Sirhan Stabbing Raises Questions On Safety, Innocence, Cover Up

The stabbing of Sirhan Sirhan on Aug. 30 in a California prison is bringing renewed attention to claims that he was unfairly convicted for the 1968 assassination of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy — and has since been denied justice because of a monumental cover up.

Sirhan, now 75 (and shown in a 2016 prison photo), is reportedly hospitalized in stable condition following his stabbing at  the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in Otay Mesa, near San Diego. A Los Angeles Times story, Sirhan Sirhan is reportedly stabbed at prison in San Diego, drew from California corrections authorities and other sources to report that Sirhan suffered neck wounds and that his assailant has been identified.

The Justice Integrity Project sought reaction from experts, particularly those who have published recent books or otherwise argued that California authorities — including U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris when she was California’s attorney general — have unfairly resisted efforts to provide Sirhan with the first-ever evidentiary hearing. This would be a hearing whereby scientific evidence could be introduced showing that Sirhan could not possibly have fired the shots that killed Kennedy after a 1968 speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Sirhan’s lead counsel, Dr. William F. Pepper, one of a number of experts who has become convinced of the defendant’s innocence in firing fatal bullets at Kennedy, commented on the stabbing by noting the 213-page petition that he filed in 2017 on Sirhan’s behalf seeking the first evidentiary hearing in the case that would evaluate ballistic and other forensic evidence.

Pepper is shown at left in a file photo.

Co-defense counsel Laurie Dusek, who promptly left her base in New York after the news to travel to California, commented that authorities failed to notify either Sirhan’s immediate family and counsel of record regarding the stabbing. She said on Saturday afternoon that Sirhan’s brother Munir Sirhan has been unable to obtain information from the hospital treating the prisoner.

Sirhan’s original defense lawyer — Grant Cooper, a prominent Los Angeles trial attorney whose independence had been compromised by secret felony case that authorities brought in an unrelated matter, with charges dismissed after Sirhan’s conviction –  conceded Sirhan’s guilt in the defendant’s 1969 trial. The defense counsel, who died in 1990 at age 87, failed to argue to the jury, for example, that Los Angeles Coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi had determined that Kennedy was killed with three shots fired from the rear (whereas Sirhan was in front of the late senator, according to witnesses).

A recent quotation from that medical examiner, the still-living Dr. Thomas Noguchi, is shown below.

Pepper, who had been a county campaign chairman and friend to Kennedy in the 1960s and went on to a legal career that has included teaching human rights law for years at Oxford University in England, filed the 2017 petition on Sirhan’s to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), a body within the Organization of American States (whose logo is at right).

“I believe,” Pepper commented on Saturday, ‘that it is no coincidence that Sirhan has received a potentially fatal attack at a time when the IACHR is being compelled to consider granting an evidentiary hearing, which could, finally, establish his innocence of the assassination of Senator Kennedy.”

IACHR has not yet set a hearing on the petition despite numerous inquiries by Pepper and this editor, who collaborated on a 2018 Consortium News column about the case, OAS Facing Call for New Probe into RFK Murder. Here is a link to the filing.

In a separate comment on Saturday, author Lisa Pease urged the public to sign a petition to California Gov. Gavin Newsom to free him. “We’d all love a new court proceeding,” she wrote. “But he just wants to go home.” The Change.org petition is here. 

Earlier this year, Pease, a former aide in 1992 to California Gov. Jerry Brown during his presidential run, authored the 512-page account of the case, shown at left, A Lie Too Big To Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

In 2018, the Washington Post published a multi-part series by longtime criminal justice reporter Tom Jackson, Who killed Bobby Kennedy? His son RFK Jr. doesn’t believe it was Sirhan Sirhan. It reported that two of the late senator RFK’s children, law professor, author and activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Georgetown University scholar and former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend were among those calling for a new investigation of the case based on evidence that Sirhan did not fire the fatal shots.

 Sirhan Shot But Did He Kills?

Even Sirhan’s defenders have conceded that he did fire some shots, as the government has always maintained. The issue is whether he fired the fatal ones. The issues prompted Robert Kennedy Jr., the late New York senator’s eldest son and a longtime law professor, to visit Sirhan in prison, otherwise study the case and then conclude that strong questions remain in the government’s evidence, as indicated by the graphic above.

