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Defending Oswald

vtbub

Critical Thinker
V
Joined
May 28, 2011
Messages
252
It is the afternoon of November 24th, 1963 and Lee Harvey Oswald is being brought out from his cell at Dallas City Hall and through the baement and into the waiting armored car that will bring him to the County Jail a few blocks away. The throngs of media and cameras focus on Oswald in his sweater as he his given one last chance to answer questions from the mob of reporters gathered to record his sure to be last public appearance outside of a courtroom for a long time.

Oswald stays quiet and is placed in the back of the truck without incident. The transfer is successful and goes without incident. He is appointed a public defender who must come up with some defense that at worst keeps Oswald out of the gas chamber and at best, a free man.

You get to play his lawyer in this thread. How would you defend Oswald at trial? Lets assume that the Warren Commission's evidence would be the prosecution's case. What holes would you exploit on his behalf?

Oswald will be tried in a Texas court and your client faces two counts of muder. The jury could possibly be also given the chance to consider the Attempted Murder of Governor Connally and the Attempted Murder of a police officer upon Oswald's arrest at the Texas Theater.

Remember, if you choose to go with the conspiracy route here, you wold have to prove that he played no part in anything except what happened in the theater.

Where would you try to poke holes to plant reasonable doubt? Would you try the insanity defense? How would you keep LHO off death row?

The only thing that I ask is no arguing of woo here.

Can't argue DNA, or anything too futuristic as if Oswald had gone on trial it would have been early 1965 at the latest before it started.

I know that there are some pretty brilliant minds on this board and am curious on how you would defend the defendant at the American Trial of the Century.
 
On the face of it, this seems like a good game but for a number of reasons it ain't gonna take off, methinks.
 
When I was studying accounting Timothy McVeigh was on trial for the Oklahoma City bombing. I asked one of my commercial law instructors, who was also a practicing attorney, what he would do if he were defending McVeigh. He replied, "Nothing. There's nothing to do. He's hanging out all over the place." I strongly suspect the answer is the same for Oswald.
 
Diminished responsibility due to Soviet brainwashing?

I'm not a lawyer, but this seems to be the only chance to save him from execution or life in prison.
 
"But the best we can hope for is to get you buried in secret so your grave doesn't get defiled."

That about sums it up.

Beanbag
 
It was a massive conspiracy involving Castro, Jedgar Hoover, and the CIA. Oswald was just a patsy.








And yes, I'm kidding. If that was used as a defense, it would be laughed out of court.
 
Well, who really knows but given that Oswald himself was talking to the press about being a "patsy" then maybe the lawyer would push the "reasonable doubt" defence.

Other possible lines could be pleading insanity. Might well be convincing.

He was watching a movie at the time and had no idea what was going on.

I think it would be a bad idea to start claiming conspiracies, unless he was a part of it, as surely the job of a defence attorney is to either get his man acquitted or a reduced sentence. Presumably if there had been a conspiracy then LHO could get a plea bargain by fingering LBJ as the man who put him up to it or whoever else is considered the mastermind behind the conspiracy.
 
Look up the movie "The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald". Actually filmed twice, I like the later one with Lorne Green as the defense attorney. It outlines a good reasonable doubt case based on problems in evidence handling and timeline. Given the climate at the time I don't know that any defense would have been successful.
 
Also Vincent Bugliosi and Gerry Spence argued either side of the case in a mock trial. I watched some of it and it seemed to me that Gerry Spence's strategy was also one of reasonable doubt suggesting that certain witnesses couldn't possibly have seen or heard what they claimed to have done and by putting Oswald away from the book depository window at the time Kennedy rolled past.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerry_Spence#Mock_Trial:_United_States_v._Oswald

Of course, some of this involved using evidence that probably wouldn't have been available to the defence attorney at the time. For example, I think there was a photograph of someone who looked a bit like Oswald in the doorway of the book depository that Spence suggested makes it impossible for Oswald to be the shooter. I doubt this picture was available at the time, although I could be wrong. Naturally, the picture turned out to have been of someone else who also worked there yet any doubt at all is something a defence attorney would presumably want to exploit.
 
