22-01-2016, 02:54 PM
On February 10, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, the convicted assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, will be considered for parole in San Diego. Sirhan was originally scheduled for release in 1984 but after intense political pressure, his parole date was rescinded in 1982 and he has since been denied thirteen times.
In March, Sirhan will turn 72 years old, having spent two-thirds of his life in prison for a crime he cannot remember committing. For three years prior to his last parole hearing in 2011, Dr. Daniel Brown of Harvard Medical School spent over sixty hours with Sirhan trying to recover his memory of the shooting. Dr. Brown concluded Sirhan's amnesia for events before and during the shooting was real but his findings were ignored by the parole board, who saw the gaps in Sirhan's memory as a cynical ruse to minimise his responsibility for his crime.
Sirhan has been an exemplary inmate, with no prison violations since 1972 and an excellent work record. If paroled, he would be deported to Jordan to live out his final years, a danger to nobody. But as The Marshall Project recently discovered in a year-long examination of America's parole boards, parole decisions are often driven not by public safety but by politics. Since 1982, California has treated Sirhan like a political prisoner who will never be released, not a human being who has served his time and has the right to a fair hearing and the rule of law. In the courts, his habeas corpus petition was denied last year, despite new audio evidence indicating thirteen shots were fired in the Ambassador Hotel pantry that evening.
American journalism's record of reporting this case has been abysmal, with no serious investigation by a news organisation since a CBS News inquiry forty years ago. While Sirhan is still alive, there's still time to reinvestigate his case and expose the politicised charade that his appeal and parole process have become. I will be blogging on the case daily in advance of Sirhan's parole hearing, releasing a range of new archival material, and I urge others to join me: www.sirhanbsirhan.com
I've posted a video giving an overview of the case, with previously-unseen clips from Sirhan's 2011 hearing here.
In March, Sirhan will turn 72 years old, having spent two-thirds of his life in prison for a crime he cannot remember committing. For three years prior to his last parole hearing in 2011, Dr. Daniel Brown of Harvard Medical School spent over sixty hours with Sirhan trying to recover his memory of the shooting. Dr. Brown concluded Sirhan's amnesia for events before and during the shooting was real but his findings were ignored by the parole board, who saw the gaps in Sirhan's memory as a cynical ruse to minimise his responsibility for his crime.
Sirhan has been an exemplary inmate, with no prison violations since 1972 and an excellent work record. If paroled, he would be deported to Jordan to live out his final years, a danger to nobody. But as The Marshall Project recently discovered in a year-long examination of America's parole boards, parole decisions are often driven not by public safety but by politics. Since 1982, California has treated Sirhan like a political prisoner who will never be released, not a human being who has served his time and has the right to a fair hearing and the rule of law. In the courts, his habeas corpus petition was denied last year, despite new audio evidence indicating thirteen shots were fired in the Ambassador Hotel pantry that evening.
American journalism's record of reporting this case has been abysmal, with no serious investigation by a news organisation since a CBS News inquiry forty years ago. While Sirhan is still alive, there's still time to reinvestigate his case and expose the politicised charade that his appeal and parole process have become. I will be blogging on the case daily in advance of Sirhan's parole hearing, releasing a range of new archival material, and I urge others to join me: www.sirhanbsirhan.com
I've posted a video giving an overview of the case, with previously-unseen clips from Sirhan's 2011 hearing here.