JFK Conspiracy Theories IV: The One With The Whales

[HSienzant]

Two problems here. First, while it is true that the WC did not employ a full adversarial approach to truth-seeking, it is not the case that the WC placed no checks on its fact-finding process. For one thing, the WC engaged Walter E. Craig, then President of the American Bar Association, to advise the WC on whether its activities "conformed to the basic principles of American justice" (WCR xiv). Craig had the ability to cross-examine and recall witnesses, and he "participated fully and without limitation" in the process (xiv). His participation was agreed to by Marina Oswald.

Second, you beg the question whether a full adversarial approach would have yielded better, fuller, and fairer results. Had LHO lived, an adversarial trial would have enabled his counsel to keep lots of information away from the jury and therefore from the American public. Hearsay objections would have precluded many statements that were available to the WC. (Hearsay exclusions do not always assist the truth, which is one reason why there are so many exceptions to the hearsay rule.) LHO would also have invoked the spousal privilege to prevent many of Marina's statements from entering the record. And so on. Would such evidentiary exclusions have resulted in a better understanding of the assassination by the American public, or would we have much less information than we have, whether or not LHO had been convicted?

And 99.9% of the arguments advanced by conspiracy theorists wouldn't be raised by the prosecution or the defense.

For example, if Oswald was being tried for shooting the President, it matters not a whit whether there was a second person behind the shooter or not.

Proving a conspiracy and/or multiple shooters would not get Oswald off, so Carolyn Walthers statements would not be heard by the jury.

The defense's sole scope would be to establish Oswald wasn't the gunman*, not that there were shots from the Grassy Knoll, for instance. Bringing in those witnesses who said they saw smoke on the knoll would be classified as a distraction by the prosecution, and rightly so. The judge would be fully within his rights to exclude their testimony as having no bearing on the question of Oswald's guilt or innocence that is the question before the jury.

Conspiracy theorists like to pretend that a trial of Oswald would have somehow have revealed the conspiracy, but that is just wishful thinking on their part. As you note, the scope of the trial would be severely less than all the issues the Warren Commission explored.

Who, exactly, for instance, would be bringing up Oswald's Mexico City trip and why would they bring it up? Neither the prosecution nor the defense has any good reason to explore that excursion in any detail, as it would not take the rifle out of Oswald's hand nor put it in his hands.

Who benefits from bringing up the auto dealership incident about two weeks prior to the assassination as testified to by Albert Bogard and some of his co-workers?

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/testimony/bogard.htm

The defense couldn't raise the issue of an Oswald duplicate, because Bogard would point to Oswald as the person he saw who he interacted with. The jury would believe the witness over some silly defense argument that conspirators were trying to frame Oswald by having some doubles going around town taking test drives, and the witness was mistaken it was Oswald.

Hank
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* Oswald's lawyers would first counsel him to plead insanity as that would be the only way for Oswald to escape a conviction and the electric chair, I believe. But Oswald would reject their advice. He didn't think he was nuts, but that was really his only chance of escaping execution.

 

[RoboTimbo]

The spinning skull gif shows the approximate location of the EOP on a human skull. Consider where the red mark would be in relation to the ears. The autopsy report says the small head wound was situated "slightly above" the EOP. The face sheet and the repeated interviews with the autopsy pathologists confirm that "slightly above" means slightly above, not ten feet above or whatever the flavor of the week is.

Where do you and No Other think the shot came from?

 

[MicahJava]

Hi, Micah. My questions above are still pending. Do you plan to respond?

Why would anybody put credence in Vince when he accepts the cowlick entry theory? He even tried saying they were all trying to cover up their own incompetence. BS. I guess the witness statements of Stringer, Kellerman, Lipsey, O'Neil, Boyers, and the face sheet verified by Burkley all supporting a lower wound doesn't matter either. Nope, the three main pathologists just lied to defend their own careers.

