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April 23, 1969. Sirhan Sirhan is given the death sentence following his conviction in the shooting death of Democrat Robert F. Kennedy. After California abolished the death penalty in 1972, Sirhan’s sentence was reduced to life in prison.
RF Kennedy, a U.S. senator from New York who had just won the Democratic presidential primary in California, delivered a victory speech in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles early on June 5, 1968. Kennedy was shot three times at close range with a.22 caliber revolver by Sirhan Sirhan after the speech as he was heading toward the hotel kitchen to greet supporters; a fourth bullet passed through Kennedy’s jacket. Five additional persons were shot, but none of them died. Sirhan was quickly overpowered by the senator’s friends and aides.
Read: Robert Kennedy, The Great President America Lost in 1968
On June 6, Kennedy passed away at the hospital. He was 42 years old. Kennedy’s funeral mass took place at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City where he had been a senator since 1965 and had also served as the country’s attorney general from 1961 to 1964 under President Kennedy’s administration.
Thousands of mourners lined the railway track as his remains were eventually transported to Washington, D.C. He was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery next to his brother, President John F. Kennedy, who had been killed on November 22, 1963, by Lee Harvey Oswald.
Source: History Channel
Who is Sirhan Sirhan?
Palestinian immigrant Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, who was born in Jerusalem in 1944, immigrated to the US as a young child. He finished high school in California. Later, he said that the reason he killed Robert F. Kennedy was that the senator had sided with Israel during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Sirhan was found guilty on April 17, 1969, after a three-month trial during which his attorneys claimed he was mentally ill at the time of the crime. He received the death punishment on April 23.
The death penalty was, however, abolished by the California Supreme Court in 1972, and Sirhan’s sentence was changed to life in prison. He has had more than a dozen parole applications rejected, and he is still incarcerated in California.