It references a 30-minute recording made the night of the shooting by Stanislaus “Stas” Pruszynski, a Canadian journalist working on a book about the senator’s fateful 1968 presidential campaign whereby he sought to succeed incumbent Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson during the height of Vietnam War and racial protests and riots following the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the spring of 2004, CNN journalist Brad Johnson discovered the tape and its importance, especially after audio expert Philip Van Praag determined that it showed 13 shots being fired. Sirhan’s .22 caliber gun could fire eight shots at most.

Johnson tracked Pruszynski to the latter’s native Poland, where he confirmed that to Johnson that he had failed to realize that he had neglected to discontinue recording after RFK finished his California primary victory speech. This is the only known recording of the shooting, which occurred in a crowded hotel pantry as the candidate left the speaking stage.

Sirhan, born in Jerusalem to an Arab Christian family, is shown in police custody shortly after his arrest in 1968. He has said that he cannot remember why he went to the hotel, why he was shooting and who, if anyone, were accomplices.

Sirhan’s current advocates, including some biographers, suspect on the basis of numerous clues that he was groomed, probably with the help of drugs, to become a patsy for a professional killer who escaped along with one or more co-conspirators.

The Washington Post’s Jackman, right, explored the hypnosis possibility last year in The assassination of Bobby Kennedy: Was Sirhan Sirhan hypnotized to be the fall guy?

Jackman reported: At the police station, Sirhan was preternaturally calm, officers later said. “I was impressed by Sirhan’s composure and relaxation,” Sgt. William Jordan wrote in a report later that morning. “He appeared less upset to me than individuals arrested for a traffic violation.”

But the hypnosis angle gained momentum in recent years after Sirhan was examined for more than 60 hours by a Harvard Medical School professor with vast expertise in forensic psychiatry and hypnosis.

In a lengthy affidavit filed with Sirhan’s last appeal in 2011, Daniel P. Brown (shown at right) concluded that “Mr. Sirhan did not act under his own volition and knowledge at the time of the assassination and is not responsible for actions coerced and/or carried out by others.” He was, Brown said, a true “Manchurian Candidate,” hypno-programmed into carrying out a violent political act without knowing it.

Others writing on the topic include Dr. Shane O’Sullivan, who wrote the book Who Killed Bobby? and the WhoWhatWhy column Was Sirhan Hypnotically Programmed to Assassinate RFK?

Also, O’Sullivan directed the documentary RFK Must Die.

O’Sullivan reported last year: “Over the last 11 years, Sirhan’s co-counsel Laurie Dusek and Dr. Daniel Brown (shown above right left), a leading expert on hypnosis and coercive persuasion at Harvard Medical School, have spent over 150 hours with Sirhan, working pro bono and at great personal cost to recover his memory of the shooting.”

Among others probing irregularities in the case are longtime journalists Tim Tate and Brad Johnson, who published the 2018 book The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: Crime, Conspiracy and Cover-Up – A New Investigation.

Tate worked for BBC for many years and has authored best-selling books on other topics. Johnson is a former correspondent for CNN. Each worked two decades intermittently in researching their book.

Several of the authors have focused on an audio recording of the news report that van Praag has determined shows 13 shots fired during the assassination.

Johnson shared his views in the comments below in one of a series of graphics prepared by the Justice Integrity Project last year:

The .22 caliber gun seized from Sirhan had a maximum capacity of eight shots. Authorities removed from the scene wall and ceiling materials where it was reputed that bullets landed, with that evidence largely unavailable for Sirhan’s defense or researchers since.

Kennedy’s close friend Paul Schrade has said he believes Sirhan shot him in the head and that he originally believed the official verdict. But Schrade has since become a determined advocate for Sirhan’s release in the belief that someone else fired the fatal shots killing Kennedy. His quotation to that effect are show below in graphics prepared by the Justice Integrity Project (and available for complimentary reuse by others). This column will be updated with additional expert comments.

Dr. Cyril M. Wecht, a longtime coroner, medical school professor, author and consultant based in Pittsburgh, also has decried the continued imprisonment of Sirhan without parole or a new hearing. Wecht, author and co-author of nearly 50 books, assisted Dr. Noguchi on the Kennedy autopsy.

Government and Media Cover Up

Nearly all government officials and most mainstream media, aside from the Washington Post in the 2018 series quoted above and below, avoid any in-depth discussion of the scientific evidence, the still-living witnesses willing to testify or the implications of the case if, as it appears, Sirhan was wrongfully convicted and is being kept in prison long after his normal release on parole in the mid-1980s even if had had killed Kennedy.

