Oswald and the Dallas Police Department's Record of Planting Evidence

[Michael T. Griffith]

Over and over in this forum, we see lone-gunman theorists summarily dismiss the idea that the Dallas Police Department (DPD) planted and altered evidence to frame Lee Harvey Oswald. In point of fact, the DPD has a long history of planting evidence, fabricating evidence, suppressing exculpatory evidence, manipulating witnesses, etc., etc. Even Google AI says, "The Dallas Police Department (DPD) has a documented history of evidence tampering."

A good introduction to the subject of the dubious evidence cited against Oswald is Donald Wilkes' article "Lee Harvey Oswald, the Patsy: An Objective Review of the Evidence Concludes That Oswald Was Framed," published by the University of Georgia in 2013 on the University of Georgia Digital Commons: Popular Media website. At the time, Wilkes was an emeritus professor of law at the University of Georgia. Here's a link to his excellent article:

https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?httpsredir=1&article=1184&context=fac_pm

For now, let us focus on the case of Randall Adams. The award-winning 1988 Errol Morris documentary The Thin Blue Line documents the now-infamous case of Randall Adams, who was framed and railroaded by the Dallas Police Department (DPD) and the Dallas District Attorney's (DA's) office in 1976 on the false charge of killing a police officer named Robert Wood.

The film documents that the DPD used false witnesses, suppressed exculpatory evidence, discarded the most likely suspect (who later confessed), and refused to let Adams talk to a lawyer for two weeks. Gee, sound familiar? The DA was Henry Wade. The DPD officer who engineered the frame-up was Gus Rose. Humm, do those names sound familiar?

The Texas Criminal Court of Appeals overturned Adams' conviction in 1989 on the grounds of prosecutorial malfeasance (misconduct) and inconsistencies in the evidence. It had become clear that Adams had nothing whatsoever to do with Officer Wood's murder.

Yet, even after the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals voided Adams' conviction, DA Wade vowed to retry Adams, saying there was no room in his book "for a cop-killer getting off with anything else than the death penalty"! Mind you, this was after the state's criminal appeals court had found the DA's office guilty of misconduct! This says volumes about Wade's ethics and integrity.

Because of public pressure created by the release of The Thin Blue Line and pressure from state government officials, the Dallas DA's office eventually decided against retrying Adams.

Here's the transcript of The Thin Blue Line:

https://www.errolmorris.com/film/tbl_transcript.html

Here are links with more information on the DPD's sleazy record, running clear into the 2020s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Police_Department#:~:text=in%20July%202008.-,Fake%20drug%20scandal,were%20actually%20not%20illegal%20substances.

https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/fourth-former-dallas-officer-in-fake-drug-scandal-gets-one-year-probation/287-338790876

https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Dallas-police-hammered-for-fake-drug-scandal-1486478.php

https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/6-dallas-police-officers-on-leave-linked-to-illegal-search/2748127/

Here are links with information on cases of other police departments planting and fabricating evidence:

https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6013&context=law_lawreview

https://www.themarshallproject.org/records/4692-cops-planting-evidence

https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/faculty_scholarship/article/1903/&path_info=S_Fisher_Just_the_Facts.pdf

https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/police-corruption-revealed-los-angeless-rampart-division
Discusses the LAPD's Rampart scandal, where the LAPD was caught planting and fabricating evidence in the 1990s. The city of LA eventually was forced to pay millions to settle the civil lawsuit brought by some of the victims.

https://jmarshlaw.com/chicago-police-planted-evidence/
Discusses three cases where the Chicago Police Department was caught planting evidence from the 1980s to the mid-2000s.

https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/249850.pdf

[Charles Collins]

Over and over in this forum, we see lone-gunman theorists summarily dismiss the idea that the Dallas Police Department (DPD) planted and altered evidence to frame Lee Harvey Oswald. In point of fact, the DPD has a long history of planting evidence, fabricating evidence, suppressing exculpatory evidence, manipulating witnesses, etc., etc. Even Google AI says, "The Dallas Police Department (DPD) has a documented history of evidence tampering."

A good introduction to the subject of the dubious evidence cited against Oswald is Donald Wilkes' article "Lee Harvey Oswald, the Patsy: An Objective Review of the Evidence Concludes That Oswald Was Framed," published by the University of Georgia in 2013 on the University of Georgia Digital Commons: Popular Media website. At the time, Wilkes was an emeritus professor of law at the University of Georgia. Here's a link to his excellent article:

https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?httpsredir=1&article=1184&context=fac_pm

For now, let us focus on the case of Randall Adams. The award-winning 1988 Errol Morris documentary The Thin Blue Line documents the now-infamous case of Randall Adams, who was framed and railroaded by the Dallas Police Department (DPD) and the Dallas District Attorney's (DA's) office in 1976 on the false charge of killing a police officer named Robert Wood.

