Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted 52 years ago for the murder of Robert Kennedy, will be released from prison. The California Parole Board granted parole to the 77-year-old Palestinian refugee. Sihran will not be released from prison immediately: the decision must be validated within 90 days by the Board staff and countersigned by Governor Gavin Newson.
It was the sixteenth time that Sirhan had appeared before the Californian commission, but the first in which the prosecutor had not come to support the need for the condemned to remain behind bars. This is because George Gascon, the new District Attorney of Los Angeles County, recently revoked the rules under which the plaintiff routinely went to hearings: “Our work stops at the time of sentencing. We make no exceptions for Sirhan, ”spokesman Alex Bastian said.
Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of the assassination of Robert Kennedy
In 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, with American cities on fire after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign had revived the hope that a deeply torn country could find cohesion. Never a naturalized American citizen, aspiring jockey Sirhan changed the course of history on June 5, 1968 by unloading eight gunshots on a crowd of RFK supporters in the kitchens of the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles.
Did he really want, as he said at the trial, to punish the man who had just won the California primary for supporting Israel in the Six Day War? Or was it just the insane gesture of a drunkard who had recently entered the mystical sect of the Rosicrucians? Rfk, pragmatic but idealistic, in those days had confirmed himself as the favorite in the challenge of the Dems against Richard Nixon: his death split the party and in November “Tricky Dick” had an easy game won over the gray rival Humbert Humphrey.
For those eight bullets, which injured five other people, Sirhan was sentenced to the gas chamber in 1969, commuted to life imprisonment with the possibility of penalty discounts after the California Supreme Court in 1972 temporarily abolished the death penalty. In recent days, excellent personalities had lined up to push for his release: the trade unionist Paul Schrade, who was one of the five injured and is convinced that on that fateful day there was a second shooter never identified, some sons of RFK had joined, including Robert Junior, who visited Sirhan in jail in 2018, and Katherine Kennedy Townsend. Yesterday in the courtroom, Douglas, who was just over a year old when his father was killed, spoke: “I have lived my whole life in terror of him and his name”, he said: “Now I am grateful because I see a human being who deserves compassion”.