The silence and obfuscation, at among key players, doubtless stems the acute embarrassment for the legal system if serious problems became widely known regarding one of the most iconic and historically pivotal murder cases in recent American history. Kennedy was well on his way after his California victory to securing the Democratic nomination for president in July and then likely defeating during the fall elections Republican presidential nominee.

Most books until recently have also accepted with little question the prosecution’s argument that Sirhan was the sole killer and acted without accomplices.

Contrary to popular belief, it is far easier and more lucrative for most book and film creators to accept as fact official government conclusions in the most politically sensitive death cases rather than incur pushback by authorities, especially if a cover up is alleged involving the intelligence divisions of local or federal bodies.

More than three thousand books have been published in whole or part about the assassination of RFK’s brother John F. Kennedy, for example, but only a few that are of the official story have achieved enduring best-seller status. Yet decades of polling has shown that more than 60 percent of the public (and sometimes nearly 80 percent) do not believe the conclusions of the 1964 Warren Report ascribing sole guilt in JFK’s death to Lee Harvey Oswald.

Although members of the public may feel free to express their opinions decision-makers in government, publishing, film and academia understand the danger to their careers if they are smeared by the term “conspiracy theorist,” which was weaponized by the CIA in the 1960s to thwart inquiries about the JFK assassination (according to a now-declassified CIA memo).

Sirhan’s next California parole hearing cannot be until 2021 because of state procedures enabling them only at five year intervals. He has never been allowed to present witnesses  and other evidence. The state denies parole under a “Catch 22,” in effect: That if he seeks to prove innocence for firing the fatal bullets he is not accepting guilt and so his requests must be denied for lack of remorse.

In the 2020 Democratic presidential race’s July debate, an indirect focus occurred on the plight of Sirhan and other California prisoners who might be suffering injustice.

Democratic contender Tulsi Gabbard, a congresswoman from Hawaii (shown at right in a file photo), sharply attacked the prosecution record of Kamala Harris as being unfairly harsh during her years as California attorney general before election to the U.S. Senate.

Gabbard did not cite specific defendants such as Sirhan. But the attack appeared to resonate strongly against Harris, who has been campaigning as a liberal and advocate for racial minorities and other downtrodden.

Polling numbers for Harris went down after the debate duel with Gabbard in most surveys, while Gabbard became the most searched-for candidate on social media.

Harris, portrayed at left in caricature by the editors of Black Agenda Report, is held in very low regard by many key advocates for Sirhan because of her actions as attorney general to thwart Sirhan’s requests,

The problems for Harris are of scant comfort for the advocates for Sirhan but do serve to illustrate the challenges in such efforts:

Even an ostensible liberal and advocate for justice reform such as Harris appears to have little or no interest in solving the murder of her predecessor, the Democratic icon Robert F. Kennedy (shown at right campaigning with his friends Delores Huerta and Paul Schrade (at center, stretching out his arm) among migrant farm workers in California. 

The Powers That Be, the same powers that RFK fought during his final campaign, do not want facts or justice, it seems — only compliance with conventional wisdom until all witnesses (incluiding the prisoner) are dead.

Contact the author Andrew Kreig

Related News Coverage

2019

Aug. 30

Sirhan Stabbed In Custody

Los Angeles Times, Sirhan Sirhan is reportedly stabbed at prison in San Diego, Teri Figueroa, Aug. 30, 2019. Sirhan Sirhan, who is serving a life sentence for the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, was reportedly stabbed Friday in a San Diego-area prison. TMZ and NBC7, both citing unnamed sources, reported that the 75-year-old inmate had been stabbed at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in Otay Mesa.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation issued a statement Friday confirming that an inmate had been assaulted, but the agency would not say whether the victim was Sirhan Sirhan (shown in a 2016 prisoner photo).

According to the statement from state prison officials, a Donovan inmate was assaulted at 2:21 p.m.

“Officers responded quickly, and found an inmate with stab wound injuries,” the department said. “He was transported to an outside hospital for medical care, and is currently in stable condition.”

“The suspect in the attack has been identified, and has [been] placed in the prison’s Administrative Segregation Unit, pending an investigation.”

According to Cal Fire spokesman Capt. Thomas Shoots, medics responded to a reported stabbing — the person was bleeding from the neck — just before 2:25 p.m. Friday. He said the person, whose identity he could not release, was taken by ambulance to a hospital shortly before 2:50 p.m.