Honestly I think the best chance wouldn't have been a legal strategy but more of a cooperation strategy. Tell them it was a plot, tell them it was the soviets, or castro or whatever. Get immunity to implicate others. Now assuming it wasn't a plot you may have a hard time pulling this off. But given his time spent in the ussr he may have known enough to actually pull this off somehow. At least enough to muddy the waters to stop the death penalty.
 
NewtonTrino said:
Honestly I think the best chance wouldn't have been a legal strategy but more of a cooperation strategy. Tell them it was a plot, tell them it was the soviets, or castro or whatever. Get immunity to implicate others. Now assuming it wasn't a plot you may have a hard time pulling this off. But given his time spent in the ussr he may have known enough to actually pull this off somehow. At least enough to muddy the waters to stop the death penalty.
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I think I disagree with this idea. The suggestion that Castro or the Soviets were involved would not have made the case muddier in the minds of most Americans, I think. Instead it could have escalated to an act of war with Oswald being on the other side of the United States.

In fact, if I recall correctly, the Warren Commission was convened largely to end loose talk of a Soviet or Communist conspiracy. I'd be surprised if a defence attorney would think that promoting one would be the best hope for his client. If anything the defence attorney would only hasten a charge of treason for his client if he managed to convince anyone.
 
angrysoba said:
Also Vincent Bugliosi and Gerry Spence argued either side of the case in a mock trial. I watched some of it and it seemed to me that Gerry Spence's strategy was also one of reasonable doubt suggesting that certain witnesses couldn't possibly have seen or heard what they claimed to have done and by putting Oswald away from the book depository window at the time Kennedy rolled past.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerry_Spence#Mock_Trial:_United_States_v._Oswald

Of course, some of this involved using evidence that probably wouldn't have been available to the defence attorney at the time. For example, I think there was a photograph of someone who looked a bit like Oswald in the doorway of the book depository that Spence suggested makes it impossible for Oswald to be the shooter. I doubt this picture was available at the time, although I could be wrong. Naturally, the picture turned out to have been of someone else who also worked there yet any doubt at all is something a defence attorney would presumably want to exploit.
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The mock trial was very good and Spence is one of the best at what he does and even he had a hard time trying to poke any real holes into anything.


Delighted to get some real responses here. I agree with another poster, it simply was too much to try for a serious acquittal. Maybe if it was just the one shooting but, when you add Kennedy and Tippit together, too many witnesses and too much evidence.

Insanity would be the route I would go. Try to paint Oswald as someone who snapped.
 
No, too much planning and forethought for someone who snapped, and that defense very rarely wins. A more serious insanity defense would be something like John Hinckley, like paranoid schizophrenia.
 
LibraryLady said:
No, too much planning and forethought for someone who snapped, and that defense very rarely wins. A more serious insanity defense would be something like John Hinckley, like paranoid schizophrenia.
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I'm not going to disagree with you here.

There is one thing that I'm surprised I haven't read it. I don't think it would have saved Oswald's bacon, but just might have changed things a little bit.
 
Hmmm...... It seems that the best thing a defense atty. could have done was to try and aim for insanity and then try and make a plea deal with the prosecution to save his life.

I don't think that this would have worked though. I can't see any DA making a plea deal with as good a case as they had against Oswald.

(the interesting thing is that if convicted and given death, 4 or 5 years later his sentence would've been commuted when the uSA outlawed the death penalty for a bit)
 
Saw the thread title, and thought it was about the character Oswald in King Lear. That guy was just a dick. No defending him.
 
SpitfireIX said:
Erm, that didn't happen until 1972. Oswald would undoubtedly have been tried, convicted, and executed before then.
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You think so? Heck I bet his trial wouldn't have ended until 1966 or so, then the endless appeals that would've been allowed in such a high profile case. I think he might've made it until then. (btw I wasn't alive back then so i was guessing about the death penalty thing, not a blood suck....I mean lawyer either :-p)
 
LogicFail said:
You think so? Heck I bet his trial wouldn't have ended until 1966 or so, then the endless appeals that would've been allowed in such a high profile case. I think he might've made it until then. (btw I wasn't alive back then so i was guessing about the death penalty thing, not a blood suck....I mean lawyer either :-p)
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I can't see a Texas judge being inclined to let the defense draw the trial out to that extent. The cries for "closure" (or another term - I don't know if that one was in common use at the time) would be deafening from both the public and the politicians.
 
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