The man who killed Senator Robert F Kennedy in 1968 could be freed on parole after prosecutors said they won’t oppose his parole request.
Sirhan B Sirhan, now 77, has spent the last 53 years in a San Diego prison and is scheduled to stand in front of a California parole board for the 16th time on Friday.
His last parole hearing was in February 2016.
He was originally condemned to death, but California temporarily banned capital punishment and his sentence was reduced to life in prison, with that loophole also giving him the chance to seek freedom.
Robert Kennedy Jr is supporting Sirhan’s bid for freedom because he doesn’t think he’s the man who killed his father, and in 2018, he visited Sirhan in jail and told him he didn’t believe he was responsible for the shooting.
Sirhan admitted to the killing shortly after it occurred in Los Angeles in 1968 but has maintained for years that he has no recollection of it.
Robert Kennedy Jr said in 2018 that he believed someone else shot his father, and that Sirhan was set up to take the blame for it, and that he wanted the case to be reopened.
LA County District Attorney George Gascon hasn’t indicated whether or not he will reopen the case and it’s unclear if Sirhan intends to file an appeal.
Prosecutors have opposed his parole efforts 15 times and LA County’s new District Attorney, George Gascon, is choosing to remain unbiased this time.
Gascon’s office will not attend Sirhan’s parole hearing, nor do they intend to send a letter in support of him, and Alex Bastian, special adviser to Gascon told a newspaper outlet that the position of a prosecutor and their access to information ends at sentencing and that the parole board’s sole goal was to impartially decide whether someone was suitable for release and that if someone is the same person that perpetrated an appalling crime, that person would not correctly be found suitable for release.
However, if someone is no longer a menace to public safety after having completed more than 50 years in jail, then the parole board may support discharge based on an unbiased decision.
Former Maryland lieutenant governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend said in 2018 that she supported her brother’s calls for a new investigation into their father’s killing.
Sirhan was arrested on June 5, 1968, at the scene of Kennedy’s Los Angeles shooting and sentenced to first-degree murder after he confessed, but has maintained over the years that he has no memory of the day of the confession.
Perhaps this man is innocent, but who knows when so much truth has been buried, and if Robert F Kennedy Jr and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend aren’t convinced that Sirhan B Sirhan killed their father, then who do they think did it, or has that been buried as well? And nobody’s going to let the cat out of the bag, too much has been seen already.
However, it’s all pretty ominous, and there was a lot of evidence – gun in his hand, gunpowder traces on his hand, fingertips and the gun et cetera, unless the argument is that he was brainwashed by someone else to do it.
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