Rory Kennedy on Wednesday asked California Gov. Gavin Newsom and prison officials to reject the parole recommendation for the man convicted of murdering her father, Robert F. Kennedy.
“I ask them, for my family and — I believe for our country, too — to please reject this recommendation and keep Sirhan Sirhan in prison,” the documentary filmmaker and youngest child of the senator and presidential candidate penned in a New York Times guest essay.
The 77-year-old Sirhan was granted parole by a two-person panel at his 16th parole hearing last Friday. Sirhan was convicted of fatally shooting RFK on June 5, 1968 in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. Sirhan was sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life with the possibility of parole.
Related Stories
“My father’s murder was absolute, irreversible, a painful truth that I have had to live with every day of my life — he was indeed taken forever. Because he was killed before I was born, it meant I never had the chance to see my father’s face, and that he never had the chance to see mine,” she wrote. “For America, the price of my father’s life and ambitions cut short has been incalculable — for the thousands of young men who died in Vietnam as the war my father opposed ground on for nearly seven more years; for the millions living in poverty or under the yoke of racism; for the wrongfully convicted who have languished behind prison walls; for the generation of would-be leaders whose hopes and dreams my father carried with him. Who knows what his death has cost?”
Kennedy, who wrote that she spoke for her mother and most of her 10 siblings — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Douglas Kennedy were in favor of the parole — wrote that Sirhan does not deserve to be released as he does not take responsibility for his history-changing actions.
“At the time of the trial, he moved to plead guilty to murder in the first degree,” Kennedy wrote. “Yet, across the decades that followed, right up through last week, he has not been willing to accept responsibility for his act and has shown little remorse. At his previous parole hearing, in 2016, when asked by Commissioner Brian Roberts to explain how he was involved in the murder, Mr. Sirhan replied, ‘I was there and I supposedly shot a gun.’ And how, having committed one of the most notorious assassinations of the latter part of the 20th century, can you be considered rehabilitated when you won’t even acknowledge your role in the crime itself?”
Kennedy concluded her lengthy Times piece by asking Gov. Newsom and the California Parole Board’s staff to deny the recommendation. The parties have 30 days to decide whether to grant it, reverse it or modify it.
