Credit: © CNP
Meeting J. Edgar Hoover
SAN DIEGO (AP) — Sirhan Sirhan faced his 16th parole hearing Friday for the assassination of U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, and for the first time no prosecutor was there to argue he should be kept behind bars.
Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, a former police officer who took office last year after running on a reform platform, says he idolized the Kennedys and mourned RFK’s assassination but is sticking to his policy that prosecutors have no role in deciding whether prisoners should be released.
That decision is best left to California Parole Board members who can evaluate whether Sirhan has been rehabilitated and can be released safely, Gascón told The Associated Press earlier this year. Relitigating a case decades after a crime should not be the job of prosecutors, even in notorious cases, he said.
“The role of a prosecutor and their access to information ends at sentencing,” Alex Bastian, special adviser to Gascón, said in a statement Thursday.
Some Kennedy family members, Los Angeles law enforcement and the public submitted letters opposing Sirhan’s release, Parole Board Commissioner Robert Barton said at the start of the proceeding Friday. The board would consider past arguments by prosecutors opposing his release, depending how relevant they are, he said.
At least one of Kennedy’s sons, Douglas Kennedy, was in attendance, but it wasn’t immediately clear if he was opposing Sirhan’s release. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spoken in favor of his release and other children have called for a reinvestigation of the killing, which some believe involved a second shooteR.
