Jerusalem's Musrara neighborhood, into an Arab Palestinian Christian family. He became a Jordanian citizen in December 1949, just before Jordan annexed the West Bank. According to his mother, Mary, Sirhan was traumatized by the violence he witnessed in the Arab–Israeli conflict as a child, including the death of his older brother, who was run over by a military vehicle which was swerving to evade gunfire.
When Sirhan was 12 years old, his family immigrated to the U.S., moving briefly to New York and then to California. He attended Eliot Junior High School, John Muir High School, John Marshall Junior High School (now called Thurgood Marshall Secondary School), and Pasadena City College. Shortly after the family's move to California, Sirhan's father, Bishara Salame Sirhan, returned alone to the Middle East. Standing 5 feet 5 inches (165 cm) and weighing 120 pounds (54 kg) at age 20, Sirhan moved to Corona to train to become a horse jockey while working at a stable, but lost his job and abandoned the pursuit after suffering a head injury in a racing accident.
Sirhan never became a U.S. citizen, instead retaining his Jordanian citizenship. As an adult, he changed church denominations several times, joining Baptist and Seventh-day Adventist churches. In 1966, he joined the esoteric Ancient Mystical Order of the Rose Cross, one of the Rosicrucian Orders.
Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
Around 12:15 a.m. PDT on June 5, 1968, Sirhan fired a .22 LR Iver-Johnson Cadet revolver at United States senator Robert F. 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. Authors George Plimpton, Jimmy Breslin, and Pete Hamill, former professional football player Rosey Grier and 1960 Olympic gold medalist Rafer Johnson were among several men who subdued and disarmed Sirhan after a struggle.
Kennedy was shot three times—once in the head and twice in the back—with a fourth bullet passing through his jacket. He died about 26 hours later at Good Samaritan Hospital. Five other people at the event were also shot, all of whom recovered: Paul Schrade, an official with the United Auto 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 Irwin Stroll, a teenage campaign volunteer.
The assassination spawned many conspiracy theories, many of which claimed there was a "second gunman" or that Sirhan was not the true killer. In a 2018 interview with The Washington Post, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that he had traveled to California to meet with Sirhan in prison and, after a relatively long conversation (the details of which he would not disclose), had come to believe that Sirhan did not kill his father and that a second gunman was involved.
Even though Sirhan admitted his guilt in a recorded confession while in police custody on June 9, a long, publicized trial followed in The People of the State of California v. Sirhan Sirhan. The judge did not accept Sirhan's confession and denied his request to withdraw his plea of "not guilty" to plead "guilty".
On February 10, 1969, Sirhan's lawyers made a motion in chambers to enter a plea of guilty to first-degree murder in exchange for life imprisonment rather than the death penalty. Sirhan told Judge Herbert V. Walker that he wanted to withdraw his original plea of not guilty to plead guilty as charged on all counts. He also asked that his counsel "dissociate themselves from this case completely". The judge asked him what he wanted to do about sentencing, and Sirhan replied, "I will ask to be executed." Walker denied the motion and said, "This court will not accept the plea." He also rejected Sirhan's request for his counsel to withdraw; his counsel entered another motion to withdraw from the case of their own volition, but Walker also denied that. Walker subsequently ordered that the record be sealed about the motion.
The trial proceeded, and opening statements began on February 12. The lead prosecutor in the case was Lynn "Buck" Compton, a World War II veteran of Easy Company fame who later became a justice of the California Court of Appeal. David Fitts delivered the prosecution's opening statement, providing examples of Sirhan's preparations to kill Kennedy. The prosecution showed that Sirhan was seen at the Ambassador Hotel on June 3, two nights before the attack, to learn the building's layout, and that he visited a gun range on June 4. Alvin Clark, Sirhan's garbage collector, testified that Sirhan had told him a month before the attack of his intention to shoot Kennedy.
Sirhan's defense counsel included attorney Grant Cooper, who had hoped to demonstrate that the killing had been the impulsive act of a man with a mental deficiency. But Walker admitted into evidence pages from three of Sirhan's journal notebooks that suggested the crime was premeditated and "quite calculating and willful". On March 3, Cooper asked Sirhan in direct testimony whether he had shot Kennedy; Sirhan replied, "Yes, sir", but then said that he did not bear Kennedy any ill will. Sirhan also testified that he had killed Kennedy "with twenty 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. He has maintained since then that he has no memory of the crime or of making that statement in court.
The defense based its case primarily on the expert testimony of Bernard L. Diamond, a professor of law and psychiatry, who testified that Sirhan was suffering from diminished capacity at the time of the murder. Sirhan was convicted on April 17, 1969, and was sentenced six days later to death by 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, which ruled that capital punishment violates the California Constitution's prohibition against cruel or unusual punishment. The February 1972 decision was retroactive, invalidating all existing death sentences in California.