In June 1968, Sirhan Sirhan had killed the Democratic senator, in the middle of the campaign for the primaries.
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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 the state, considered in particular that the detainee, now 77 years old, still constituted “a threat to public safety” and he refused “to accept responsibility for this crime”.
This Palestinian immigrant had assassinated “Bobby” Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in June 1968. The New York senator, younger brother of ex-president John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was then campaigning for the Democratic nomination in sight of the presidential election. 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 capital punishment in California. In August 2021, the state parole board finally gave its approval for his release from prison, after having refused it fifteen times.
“The Assassination of Senator Kennedy by [Sirhan] Sirhan is one of the most notorious crimes in American history.”, nevertheless judged Gavin Newsom in a press release. “After decades spent in prison, (…) he does not have the lucidity necessary to prevent him from making the same dangerous decisions as in the past.”
During his previous parole application in 2016, Sirhan Sirhan claimed he had drunk too much the night of the crime and would have liked “nothing happened”. He had also assured that the confessions during his trial were made by a lawyer who had badly advised him and had convinced him that he was guilty.