JFK Assassination Forum

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.

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.

Ok, let's go, she saw what she saw. She could see well enough to do her job. And she saw Oswald doing a very specific action. Keep em coming.

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

Hahahaha! Obviously they didn't find any grey jacket, Oswald's jacket was in evidence.

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.

Exactly, the jacket on film ended up as official evidence.

And finally, they would call the officers who put their markings on the grey jacket and ask they how and why that happened.

Yep, precisely.

And this is how you'd handle being on the Defence, Really?? Go back to laymen school and do some more Google searching!

I'll leave it to our resident self-appointed legal eagle

What are you talking about? You're the one who make keeps making the Legal claims and I just refute them, No biggie!
Anyway you're just Butt-hurt that I embarrassed you when you erroneously claimed that "Beyond all reasonable doubt" had to include "conclusive evidence", and we're still laughing at you!

JohnM

   "Will The Real Ross Perot, Please Stand Up"!

Now there's an articulate rebuttal of the points I made.

TC-

I have posted many times the reasons why a lone gunsel is not a plausible explanation for the wounds received by JFK and JBC, nor the rapidity of shots.

Tell us how rapidly you think the shots were fired and why those shots couldn't have all been fired by Oswald with his Carcano rifle?

The smell of gunsmoke in the DP-GK area, in the immediate aftermath of the JFKA also defies explanation.

There is a very simple explanation. If people smelled gunpowder on Elm St, it was the residue discharged from Oswald's Carcano rifle that drifted down to ground level following his three shots. Oswald was the only one firing a gun during the assassination.

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.

As this brief from the O. J. Simpson Civil Trial makes clear, the law is not nearly so rigid.

Our resident self-appointed "law-professor" strikes again....

What anybody who understands even the most basic things about the law knows is that in law very little is ever cut and dry. That's why there is jurisprudence. There is no point in finding some quote on the internet and present it as if it has any relationship with another case. Even two cases who look identical could nevertheless have different outcomes,

The National Institute of Justice said this about a chain of custody;

The reason for establishing a chain of custody is to prevent substitution of, tampering with, mistaking the identity of, damaging, altering, contaminating, misplacing or falsifying the evidence.
This principle and procedure creates legal integrity of the evidence. The chain of custody verifies both the legal integrity and the authenticity of all evidence. Without proof of an intact chain of custody, the evidence may be excluded from trial or afforded less weight by the trier of fact. 

Yet, our resident self-appointed legal eagle basically says that COP SAID SO would be enough to ignore or by pass the chain of custody. Hilarious!

...or afforded less weight by the trier of fact.

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