At the very least the quote from The National Institute of Justice says without a solid chain of custody, evidence is afforded less weight. Doesn't mean it's necessarily excluded.
You'd have to fight very hard to remove the jacket from evidence.
1. Earlene Roberts saw Oswald zipping up a jacket.
2. Benavides saw Oswald wearing a jacket.
3. Callaway positively identified Oswald and wearing a jacket.
4. Markham positively identified Oswald and wearing a jacket.
5. Virginia Davis positively identified Oswald and wearing a jacket.
6. Barbara Davis positively identified Oswald and wearing a jacket.
7. Scoggins positively identified Oswald and wearing a jacket.
8. Mary Brock positively identified Oswald and wearing a jacket.
9. Sam Guinyard positively identified Oswald and wearing a jacket.
10. Westbrook recovered Oswald's jacket and later positively ID'd it.
11. Marina identified the Jacket.
12. Oswald is arrested without his jacket, where did it go?
The prosecution would drag out all of the above eyewitnesses and the defence would be left with trying to disprove each and every eyewitness to what they saw. Good luck with that. And at the end of the day the jacket is only a fraction of the evidence in what convicts Oswald for the murder of Tippit, so I can understand why the CT's try so hard to isolate the Jacket evidence, because it's all you got!
JohnM
At the very least the quote from The National Institute of Justice says without a solid chain of custody, evidence is afforded less weight. Doesn't mean it's necessarily excluded. At least you have learned something now! Good for you.... and yes, it depends on case by case.
Oh btw, nobody is talking about evidence being excluded. It doesn't have to be. A lack of a solid chain of custody, as for the jacket in this case, leaves the evidence without proper authentication. And that by itself is enough, because no sane person would want to rely on evidence that can not and isn't being autheticated. LNs of course do exactly the latter as a matter of routine!
You'd have to fight very hard to remove the jacket from evidence.
1. Earlene Roberts saw Oswald zipping up a jacket.
2. Benavides saw Oswald wearing a jacket.
3. Callaway positively identified Oswald and wearing a jacket.
4. Markham positively identified Oswald and wearing a jacket.
5. Virginia Davis positively identified Oswald and wearing a jacket.
6. Barbara Davis positively identified Oswald and wearing a jacket.
7. Scoggins positively identified Oswald and wearing a jacket.
8. Mary Brock positively identified Oswald and wearing a jacket.
9. Sam Guinyard positively identified Oswald and wearing a jacket.
10. Westbrook recovered Oswald's jacket and later positively ID'd it.
11. Marina identified the Jacket.Oh boy... this is so stupid. Let's see if I can tell you this in simple words. If Earlene Roberts is wrong and Oswald didn't leave the rooming house wearing a jacket all those people who "positively identified Oswald" at a questionable line up could not have seen Oswald!
# 10. is just the same COP SAID SO BS you have just been schooled on. Which only shows how LNs operate. They will repeat a lie time after time no matter how often it has been debunked.
# 11. Marina identified the jacket, he says. And, indeed, she did. She identified the grey jacket that did belong to Oswald. She never identified the white jacket Westbrook gave to an unknown police officer. Claiming that the two jackets are one and the same requires proof and that's exactly what is completely missing here!
The prosecution would drag out all of the above eyewitnesses and the defence would be left with trying to disprove each and every eyewitness to what they saw. Good luck with that. What prosecution would that be? You have a crystal ball, do you?
And at the end of the day the jacket is only a fraction of the evidence in what convicts Oswald for the murder of Tippit, so I can understand why the CT's try so hard to isolate the Jacket evidence, because it's all you got!Now, there's an idiotic contradiction if I ever saw one. On the one hand he claims that the jacket is only a fraction of the evidence and then he says he can't understand why CT's try so hard to isolate the jacket. It just doesn't make sense. If there was more evidence than only the jacket it wouldn't make any sense at all for anybody to only concentrate on the jacket alone.
The facts are very simple;
1. Earlene Roberts is a highly unreliable witness who wasn't paying much attention, had bad vision, only saw Oswald walking out of the house for a few seconds and was known for making up stories.
2. There is plausible evidence that places Oswald's grey jacket (the one identified by Marina) in Irving on Thursday evening. There is no way that jacket could have been in Oak Cliff on Friday morning.
3. There is no evidence that the jacket, described as being white in several radio communications, which has no chain of custody whatsoever is the same jacket as the one now in evidence with markings of a number of officers on it, who were not and could not have been in the chain of custody. Marking an item of evidence when you had never anything to do with it is manipulation of that piece of evidence.
So, if you want to play the "at court they would do" game, let's try this;
The defense would call Earlene Roberts and go after her full force to find out if her story held up.
Then they would call the officers who searched Ruth Paine's house on Saturday and ask them under oath if they saw the grey jacket in Irving or not
Then they would find out who the patrol officers were who actually did hold the jacket and ask them what they saw and what happened to the jacket between the moment Westbrook gave it to one of them and the moment the grey jacket showed up at the police station.
And finally, they would call the officers who put their markings on the grey jacket and ask they how and why that happened.
I'll leave it to our resident self-appointed legal eagle to determine for himself what the outcome of all that could possibly be. He'll probably get it all wrong, but that's a given and not much to worry about.
