Yesterday's terrorist

Hadar Aviram

Chapter 25 in Research Handbook on Penal Policy, 2026, pp 469-490 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Nixon's presidency was facilitated by the 1968 assassination of his Democratic rival, Senator Robert Kennedy. The assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, was initially sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life with parole ‒ which he has been consistently denied. As of 2025, 81-year-old Sirhan remains incarcerated. Chapter 25 analyzes all Sirhan's parole hearings, identifying his 1982 hearing as a watershed moment in parole philosophy: confronted with Sirhan's nearing parole date, the board conducted a week-long investigation, revisiting their 1970s predecessors’ reliance on rehabilitation and replacing it with their own retributive philosophy. Later hearings unabashedly denied Sirhan's parole based on the heinousness of his crime, albeit somewhat less openly since 2008. The chapter interrogates the appropriateness of retributive parole considerations in unusual cases, such as political assassinations, and examines how the idea of dynamic retributive calibration applies in such cases.

Keywords: Parole; Retribution; Rehabilitation; Political assassination; Dynamic retribution; Sirhan Sirhan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035308521
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