Sirhan Sirhan
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.
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