The film documents that the DPD used false witnesses, suppressed exculpatory evidence, discarded the most likely suspect (who later confessed), and refused to let Adams talk to a lawyer for two weeks. Gee, sound familiar? The DA was Henry Wade. The DPD officer who engineered the frame-up was Gus Rose. Humm, do those names sound familiar?

The Texas Criminal Court of Appeals overturned Adams' conviction in 1989 on the grounds of prosecutorial malfeasance (misconduct) and inconsistencies in the evidence. It had become clear that Adams had nothing whatsoever to do with Officer Wood's murder.

Yet, even after the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals voided Adams' conviction, DA Wade vowed to retry Adams, saying there was no room in his book "for a cop-killer getting off with anything else than the death penalty"! Mind you, this was after the state's criminal appeals court had found the DA's office guilty of misconduct! This says volumes about Wade's ethics and integrity.

Because of public pressure created by the release of The Thin Blue Line and pressure from state government officials, the Dallas DA's office eventually decided against retrying Adams.

Here's the transcript of The Thin Blue Line:

https://www.errolmorris.com/film/tbl_transcript.html

Here are links with more information on the DPD's sleazy record, running clear into the 2020s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Police_Department#:~:text=in%20July%202008.-,Fake%20drug%20scandal,were%20actually%20not%20illegal%20substances.

https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/fourth-former-dallas-officer-in-fake-drug-scandal-gets-one-year-probation/287-338790876

https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Dallas-police-hammered-for-fake-drug-scandal-1486478.php

https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/6-dallas-police-officers-on-leave-linked-to-illegal-search/2748127/

Here are links with information on cases of other police departments planting and fabricating evidence:

https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6013&context=law_lawreview

https://www.themarshallproject.org/records/4692-cops-planting-evidence

https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/context/faculty_scholarship/article/1903/&path_info=S_Fisher_Just_the_Facts.pdf

https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/police-corruption-revealed-los-angeless-rampart-division
Discusses the LAPD's Rampart scandal, where the LAPD was caught planting and fabricating evidence in the 1990s. The city of LA eventually was forced to pay millions to settle the civil lawsuit brought by some of the victims.

https://jmarshlaw.com/chicago-police-planted-evidence/
Discusses three cases where the Chicago Police Department was caught planting evidence from the 1980s to the mid-2000s.

https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/249850.pdf

Wow, crooked cops galore. This really makes me wonder whether or not there are any documented cases like these that include participation by the Secret Service, the FBI, an independent presidential appointed commission headed by the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and almost 63-years of independent investigations by thousands of skeptical researchers, etc.     

[Michael T. Griffith]

Wow, crooked cops galore. This really makes me wonder whether or not there are any documented cases like these that include participation by the Secret Service, the FBI, an independent presidential appointed commission headed by the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and almost 63-years of independent investigations by thousands of skeptical researchers, etc.

LOL! Someone is about 30 years behind the information curve. It is curious that you would make these statements after all we now know about the WC, the Secret Service, and the FBI regarding the JFK case.

Let's start with the FBI. Are you unaware of the numerous JFK witnesses, including a presidential aide, who said that FBI agents misrepresented what they said (either by distortion or omission), or pressured them to change their stories? Are you aware of the FBI's shameful record of destroying, withholding, and misrepresenting evidence in the JFK case? You could start your education by reading Harold Weisberg's books, which detail his dealings with the FBI regarding JFKA evidence. The FBI's misconduct in dealing with the Tague curb mark alone is incriminating. How about the evidence-tampering/falsification scandal that rocked the FBI crime lab in the 1990s, which was widely reported on major news networks and newspapers? Did you miss that? How about the more recent scandals regarding FBI misconduct regarding evidence? Do you not watch TV or read news sites?

As for the WC, wow, where to start? Are you just unaware of the documented cases of the WC altering testimony, suppressing evidence, rejecting totally credible witnesses because their accounts indicated conspiracy, ignoring or trying to ignore evidence that indicated conspiracy, refusing to acknowledge dissent among the WC members themselves, etc., etc.? Are you familiar with the disclosures from WC whistleblower Morris Wolff? Or, have you heard of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA)? You could start with the HSCA's summary of the failures of the WC's investigation. Then you could graduate to the many scholarly books that have documented the WC's failures, lies, distortions, and cover-ups, such as Dr. Gerald McKnight's book Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why, and Dr. David Scheim's The Mafia Killed President Kennedy, which, among things, documents the WC's shameful whitewash of Ruby's Mafia ties and Ruby's motive for killing Oswald, as well as its bogus claim that Ruby entered the police basement via the Main Street Ramp.

