Bobby Kennedy's assassin loses appeal

Bobby Kennedy’s assassin today lost a bid to overturn his conviction an and subsequent life sentence.

Supreme Court judges in Washington refused to consider claims that Sirhan Sirhan’s defence lawyer had secretly worked with the government to win his conviction in 1968.

Sirhan’s new lawyer, Lawrence Teeter, also argued unsuccessfully that a California judge who was a prosecutor in Sirhan’s trial had tainted his appeals.

Teeter said that colleagues of Judge William Matthew Byrne should have been disqualified from considering his filings in lower courts.

“What is at stake is not simply Sirhan Sirhan’s constitutional rights but the integrity of the judicial system and the appearance of justice as the judicial system confronts the truth about an event that changed the entire world,” Teeter told justices in court paperwork.

Sirhan is serving a life sentence for killing Senator Kennedy just moments after he had declared victory in the California presidential primary.

Sirhan claims that he was hypnotised at the time and that a second gunman might have actually killed Kennedy, whose brother President John F. Kennedy was also assassinated, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.