Chain of custody of CE 399 - big problem or much ado about nothing?

[Steve M. Galbraith]

Oh, dear, what to do with folks like Martin?

Let's see, I am just like Trump, an "LN clown" who is "afraid" to reply to Martin's posts, and a purveyor of "an avalanche of arrogant word salad posts," "childish insults," "pathetic fictional dialogue" and "self-serving BS posts." Well, perhaps.

I think it would be fair to say I've gotten under Martin's skin, yes?

I actually started this narrowly focused thread in a sincere effort to provide a retired lawyer's perspective on how a chain of custody works, what it means for a witness to identify an item of evidence, and why the CT arguments about CE 399 (strictly in relation to the chain of custody) are flawed. I really didn't picture this thread generating any hysteria.

Martin immediately went off on the tangent that I was completely misguided because the Oswald defense would have not objected to the admission of CE 399 at all. I responded to each of his posts at considerable length. By his second post, I was "pathetic" and the purveyor of "self-serving BS," "the diehard LN cult manuscript," and "assumptions, cherry-picked evidence and a massive subjective bias." Later, I was accused of "massively contradicting myself," of possessing an "arrogant big head" and of posting a "word salad" unworthy of a response.

I warned Martin early in our relationship, when he questioned whether I was a lawyer at all, that he was dealing with a master of snarkiness and that if chose to play this game he was going find out what master-level snarkiness looks like. He didn't take the hint.

Look, people, this is all silliness. Do you not understand that? The verdict of history on the JFKA is never going to change. CTers and LNers live in different realities, simple as that. No minds are ever going to be changed. At some level, who the hell cares who whacked JFK in 1963 anyway? Playing with the issues is kind of fun in the same way jigsaw puzzles (or perhaps chess) are fun, and that's about it. It's mental exercise, but it isn't going anywhere. If you're in love with your theory, go for it - but recognize that you're just playing around with ideas and that others, including LNers, are equally in love with their theories. If you become the functional equivalent of a religious fundamentalist about it, all the fun goes poof.

The problem with Martin and those like him is that they don't get the joke. They become enraged when they aren't taken as seriously as they think they should be taken. NONE OF IT IS SERIOUS, that's the joke. There are even LNers who don't get the joke. Do you think I'm serious with my Caped Factoid Buster nonsense? With assigning folks like Martin to some imaginary bin of those who are Not Worth My Time? Good Lord. On every forum on which I've ever participated - even golf and motorcycle forums - I've found it amusing to create some over-the-top persona and turn him loose. If he makes you come unglued, that's your problem and frankly a source of mirth for me until it reaches the level of upsetting someone to the extent it seems to have done with Martin. If you can't deal with master-level snarkiness, don't provoke me by playing that game; if you can, bring it - the wittier the better!

That being said, I shall herewith release Martin and his compadres from the imaginary Not Worth My Time bin and, if they say anything worthwhile (unlikely, but it could happen!  ) pledge myself to respond in a restrained and statesmanlike manner worthy of my Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary training.

Or maybe not. 

If you want him to ignore you just say you think Ruth Paine was the shooter behind the fence. Or Jackie shot JFK. Or Greer. And everything was faked, Oswald was framed, then everything was covered up, then the coverups were covered up ad infinitum. Promote the Lifton theory. The two Oswalds theory. The leprechauns theory. Whatever. Any conspiracy theory. Every conspiracy theory.

Will he challenge your evidence? Ask about chain of possession for that evidence? Raise legal questions? Demand this or that? Nope. Not a thing. You won't hear from him again.

[Lance Payette]

I'm not seeing red flags in CE-2011 and Shanklin's Airtel. They both seem to be saying the same thing. Neither Wright nor Tomlinson could positively identify exhibit C1 as the bullet that they handled at Parkland on Nov 22. Understandably so. The Airtel is misinterpreted by many in the CT camp. Wright and Tomlinson both told Bardwell Odum that the bullet appeared to be the one they handled but they were not positive that it was the same one.  CTs were ecstatic when Thompson and Aguilar reported that Odum denied to them that he had ever handled CE-399. Thompson eventually burst their bubble when he admitted that Odum recovered some memory of being in Wright's office at Parkland and ended up deferring to the FBI document.

I really don't see red flags either. A defense attorney might attempt to impeach Tomlinson or Wright with them, but that would go nowhere for the reasons we both recognize. The authors of the two documents were FBI men who, I believe, were using "identify" in a technical sense and not the sense of "refusal" or "we have a big problem here" as Thompson and Aguilar imply. I wasn't aware of what you say in your final sentence, but that certainly takes the wind out of the Odum thing. The only real puzzle is what was going on with Wright when he met with Thompson in 1967. Martin may even be right, albeit not for the reasons he suggests: the Oswald defense might not have objected to CE 399 at all because the notion that Johnsen and the others were lying and the bullet had been fabricated by firing it into a tank of water is simply too far-fetched and desperate to have much appeal. Much Ado About Nothing does pretty well sum up my view of the arguments about CE 399 having a chain of custody problem or being inauthentic.