Sirhan Sirhan (shown after his arrest) has been in the state’s prison system since May 1969, nearly a year after Kennedy, who was seeking the Democratic nomination for president, was assassinated.

Kennedy was shot and gravely wounded shortly after midnight June 5, 1968, after a speaking to supporters at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Sirhan, then 24, was subdued at the scene. Kennedy, 42, died early the next day. Online Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation records state that the inmate, whose full name is Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, has been up for parole numerous times. His next hearing is slated for February 2021.

2018

June 5

New Focus On Hypnosis In RFK Murder 50 Years Ago Today

WhoWhatWhy, Opinion & Analysis: Was Sirhan Hypnotically Programmed to Assassinate RFK? Shane O’Sullivan, June 5, 2018. Dr. Shane O’Sullivan, shown above, wrote “Who Killed Bobby?” and directed the documentary “RFK Must Die.”

Fifty years ago, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. His convicted assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, remains in prison in San Diego and claims to have no memory of the crime. Robert Kennedy Jr. visited Sirhan for three hours last December and, on the basis of new audio evidence of a second shooter, is calling for a new investigation into the case.

Over the last 11 years, Sirhan’s attorney Laurie Dusek and Dr. Daniel Brown (shown at left), a leading expert on hypnosis and coercive persuasion at Harvard Medical School, have spent over 150 hours with Sirhan, working pro bono and at great personal cost to recover his memory of the shooting.

The WhoWhatWhy piece shows 67 minutes of video footage spiked from a Netflix documentary showing  Dr. Dan Brown and Sirhan’s attorney, Laurie Dusek, discussing their groundbreaking work with Sirhan for the first time. 

Washington Post, Did L.A. police and prosecutors bungle the Bobby Kennedy assassination probe? Tom Jackman (shown right), June 5, 2018. For six years after he was shot and wounded while walking behind Robert F. Kennedy in the Ambassador Hotel in June 1968, Paul Schrade mourned the loss of his friend and stayed out of the public eye. But beginning with a news conference in 1974, Schrade has demanded answers to the question of whether a second gunman — and not Sirhan Sirhan — killed Kennedy.

Soon after Sirhan’s trial ended with his first-degree-murder conviction in April 1969, journalists noted that Kennedy had been shot in the back of the head at point-blank range, but witnesses all said Sirhan was standing in front of Kennedy. Bullet holes found in the doors of the crime scene indicated more shots were fired than could have come from Sirhan’s eight-shot .22-caliber pistol, some witnesses said. Sirhan’s defense team had not challenged any of the physical evidence at trial.

Consortium News, A just published book on the RFK murder re-examines the evidences and asks what the world might be like if the four 1960s assassinations never occurred, James DiEugenio, June 5, 2018. Authors Tim Tate and Brad Johnson begin their new book, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: Crime, Conspiracy and Cover-Up – A New Investigation (Thistle Publishing) with this quote from RFK the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed: “What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by an assassin’s bullet.”

Just two months later Kennedy would become the last in a series of four assassinations of American leaders from 1963-68: President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. The cumulative political impact of those murders is hard to overstate. Toward the end of their book the authors try to estimate what that impact was.

Though it’s impossible to say for sure, they conjecture that, at the very least, the Vietnam War would have ended much sooner and would not have expanded into Laos and Cambodia. We know for certain that President Richard Nixon’s decision to expand the war caused the collapse of the government of Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk, the eventual takeover by the Khmer Rouge and the death of two million people.

The murder of Bobby Kennedy has always seemed to get less attention in the mainstream media than the other 1960s assassinations, perhaps because it’s been considered an “open and shut case.” There were, after all, seventy witnesses to RFK’s murder. But the Los Angeles Police Department decided very early, and quite literally, that what happened in the wee hours of June 5, 1968 would not be another Dallas, as Tate and Johnson say.

June 4

Washington Post, The assassination of Bobby Kennedy: Was Sirhan Sirhan hypnotized to be the fall guy? Tom Jackman (shown right), June 4, 2018. Even as Sirhan Sirhan was being captured, seconds after the shooting of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles, he behaved oddly. A group of men had tackled him, held him down and tried to wrest the gun out of his hands.