Another thing that shouldn't have made the final cut of Reclaiming History is Vince quoting Dr. Earl Rose as "The only place he said he disagreed with the autopsy surgeons is that they reported the entrance wound to the back of the head 'too low. It was in the cowlick area.'". Dr. Earl Rose was the Dallas County Medical Examiner who argued with the Secret Service agents over where the autopsy would be performed. In other words, his place in history is being the guy who didn't get to examine the body. Who the F cares?

 

[RoboTimbo]

Why would anybody put credence in Vince when he accepts the cowlick entry theory? He even tried saying they were all trying to cover up their own incompetence. BS. I guess the witness statements of Stringer, Kellerman, Lipsey, O'Neil, Boyers, and the face sheet verified by Burkley all supporting a lower wound doesn't matter either. Nope, the three main pathologists just lied to defend their own careers.

Another thing that shouldn't have made the final cut of Reclaiming History is Vince quoting Dr. Earl Rose as "The only place he said he disagreed with the autopsy surgeons is that they reported the entrance wound to the back of the head 'too low. It was in the cowlick area.'". Dr. Earl Rose was the Dallas County Medical Examiner who argued with the Secret Service agents over where the autopsy would be performed. In other words, his place in history is being the guy who didn't get to examine the body. Who the F cares?

But you've already agreed with the autopsy results. Are you now waffling on that?

 

[MicahJava]

Micah, you never responded to the points here:

Oh my God, we've been over this before.

 

[OKBob]

The defense's sole scope would be to establish Oswald wasn't the gunman*, not that there were shots from the Grassy Knoll, for instance.

Yes. This is why at the end of the 1986 mock prosecution of LHO, tried by Vincent Bugliosi (prosecution) and Gerry Spence (defense), the jury unanimously found Oswald guilty, even though several jurors believed there might have been a conspiracy. With all the protections an adversarial process would have afforded, no trial could have satisfied the American public as to all questions, whether LHO had been found guilty or not.

 

[HSienzant]

Another thing that shouldn't have made the final cut of Reclaiming History is Vince quoting Dr. Earl Rose as "The only place he said he disagreed with the autopsy surgeons is that they reported the entrance wound to the back of the head 'too low. It was in the cowlick area.'". Dr. Earl Rose was the Dallas County Medical Examiner who argued with the Secret Service agents over where the autopsy would be performed. In other words, his place in history is being the guy who didn't get to examine the body. Who the F cares?

Oh boy. Do you lack knowledge of this case. Earl Rose was a member of the HSCA forensic pathology panel. As such, he reviewed all the extant autopsy materials and reached his own conclusions about what they showed. Vince quoted Rose because Rose is an expert who reviewed the autopsy materials.

http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol7/html/HSCA_Vol7_0008a.htm

Hank

 

[OKBob]

Why would anybody put credence in Vince when he accepts the cowlick entry theory?

Argument from personal incredulity: fallacious. Speculation about cowlicks: unsupported. With all due respect, you should be ashamed of a reply like this.

 

[HSienzant]

Oh my God, we've been over this before.

Still waiting for you to respond to these points, your pretense that you have already done so notwithstanding.

Can you cite where the [NAA] science was debunked and courts stopped using it?

Fingerprint analysis is alive and well. As I recall, Darby was in his mid-80s when he made the erroneous ID as it being Mac Wallace's fingerprint.

Here is your ONLY MENTION OF DARBY in this thread. It is the post I am now questioning your assertion about the NAA, and pointing out Darby's age as having a bearing on his fingerprint analysis:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=11837808&postcount=3494

The JFK case has a funny way of testing the limits of what can be done with forensic evidence. Every LN thought NAA was the holy grail until courts stopped using it because it was debunked. [emphasis added] And on the CT side, let's not forget the blunder with the alleged fingerprints of Mac Wallace on the Sixth Floor. Fingerprint expert Nathan Darby swore on a stack of bibles that the unidentified Sixth Floor fingerprint matched the print of Mac Wallace, but Joan Mellen got yet another expert who concluded that the print did not match. What does this say about the entire field of fingerprint analysis?

This issue is summarized in Jim DiEugenio's review of Faustian Bargains by Joan Mellen: https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/mellen-joan-faustian-bargains


I can't help but see a parallel here with the guys who said the X-ray showed an entry in the cowlick.

