Hey at another forum the following question was asked:
"What if Lee Harvey Oswald never shot? What would have happened during the trial and afterward?"
I suspect they meant that if he had set up nest had his rifle loaded, aimed but not fired - could he be charged with anything?
I suspect some high-school kid has a paper to write and doesn't want to do any real research.
My answer depends on the hidden assumptions behind the question.
Do they mean if he was a lone nut, brought the rifle to work, and then never fired it?
Probably nothing. Oswald takes the rifle home, still wrapped in the paper sack, and no one is the wiser. JFK and Tippit survive and JFK serves a second term. Lyndon Johnson is probably never president. The children of JFK, Oswald, and Tippit don't grow up fatherless. There is no trial because it's not illegal to take your rifle to work in Texas. Indeed, Warren Caster brought two rifles into the Depository on Wednesday, 11/20/63, just two days before the assassination, and shows them to others.
https://www.jfk-assassination.net/russ/testimony/caster.htm
But because they reference a trial, that leads me to believe their hidden assumption is Oswald is one of the three (or 43) other shooters, and the other two (or 42) kill JFK, even if Oswald never shoots. If that's their hidden assumption, then it depends on what happens before, during, and after the assassination.
If Oswald never sticks his rifle out of the Depository window, there are no eyewitnesses to a weapon in the building, and the building is perhaps never searched, or not searched thoroughly enough to find the weapon still disassembled and wrapped in the paper bag. Police concentrate their search on the knoll and the other buildings.
If it is found, he says he brought it in to show to his co-workers, like Warren Caster. Oswald referenced that incident in his interrogations.
See the second paragraph here:
https://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wr/html/WCReport_0322a.htm
But if his weapon is seen sticking out of a window and found in the building, then he could be tried as a member of a conspiracy, even if he never fired a shot, and no shells, no large fragments, and no nearly whole bullet are found traceable to his weapon. The presumption would have to be that he fired and missed, scooped up the shell(s), and discarded them elsewhere.
Does Oswald leave the Depository, go to his rooming house to pick up his revolver, and still shoot Tippit? If he hasn't shot the President, most likely he stays behind and leaves with the rifle still wrapped up when the workers are dismissed early that day. He's never a suspect, just a person of interest, because of his defection.
But if he does leave the rifle behind and goes to his rooming house, gets his revolver, and then shoots Tippit? Then that most likely plays out as it did on 11/22/63, with Oswald being arrested in the movie theatre after trying to kill Officer McDonald.
That leads to a trial for the Tippit murder (Ruby doesn't shoot Oswald over
that). Oswald is convicted and executed for that crime.
Oswald by default becomes the chief suspect in the assassination as well when his rifle is discovered at his rooming house or in the Depository after a search there. But there's insufficient evidence to charge him with conspiracy to shoot the President, because there's no evidence he brought the rifle to the Depository with that intent. Perhaps some of the other 42 shooters are tracked down and the full conspiracy is revealed in this scenario.
