I was an idealistic 26-year-old clerking on the United States Supreme Court when Sirhan Sirhan murdered Robert F. Kennedy, then a leading candidate for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination.
My dreams — like those of millions of Americans — for a humane exit from the Vietnam War, for a brighter American future, were killed that day in a crowded hotel kitchen hallway, minutes after Kennedy won California’s Democratic primary. Having committed the assassination in a large crowd and on live television, Sirhan could hardly deny being the gunman.
At times, he has claimed his memory is blurry. But in interviews and interrogations, Sirhan, a Palestinian nationalist, has admitted to trying to kill Kennedy in retribution for Kennedy’s stance on Israel, doing so on the first anniversary of the beginning of the Six-Day War. But he does not take responsibility for ending the 42-year-old senator’s life and crushing the hopes of his millions of supporters. And certainly not for destroying the nation’s opportunity to pass democratic judgment on Kennedy’s bold message.
Sirhan is a political assassin. The nature of his action must determine how we view justice in his case.
When Sirhan was sentenced to death by a California court in April 1969, I felt ambivalent. As a law clerk for Justice Potter Stewart, I had helped draft an opinion, announced just two days before RFK’s murder, that curtailed juries’ ability to impose capital punishment by ending the practice of striking every juror with even the slightest qualms about the death penalty. It was a step toward abolition. But if anyone deserved capital punishment, I thought, it was Sirhan. And if the death penalty were to be ended, then at least Sirhan deserved to die in prison.
Over half a century has passed, and I continue to feel ambivalent about state-sponsored execution, although I’m close to being persuaded that no government — certainly no government in power today — is so infallible that it can justly put anyone to death. Not because none deserve that fate but because no government deserves to play God.
That said, I feel morally certain about this: that Sirhan’s life was spared when his death sentence was converted to life imprisonment in 1972, by virtue of California’s temporary abolition of the death penalty, should not result in him being given his freedom now or ever.
Even if it could be shown that Sirhan no longer poses a threat to others, he must never be released because our justice system demands the strictest punishment for the most atrocious crimes. There is no doubt in my mind that political assassination stands nearly alone in its threat to the foundation of society — it is a crime against our republic as much as against an individual.
I oppose Sirhan’s parole not because he murdered a politician I found inspiring; the assassin of a politician I vehemently oppose would be equally deserving of dying in prison. No, it’s because Sirhan took our history and government into his own bloody hands through an act of premeditated political violence.
Bobby Kennedy’s nine surviving children have expressed divergent views on this issue. But as much as I sympathize with the pain felt by the majority of the Kennedy children, who oppose Sirhan’s release, no member of the senator’s family has a special claim to be heard here.
The promise of our judicial system is to impart equal justice based on our collective moral judgments as embodied in law, not on the grief and anger of victims’ families.
In this case, the question we need to answer is, what does an assassin deserve in matters of justice? Sirhan victimized not only the Kennedy family but also the American family. We the people were his victims. And it is we the people who should be outraged by the parole board panel’s decision to recommend his release. The full parole board should reverse that decision. If it doesn’t, Gov. Gavin Newsom must.
Laurence H. Tribe is a professor of constitutional law emeritus at Harvard University. He served as the first head of the Access to Justice Office in the Obama administration. © 2021 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.