Pretending this has already been covered extensively isn't going to fly.

Where was NAA debunked, and when did the courts stop accepting it? Cite for your claim.
Does Darby's age enter into how much weight we should put on his findings, or not?

Hank

 

[OKBob]

* Oswald's lawyers would first counsel him to plead insanity as that would be the only way for Oswald to escape a conviction and the electric chair, I believe. But Oswald would reject their advice. He didn't think he was nuts, but that was really his only chance of escaping execution.

I sometimes think that LHO might have tried to go to trial pro se. He declined the assistance of the Dallas Bar Association, holding out for John Abt of New York (noted defender of American communists) or perhaps an ACLU lawyer. He said he wanted a lawyer who shared his beliefs or thought the way he did. Had he not satisfied himself as to such (and Abt testified that he probably wouldn't have taken the case), maybe LHO would have had a fool for a client. Had he been convicted, LHO would quite possibly have been sentenced to death. But if he could have strung the appeals process out until 1972--recall that Jack Ruby's retrial was pending at the time of his death in 1967--LHO's sentence would have been commuted by SCOTUS's ruling that the death penalty was unconstitutional under the 8th and 14th Amendments.

 

[MicahJava]

Oh boy. Do you lack knowledge of this case. Earl Rose was a member of the HSCA forensic pathology panel. As such, he reviewed all the extant autopsy materials and reached his own conclusions about what they showed. Vince quoted Rose because Rose is an expert who reviewed the autopsy materials.

http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol7/html/HSCA_Vol7_0008a.htm

Hank

From Wikipedia:

On November 22, 1963, Dallas County medical examiner Earl Rose was in his office at Parkland Memorial Hospital across the corridor from Trauma Room 1 when he received word that President Kennedy was pronounced dead. He walked across the corridor to the trauma room occupied by Jacqueline Kennedy and a priest who had been called in to administer last rites. There, Rose was met by Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman and Kennedy's personal physician George Burkley who told him that there was no time for an autopsy because Mrs. Kennedy would not leave Dallas without her husband's body which was to be delivered promptly to the airport. At the time of the assassination of Kennedy, the murder of a United States President was not covered by federal law. Rose objected, insisting that Texas law required him to perform a post-mortem examination prior to the removal of the body. A heated exchange ensued as he argued with Kennedy's aides. Kennedy's body was placed in a casket and, accompanied by Mrs. Kennedy, rolled down the corridor on a gurney. Rose was reported to have stood in a hospital doorway, backed by a policeman, in an attempt to prevent the removal of the coffin. According to Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power the President's aides "had literally shoved [Rose] and the policeman aside to get out of the building." In an interview with Journal of the American Medical Association, Rose stated that he stepped aside feeling that it was unwise to exacerbate the tension.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_autopsy#Background

 

[bknight]

The spinning skull gif shows the approximate location of the EOP on a human skull. Consider where the red mark would be in relation to the ears. The autopsy report says the small head wound was situated "slightly above" the EOP. The face sheet and the repeated interviews with the autopsy pathologists confirm that "slightly above" means slightly above, not ten feet above or whatever the flavor of the week is.

That is rich, what I said was the animation red spot was too low and not far enough to the right as the article indicated. Ten feet? 2-4 inches would have been slightly above, get a grip on reality.

 

[HSienzant]

Another thing that shouldn't have made the final cut of Reclaiming History is Vince quoting Dr. Earl Rose as "The only place he said he disagreed with the autopsy surgeons is that they reported the entrance wound to the back of the head 'too low. It was in the cowlick area.'". Dr. Earl Rose was the Dallas County Medical Examiner who argued with the Secret Service agents over where the autopsy would be performed. In other words, his place in history is being the guy who didn't get to examine the body. Who the F cares?

