March 2010
by Thomas L. Libby

"Did you ... shoot Senator Kennedy?"

"Yes, sir," was Sirhan Sirhan's emphatic response when his own lawyer, Grant Cooper, posed the question under direct examination at trial in March 1969 for the death of presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy.

Eyewitnesses saw Sirhan fire the gun at the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel while shouting "Kennedy, you son of a bitch!" But his defense was "diminished mental capacity." After three days of deliberation, the jury found Sirhan guilty of first-degree murder. Judge Herbert Walker sentenced him to the gas chamber (People v. Sirhan, 7 Cal. 3d 710 (1972)), but he was taken off death row three years later when California's Supreme Court abolished the death penalty.

In prison for the past 40 years, Sirhan has been denied parole 13 times. He is next eligible in 2011.

Starting in the 1990s, Sirhan's new lawyer, Lawrence Teeter, sought another trial. Sirhan, he argued, had been hypnotized and programmed to shoot Kennedy by a CIA mind-control program. There were also accusations that police mishandled evidence, and acoustical evidence established that 13 shots were fired when Sirhan's gun held only 8 rounds.

Teeter died in 2005 before these arguments could be reviewed, but Sirhan continues to press his case with new representation.