Regarding the Secret Service, just wow here as well, and where to start? They illegally seized JFK's body from Parkland before a valid autopsy could be performed. They covertly diverted the Zapruder film to Hawkeyeworks and NPIC and falsified the film's chain of custody record. They confiscated the news footage of the Parkland doctors' 11/22 press conference. They badgered Dr. Perry into changing his diagnosis of the throat wound. They lied through their teeth about the protection arrangements for Dallas, falsely claiming that JFK said he didn't want agents on the limo's running boards (among other falsehoods). They framed Abraham Bolden after he tried to contact the WC to tell them about his concerns regarding presidential protection. They told Dr. Ebersole to tape bullet fragments taped to pieces of skull and then to x-ray them, with the flimsy cover story that the x-rays would be used to make a bust of JFK. They destroyed JFK-presidential-protection records even after being warned not to do so by the ARRB. When the ARRB asked the Secret Service to swear they had complied with the JFK Records Act, they refused to do so. The Secret Service was the only federal agency that refused to do this. Gee, I wonder why? And on and on and on we could go.

Some additional sources for your education on this subject, among many, many others that could be cited:

WC Whistleblower

https://markshawbooks.com/assets/docs/New-Evidence-Proving-Warren-Commission-Corruption_Oct-26-2023-1.pdf

FBI Crime Lab scandal and Other Cases of Evidence Tampering/fabrication

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/k/kelly-evidence.html?scp=8&sq=Ultraviolet&st=Search

https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9704a/index.htm (even this quasi-whitewash of the crime lab scandal by the DOJ IG contains a great deal of damning evidence of misconduct and incompetence by FBI crime lab experts)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/08/06/minimal-punishment-meted-in-fbi-lab-flap/074b8ecc-8190-4983-a112-86504ff21be4/

https://makejusticeblind.com/a-roundup-of-the-key-facts-of-the-tampering/ (discusses a case where photos were altered by the FBI to help convict someone--gee, sound familiar?)

https://www.forensicscolleges.com/blog/resources/real-cases-of-forensic-fraud-flawed-evidence

Secret Service Misconduct in JFK Case and Other Cases

We now know that HSCA staff counsel Belford Lawson, who conducted the Committee’s investigation of the Secret Service, suspected that a Secret Service agent planted CE 399 at Parkland Hospital. In a memo on the interview with Nathan Pool, who had seen a bullet on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital, Lawson noted that a Secret Service agent was close enough to the area where the bullet was found to have planted the bullet, and that following up on Pool’s testimony could have led to identifying the agent:

A Secret Service agent was for a significant period of time close enough to the elevator to plant
a bullet; may lead to an identification of that agent; and will reveal the superficiality of the
Warren Commission’s approach. (“Untaped Interview of January 10, 1977, with Nathan Pool,”
HSCA memorandum from Belford Lawson to Robert Tanenbaum, January 12, 1977, record
number 180-10089-10189, available at
https://ia801206.us.archive.org/31/items/nsia-PoolNathan/nsia-PoolNathan/Pool%20Nathan%2001.pdf)

Dr. Donald Wilkes, "The Secret Service and the JFK Assassination"
https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1174&context=fac_pm

https://www.amazon.com/Survivors-Guilt-Service-Failure-President/dp/1937584607

https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/slideshows/prostitutes-grenades-and-drunk-driving-20-years-of-secret-service-scandals

https://time.com/3449641/secret-service-scandal/

[Lance Payette]

Wow, crooked cops galore. This really makes me wonder whether or not there are any documented cases like these that include participation by the Secret Service, the FBI, an independent presidential appointed commission headed by the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and almost 63-years of independent investigations by thousands of skeptical researchers, etc.     

You beat me to the point I was going to make!

I will simply note the following about the law professor author of Michael's linked piece, Donald Wilkes:

The 2013 piece itself notes at the end that it was the professor's THIRTY-FIFTH JFK-related article. He was (he died in 2019) a wild-eyed liberal (as most law professors are) and a more-than-wild-eyed conspiracy fanatic. A list of his erudite writings can be found at Muck Rack, https://muckrack.com/donald-e-wilkes/articles.