Oh boy. Do you lack knowledge of this case. Earl Rose was a member of the HSCA forensic pathology panel. As such, he reviewed all the extant autopsy materials and reached his own conclusions about what they showed. Vince quoted Rose because Rose is an expert who reviewed the autopsy materials.

http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol7/html/HSCA_Vol7_0008a.htm

From Wikipedia:

On November 22, 1963, Dallas County medical examiner Earl Rose was in his office at Parkland Memorial Hospital across the corridor from Trauma Room 1 when he received word that President Kennedy was pronounced dead. He walked across the corridor to the trauma room occupied by Jacqueline Kennedy and a priest who had been called in to administer last rites. There, Rose was met by Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman and Kennedy's personal physician George Burkley who told him that there was no time for an autopsy because Mrs. Kennedy would not leave Dallas without her husband's body which was to be delivered promptly to the airport. At the time of the assassination of Kennedy, the murder of a United States President was not covered by federal law. Rose objected, insisting that Texas law required him to perform a post-mortem examination prior to the removal of the body. A heated exchange ensued as he argued with Kennedy's aides. Kennedy's body was placed in a casket and, accompanied by Mrs. Kennedy, rolled down the corridor on a gurney. Rose was reported to have stood in a hospital doorway, backed by a policeman, in an attempt to prevent the removal of the coffin. According to Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power the President's aides "had literally shoved [Rose] and the policeman aside to get out of the building." In an interview with Journal of the American Medical Association, Rose stated that he stepped aside feeling that it was unwise to exacerbate the tension.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_autopsy#Background

What transpired on the afternoon of the assassination in Dallas is NOT the issue, nor am I disputing any of that. You're defending something I didn't challenge.

You claimed Bugliosi was wrong to quote Earl Rose on the autopsy as he never saw the body ("Another thing that shouldn't have made the final cut of Reclaiming History is Vince quoting Dr. Earl Rose ... his place in history is being the guy who didn't get to examine the body.")

But you appear not to know that Earl Rose reviewed the extant autopsy materials as a expert member of the HSCA forensic pathology panel, and he is an expert witness in the subject matter.

And therefore qualified to discuss the JFK autopsy as an expert witness.

That's why Bugliosi quoted him.

Hank

 

[MicahJava]

Not the issue. You claimed Bugliosi was wrong to quote Earl Rose on the autopsy as he never saw the body.Rose reviewed the autopsy as a member of the HSCA forensic pathology panel, and he is an expert witness.

That's why Bugliosi quote him.

Hank

Just another cowlicker.

 

[HSienzant]

Just another cowlicker.

Sorry, dismissing the point via a nonsensical response will not fly here either.

Hank

 

[HSienzant]

Still waiting for you to respond to these points, your pretense that you have already done so notwithstanding.

Where was NAA debunked, and when did the courts stop accepting it? Cite for your claim.

Does Darby's age enter into how much weight we should put on his findings, or not?

You raised these points yesterday, and I've asked for your documentation a number of times since then:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=11838680&postcount=3538

Hank

 

[RoboTimbo]

Just another cowlicker.

And back to running away again with a bankrupt position. I'll ask again, are there any CTists who could add value to the discussion?

 

[Tomtomkent]

Just another cowlicker.

Sure.
The photographs, X-rays, and autopsy records, all place the wound consistently in that location. But hey, if you keep pretending it was a cowlick, and rely on rough sketches and quibbling the word "slightly" that would convince any... erm... no I can't think of anybody it would convince.

 

[MicahJava]

Sure.
The photographs, X-rays, and autopsy records, all place the wound consistently in that location. But hey, if you keep pretending it was a cowlick, and rely on rough sketches and quibbling the word "slightly" that would convince any... erm... no I can't think of anybody it would convince.

You're lying, Tom.

 

[MicahJava]

Still waiting for you to respond to these points, your pretense that you have already done so notwithstanding.

Where was NAA debunked, and when did the courts stop accepting it? Cite for your claim.

Does Darby's age enter into how much weight we should put on his findings, or not?

You raised these points yesterday, and I've asked for your documentation a number of times since then:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=11838680&postcount=3538

Hank

On NAA:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=11806333&postcount=3070


http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=11806398&postcount=3074

And do you have any proof that Darby was demented?