Gov. Gavin Newsom got it horribly wrong: Sirhan Sirhan deserved to be granted parole
Somewhere in Southern California’s Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, a 77-year-old man has just learned that his latest — and possibly last — parole request has been denied.
Sirhan Sirhan, who has spent more than 50 years in prison for the murder of Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968, deserves to go free. He no longer presents a clear and present danger to the people of California, and frankly, he hasn’t for a long, long time.
But because he killed a nationally beloved politician, certain Americans — Gov. Gavin Newsom included — are blinded by their generational fondness for Kennedy and their misguided sense of justice for his assassination.
The Kennedy family, despite their national celebrity status, don’t deserve special accommodation within the law more than any other American citizen.
If Sirhan had killed anyone else but RFK, would he still be in prison today? The answer is likely no. But since Americans could not punish the murderer of John F. Kennedy in 1963, their grief boiled over to the case of Sirhan later that decade.
“We can’t change the past, but (Sirhan) was not sentenced to life without the possibility of parole,” Sirhan defense attorney Angela Berry told the Associated Press last year. “To justify denying it based on the gravity of the crime and the fact that it disenfranchised millions of Americans is ignoring the rehabilitation that has occurred, and that rehabilitation is a more relevant indicator of whether or not a person is still a risk to society.”
Sirhan’s lawyer in his initial trial, Grant Cooper, has been accused by Sirhan’s current lawyers of failing to provide adequate counsel.
Under California law, first-degree murder may be punished by execution, which is currently suspended in the state; life without parole; or 25 years to life. By allowing Sirhan to seek parole, the state has granted that his case deserves neither life without parole nor the death penalty. So why is he serving an interminable sentence?
Sirhan has watched many other men convicted of murder come and go from behind the bars of his cell. The California Board of Parole Hearings recommended that Sirhan be freed, but Newsom — an avowed Kennedy fan — denied it.
But Sirhan no longer poses a threat to society. California claims to be a progressive state, but keeping a human in jail long after he has paid his debt to society is akin to torture.
In his statement explaining his decision, Newsom quoted RFK: “Surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.”
It’s a travesty and a shame that California cannot bind up this wound more than five decades later. If we subscribe to the ideals that Kennedy preached, then we must give Sirhan his freedom.
This article was corrected to reflect Sirhan Sirhan’s current place of imprisonment, Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility.
This story was originally published January 13, 2022 at 5:40 PM.