[Tim Nickerson]

I really don't see red flags either. A defense attorney might attempt to impeach Tomlinson or Wright with them, but that would go nowhere for the reasons we both recognize. The authors of the two documents were FBI men who, I believe, were using "identify" in a technical sense and not the sense of "refusal" or "we have a big problem here" as Thompson and Aguilar imply. I wasn't aware of what you say in your final sentence, but that certainly takes the wind out of the Odum thing. The only real puzzle is what was going on with Wright when he met with Thompson in 1967. Martin may even be right, albeit not for the reasons he suggests: the Oswald defense might not have objected to CE 399 at all because the notion that Johnsen and the others were lying and the bullet had been fabricated by firing it into a tank of water is simply too far-fetched and desperate to have much appeal. Much Ado About Nothing does pretty well sum up my view of the arguments about CE 399 having a chain of custody problem or being inauthentic.

I tried timestamping it at 19:40. Just to let you know in case it doesn't open there for you.

[Lance Payette]

If you want him to ignore you just say you think Ruth Paine was the shooter behind the fence. Or Jackie shot JFK. Or Greer. And everything was faked, Oswald was framed, then everything was covered up, then the coverups were covered up ad infinitum. Promote the Lifton theory. The two Oswalds theory. The leprechauns theory. Whatever. Any conspiracy theory. Every conspiracy theory.

Will he challenge your evidence? Ask about chain of possession for that evidence? Raise legal questions? Demand this or that? Nope. Not a thing. You won't hear from him again.

I'm currently hard at work on the Alien Angle. Will that suffice? This video, posted at the Ed Forum today by Douglas Caddy, is somewhat more interesting than it looks. I first heard this theory at the 1989 MUFON conference in Las Vegas, where wacky John Lear and scary Bill Cooper assured us credulous UFO types that JFK had been shot by Greer (with a .45!) because he was about to reveal the Alien Presence.

[Lance Payette]

I tried timestamping it at 19:40. Just to let you know in case it doesn't open there for you.

WHAT THE HECK???

This was a 2003 symposium. Tink says Odum called him "two days after" their visit to his home (and in fact tried to call them before they left Dallas) and pretty much cleared up the mystery. Their seminal article, "The Magic Bullet: More Magical Than We Knew," HAD to have been written more than two days after their visit to Odum, so WHY does it trumpet the "Odum mystery" as though it were highly significant ("Bardwell Odum, one of the key links, says he was never in the chain at all and the FBI’s own, suppressed records tend to back him up.")? The online version of the article has a 2005 editor's note but nothing new about Odum, and the supposed Odum mystery is still a favorite of CTers.

Is this just raw dishonesty? Tink was a professor of philosophy and has an engaging way that makes you want to like and believe him, but this isn't the first time he's taken me aback.

[Tom Graves]

I'm currently hard at work on the Alien Angle. Will that suffice? This video, posted at the Ed Forum today by Douglas Caddy, is somewhat more interesting than it looks. I first heard this theory at the 1989 MUFON conference in Las Vegas, where wacky John Lear and scary Bill Cooper assured us credulous UFO types that JFK had been shot by Greer (with a .45!) because he was about to reveal the Alien Presence.

Unfortunately, Caddy (who is one of my FB "friends"), at *Harley Schlanger's request in early 2016, set up a meeting in Houston between Roger Stone and Schlanger shortly after the latter had returned from Moscow, where Caddy believes he attended the 10 December 2015 RT Dinner with Vladimir Putin, Mike Flynn, and Jill "Anti-Vax" Stein. After the meeting, Stone sent Caddy a thank-you e-mail in which he mentioned that and Schlanger were working together to destroy "The Globalists," and that he had a backchannel to Trump.

*Schlanger is a member of the pro-Russia Lyndon LaRouche organization.

[David Von Pein]

In the [1986] mock trial of Oswald, the defense did object to CE 399 - Spence being no fool - and the judge, a sitting federal judge, ruled it admissible at a pretrial evidentiary hearing.

"The admissibility of CE 399 (along with other items of evidence) was, indeed, dealt with in London by Judge
Lucius Bunton at a pre-trial evidentiary hearing, and Bunton, a sitting federal judge in Texas at the time,
ruled in my favor that CE 399 (not the actual bullet, of course, which we did not have in London) was admissible
at the London trial." -- Vincent Bugliosi (Via letter to DVP); August 2009

More here:

https://jfk-archives.blogspot.com/2010/06/vince-bugliosi-on-ce399.html

And still more "CE399 Chain of Custody" talk here:

https://jfk-archives.blogspot.com/2016/05/jfk-assassination-arguments-part-1135.html#The-SBT-And-Chain-Of-Custody-For-CE399