Nearly five months after a state panel recommended Sirhan Sirhan for parole, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has decided not to grant it to the man convicted of murdering Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
Newsom, who counts Kennedy as a political idol, announced his decision on Thursday. He pardoned 24 people and commuted the sentences of 18 others in California prisons, while also granting reprieves to four people who were considered at high medical risk and one who was deemed suitable for parole.
Sirhan, who has served more than 50 years in prison, was not one of them.
"After carefully reviewing the case, including records in the California State Archives, I have determined that Sirhan has not developed the accountability and insight required to support his safe release into the community," Newsom wrote in a Los Angeles Times op-ed on Thursday. "I must reverse Sirhan’s parole grant."
The 77-year-old was convicted on April 17, 1969 of murdering Kennedy, less than a year after Kennedy was shot and killed in Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel after winning the California Democratic presidential primary. He was originally sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1972.
Kennedy served as attorney general in the John F. Kennedy administration, and he was poised to follow in his brother's footsteps as the Democratic nominee before he was shot on June 5, 1968.
Newsom has quoted the younger Kennedy in numerous speeches, including the night he fended off a gubernatorial recall last September. He told reporters at the time he had numerous pictures of Kennedy in his office at the California Capitol Building and one at home.
"I think that gives you a sense of where I might be leaning," Newsom said in September. "But right now, I don't want to lean into that process and create problems."
Sirhan, a Palestinian born in Jerusalem who later became a Jordanian citizen, told David Frost in 1989 he was angry at Kennedy's campaign proposal to send 50 military planes to Israel. Kennedy was shot on the anniversary of the 1967 Six-Day War, and Sirhan said in the interview that Kennedy's intention was to "obviously do harm to Palestinians."
"I was not doing it out of personal malice toward the man, but out of concern for other people," Sirhan said in 1989.
In that same interview, Sirhan said he was "totally sorry" and "felt nothing but remorse for having caused that tragic death."
Newsom wrote in his decision on Thursday that Sirhan's "shifting narrative" about his role in the assassination was "glaring proof" the 77-year-old "lacks the insight that would prevent him from making the kind of dangerous and destructive decisions he made in the past."
Since the Frost interview, Sirhan has said he doesn't remember shooting Kennedy and that he was drinking alcohol just beforehand. He told the Associated Press last year he didn't remember the killing, saying "it pains me to experience that, the knowledge for such a horrible deed, if I did in fact do that."
Last year, according to Newsom, told a parole board psychologist he "was in the wrong spot at the wrong time" and was innocent of the crime.
"Mr. Sirhan’s implausible and unsupported denials of responsibility and lack of credibility elevate his current risk level," Newsom wrote in the decision released on Thursday. "They indicate that Mr. Sirhan, despite decades of incarceration and purported efforts in rehabilitation, has failed to address the deficiencies that led him to assassinate Senator Kennedy."
California parole board commissioners in August recommended Sirhan for parole. It was his 16th appearance before the board. Two of Kennedy's surviving children, Douglas Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., supported Sirhan's latest parole bid.
Six of Kennedy's surviving children, however, did not. Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend never publicly indicated whether she supported or opposed Sirhan's parole.
"Kennedy's assassination not only changed the course of this nation and robbed the world of a promising young leader, it also left his 11 children without a father and his wife without a husband," Newsom wrote in the Los Angeles Times on Thursday. "Kennedy's family bears his loss every day."
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