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California Gov. Gavin Newsom says the convicted killer has not developed the “responsibilities and knowledge” needed to be released.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has denied parole to Sirhan Sirhani, a Palestinian refugee serving a life sentence for the 1968 death of US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy.
Newsom made the announcement on Thursday after a California investigative committee recommended that Sirhan be released from prison for review by the commission’s legal staff and the governor himself. He had been denied parole 15 times before.
Explaining his decision in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece, Newsom said he disagreed with the conditional court’s view that he was 77 years of probation.
“After a careful examination of the case, including records from the California State Archives, Sirhan has not developed the responsibilities and knowledge necessary for safe release in the community,” Newsom wrote.
Sirhan’s lawyer, Angela Berry, did not immediately respond to the request for comment. He has previously said that Sirhani has never been charged with a serious prison violation and that prison officials believe he is at low risk.
Sirhan Kennedy, 42, was convicted of shooting in the kitchen of the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968.
The shooting came a minute after the U.S. senator and former U.S. attorney general won the Democratic primary in California and gave a minute of victory. Kennedy died the next day. Kennedy’s older brother John F Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 in Dallas.
Sirhan said he did not remember the assassination of Robert Kennedy, although he also said he shot Kennedy because he was angry with the help he had given Israel.
Following a recommendation from the parole board, Kennedy’s widow, 93-year-old Ethel, expressed her opposition to Sirhan’s release, saying that “our family and our country have suffered an indescribable loss because of a man’s inhumanity.”
Newsom called Sirhan’s “changing narrative” about the murder and refused to take responsibility for it as evidence that he had no right to release.
Newsom added that the murder was “one of the most notorious crimes in American history.”
Sirhani was sentenced to death in 1969, but his sentence was commuted to life in prison after California banned the death penalty.
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