But “in the middle of a hurricane of sound and feeling,” wrote one of those men, author George Plimpton, Sirhan “seemed peaceful.” Plimpton was struck by Sirhan’s “dark brown and enormously peaceful eyes.” A Los Angeles police officer who had rushed in recalled, “He had a blank, glassed-over look on his face — like he wasn’t in complete control of his mind.”

At the same time, the short, slim Sirhan (shown in a photo after arrest) — 5 feet 5 inches, about 120 pounds — exerted superhuman strength as one man held his wrist to a steam table in the Ambassador Hotel pantry, firing off five or six more shots even as he was held around the neck, body and legs by other men, witnesses said. It took a half-dozen men to wrench the .22-caliber pistol out of Sirhan’s grip.

At the police station, Sirhan was preternaturally calm, officers later said. “I was impressed by Sirhan’s composure and relaxation,” Sgt. William Jordan wrote in a report later that morning. “He appeared less upset to me than individuals arrested for a traffic violation.”

But the hypnosis angle gained momentum in recent years after Sirhan was examined for more than 60 hours by a Harvard Medical School professor with vast expertise in forensic psychiatry and hypnosis. In a lengthy affidavit filed with Sirhan’s last appeal in 2011, Daniel P. Brown (shown at right) concluded that “Mr. Sirhan did not act under his own volition and knowledge at the time of the assassination and is not responsible for actions coerced and/or carried out by others.” He was, Brown said, a true “Manchurian Candidate,” hypno-programmed into carrying out a violent political act without knowing it.

“I have written four textbooks on hypnosis,” Brown wrote, “and have hypnotized over 6,000 individuals over a 40-year professional career. Mr. Sirhan is one of the most hypnotizable individuals I have ever met, and the magnitude of his amnesia for actions under hypnosis is extreme.” Brown said he has spent another 60 hours with Sirhan in the years since his 2011 affidavit, further confirming his conclusions.

Brown researched not only Sirhan’s background but also the details of the case, and wove together the CIA’s notorious “MKUltra” mind-control experiments of the 1950s and 1960s; the Mafia; the famed “girl in the polka-dot dress” seen with Sirhan before the shooting; and an unknown “Radio Man” who secretly directed Sirhan to write the incriminating “RFK must die!” statements in a notebook found in his bedroom.

Lawyers for Sirhan are currently using the theory that he was a hypnotized distraction for the actual killer of Kennedy in a pending appeal to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Although it would have no binding power over the case, a positive finding could be used to push California authorities to reopen the case. Sirhan attorney William Pepper said he’s convinced that someone used “both drugs and hypnosis to make him a totally compliant distraction at the time Bobby Kennedy was within range of the second shooter, who was able to get down behind him.” Kennedy’s fatal wound was fired at point-blank range from behind, while witnesses said Sirhan was in front of him.

But to the U.S. court system, that claim simply didn’t fly. In rejecting Sirhan’s final federal appeal in 2013, U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Wistrich wrote that Sirhan’s “theory that he was subject to mind control may be intriguing” but that the experts’ views “fall far short of demonstrating that [Sirhan] actually was subjected to mind control.” Wistrich added that “Brown’s retrospective opinion based upon tests assessing [Sirhan’s] mental condition forty years after the fact are of negligible weight.”

May 27

New Doubts About Sirhan’s Guilt In RFK Murder

Robert F Kennedy Jr (2017 portrait by Gage Skidmore)

Washington Post, Retropolis: Who killed Bobby Kennedy? His son RFK Jr. doesn’t believe it was Sirhan Sirhan, Tom Jackman, May 27, 2018 (print edition). Just before Christmas, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pulled up to the massive Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, a California state prison complex in the desert outside San Diego that holds nearly 4,000 inmates. Kennedy was there to visit Sirhan B. Sirhan, the man convicted of killing his father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, nearly 50 years ago.

While his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, waited in the car, Kennedy met with Sirhan for three hours, he revealed to The Washington Post last week. It was the culmination of months of research by Kennedy into the assassination, including speaking with witnesses and reading the autopsy and police reports.

“I got to a place where I had to see Sirhan,” Kennedy said. He would not discuss the specifics of their conversation. But when it was over, Kennedy had joined those who believe there was a second gunman, and that it was not Sirhan (shown in a 2016 prison photo) who killed his father, shown at right.

“I went there because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence,” said Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and the third oldest of his father’s 11 children. “I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father. My father was the chief law enforcement officer in this country. I think it would have disturbed him if somebody was put in jail for a crime they didn’t commit.”