In August 2021, the state parole board approved his release from prison, after refusing it fifteen times.
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The governor of California rejected, Thursday, January 13, the parole of Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kennedy. Gavin Newsom, elected Democrat at the head of state, said in particular that the detainee, now 77 years old, still constituted “a threat to public safety” and that he refused “to accept responsibility for this crime”.
This Palestinian immigrant had murdered “Bobby” Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in August 1968. The New York senator, younger brother of ex-President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was campaigning for the prominent Democratic nomination at the time. of the presidential election. Five other people were injured. The murderer had at the time justified his gesture by the support given by Robert Kennedy to the sale of military planes to Israel.
Sirhan Sirhan was sentenced to death the following year but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1972, following a brief abolition of the death penalty in California. In August 2021, the state parole board finally agreed to his release from prison, after refusing it fifteen times.
“The assassination of Senator Kennedy by [Sirhan] Sirhan is one of the most famous crimes in American history, nevertheless ruled Gavin Newsom in a statement Thursday. After decades in prison, he still has not corrected the flaws that led him to assassinate Senator Kennedy. He does not have the lucidity to prevent him from making the same dangerous decisions as in the past. ” During his previous parole application in 2016, Sirhan Sirhan had claimed that he had drunk too much on the night of the crime and that he would have liked “that nothing happened”. He also asserted that his confession had been obtained through torture and that his confession had been obtained through torture.