The articles include the following titles:

Amazing Facts About the JFK Assassination
Did J. Edgar Hoover Kill JFK?
Grassy Knoll Shots? Limousine Slowdown?
Circumstances Undetermined: Dorothy Kilgallen and JFK's Murder

One could go on, but you get the idea.

Oh, the 2013 piece itself? Don't get the idea this was some peer-reviewed law review article published by the University of Georgia. It is an entirely unreviewed piece published at the online site where faculty members can publish their musings on any topic. Articles merely have to be "accepted for inclusion in Popular Media by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ University of Georgia School of Law." You can view the diverse range of such musings here: https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/fac_pm/.

Who is Joseph Lazzaro, you ask - the guy quoted at the beginning of the piece? I had never heard of him either. Rather odd that he's quoted with no citation, as though we should know who is. He is, or was, an editor of an international business magazine and writes occasional JFK conspiracy pieces in the Morley vein, https://muckrack.com/joseph-lazzaro/bio. He seems to have been a favorite of our law professor, who quoted him with regularity.

Lest I give the appearance of demeaning professor Wilkes, here is his jaw-dropping (by law professor standards) obituary: https://www.altogetherfuneral.com/obituaries/DonaldWilkesJr. He was clearly a major intellect. Note that he was elected to "the prestigious Order of the Coif," as was ... well, modesty prevents me, but you can guess.

[Michael T. Griffith]

It says volumes that Lt. J. C. Day, the DPD officer who claimed he found Oswald's palmprint on the barrel of the alleged murder weapon and lifted it, refused to swear under oath that he had lifted the palmprint. We now know from internal WC memos that even the WC had strong doubts about the palmprint's origin. To resolve these doubts, the Commission asked Lt. Day to sign a sworn statement that he did in fact lift the palmprint. Day refused to do so.

Incredibly, Day failed to take a single photo of the palmprint, even though it was standard procedure to photograph all prints before lifting them. Day took photos of the worthless partial trigger-guard prints, but didn't take a single picture of the palmprint.

I discuss the many problems with the palmprint in detail in my article "Was Oswald's Palmprint Planted on the Alleged Murder Weapon?":

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NzWhdO-Ak3nbuxl8vsy62-fpLTBMBvPx/view

[Tom Graves]

[...]

Dear Comrade Griffith,

When it comes to planting KGB*-endorsed JFKA CT memes, nobody does it as well as you.

-- Tom

*Today's SVR and FSB

[Lance Payette]

It says volumes that Lt. J. C. Day, the DPD officer who claimed he found Oswald's palmprint on the barrel of the alleged murder weapon and lifted it, refused to swear under oath that he had lifted the palmprint. We now know from internal WC memos that even the WC had strong doubts about the palmprint's origin. To resolve these doubts, the Commission asked Lt. Day to sign a sworn statement that he did in fact lift the palmprint. Day refused to do so.

Incredibly, Day failed to take a single photo of the palmprint, even though it was standard procedure to photograph all prints before lifting them. Day took photos of the worthless partial trigger-guard prints, but didn't take a single picture of the palmprint.

I discuss the many problems with the palmprint in detail in my article "Was Oswald's Palmprint Planted on the Alleged Murder Weapon?":

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NzWhdO-Ak3nbuxl8vsy62-fpLTBMBvPx/view

Fortunately for Michael, the Three Stooges can't even fabricate evidence right! Anyone notice that the supposedly fabricated evidence, such as the paper bag and palmprint, tends to be pretty inconsequential insofar as the case against Oswald is concerned? "Yeah, let's gin up a paper bag to really nail him! And make something up about a palmprint on the rifle! Because without that, we got NOTHIN'." Hey, whatever you say, Moe.

[Tim Nickerson]

It says volumes that Lt. J. C. Day, the DPD officer who claimed he found Oswald's palmprint on the barrel of the alleged murder weapon and lifted it, refused to swear under oath that he had lifted the palmprint.

Mr. McCLOY. Do you solemnly swear the testimony you give at this hearing will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?
Mr. DAY. I do.
.....
Mr. BELIN. Do you know what Commission Exhibit No. 637 is?
Mr. DAY. This is the trace of palmprint I lifted off of the barrel of the gun after I had removed the wood.
Mr. BELIN. Does it have your name on it or your handwriting?
Mr. DAY. It has the name "J. C. Day," and also "11/22/63" written on it in my writing off the underside gun barrel near the end of foregrip, C-2766.

https://www.jfk-assassination.net/russ/testimony/day1.htm