CT's, how did Oswald's rifle end up on the 6th floor?

[Gary Craig]

Take it up with Jack Ruby.  The fact that Oswald was killed has no bearing whatsoever on the evidence against him or how it can all be dismissed as suspect without someone lying or faking the evidence.  If someone says they found Oswald's prints on the rifle, how can that not be the case without some lie or fakery?  Either his prints are on the rifle or they are not.  If they are not, then the person who says they found them is lying.  To suggest otherwise is to defy logic and simply be a dishonest contrarian.

"Take it up with Jack Ruby."

LHO was in DPD custody and they were responsible for his safety. Who let Ruby into the heavily guarded basement?

"The fact that Oswald was killed has no bearing whatsoever on the evidence against him"

Sure it does. If Ozzie had lived and was able to procure legal representation, which he most certainly would have, the pretrial evidence that is now in the WCR would have been vetted in preliminary hearings, witness cross examinations and expert witnesses for the defense. Exculpatory evidence that was ignored and/or suppressed would have been brought to light.

"If someone says they found Oswald's prints on the rifle, how can that not be the case without some lie or fakery?"

That's why there are trials. The veracity of the evidence is subject to scrutiny by a variety of different means. That didn't happen in this case.
History has shown that Wade's DPD was quite capable of manufacturing evidence against defendants when they thought it was needed to get a conviction.
Even easier when you have a lawyerless dead man already convicted in the media.

[Gary Craig]

I hope you're not thinking a trial would have turned out like the fantasy put forth by Walt Brown in "The People vs. Lee Harvey Oswald." Where the prosecutor seems to offer up nothing while the defense attorney scores point after uncontested point as if by magic. Or the 2013 two-day mock trial, largely an exercise for law students.

A trial would probably be more like the 1986 Bugliosi-Spence professional effort where a legitimate experienced prosecutor went toe-to-toe with a legitimate experienced defense attorney in a courtroom setting presided over by a real-life judge.

Just that Oswald--in the hundreds of books and now thousands of websites--has received the greatest criminal defense of an individual in history. It even led to an House Select Committee in the late-70s, the most famous dramatic blockbuster movie ("JFK") concerning the subject and the Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.

"Just that Oswald--in the hundreds of books and now thousands of websites--has received the greatest criminal defense of an individual in history."

 LOL

[Walt Cakebread]

Either Oswald or someone knew Oswald owned a rifle and that he worked "in that building".

Harry Holmes told J.Edgar Hoover...     You figger it out.

[Martin Weidmann]

Take it up with Jack Ruby.  The fact that Oswald was killed has no bearing whatsoever on the evidence against him or how it can all be dismissed as suspect without someone lying or faking the evidence.  If someone says they found Oswald's prints on the rifle, how can that not be the case without some lie or fakery?  Either his prints are on the rifle or they are not.  If they are not, then the person who says they found them is lying.  To suggest otherwise is to defy logic and simply be a dishonest contrarian.

The fact that Oswald was killed has no bearing whatsoever on the evidence against him

Oh yes it did. He never got an opportunity to tell his side of the story.

If someone says they found Oswald's prints on the rifle, how can that not be the case without some lie or fakery?

You don't believe that prosecutors and law enforcement officers ever tamper with evidence to get a conviction, right?

Either his prints are on the rifle or they are not.

The FBI, who examined the rifle within 24 hours after the murder, said they could not find prints. Doesn't that mean there were no prints on  the rifle?

[Colin Crow]

Harry Holmes told J.Edgar Hoover...     You figger it out.

Who did George DeM tell after the April visit?

[Mike Orr]

Oswald did not have a rifle on the 6th floor . The rifle that was found had no prints on it until low and behold , prints were found , and they happen to match Oswald . The owner of the funeral home said he had a heck of a time getting the ink off of LHO !

[Gary Craig]

Opinion polls reflect how persuasive the Oswald defenders/conspiracy kooks (assisted by Stone's overwhelming Hollywood version) are.

Spence tried the sentimental-humanizing appeal in 1986 to little avail. CTs similarly argue that Oswald was a simple family man innocently manipulated and set-up. Having to "prove" things through time-travel doesn't sit well with judges.

"Opinion polls reflect how persuasive the Oswald defenders/conspiracy kooks (assisted by Stone's overwhelming Hollywood version) are."

 

"...Popular belief in a conspiracy was widespread within a week of Kennedy's murder. Between November 25 and 29, 1963,
University of Chicago pollsters asked more than 1,000 Americans whom they thought was responsible for the president's
death. By then, the chief suspect, Oswald -- a leftist who had lived for a time in Soviet Union -- had been shot dead
while in police custody by Jack Ruby, a local hoodlum with organized crime connections.

While the White House, the FBI, and the Dallas Police Department all affirmed that Oswald had acted alone, 62 percent
of respondents said they believed that more than one person was involved in the assassination. Only 24 percent thought
Oswald had acted alone. Another poll taken in Dallas during the same week found 66 percent of respondents believing that
there had been a plot. There were no JFK conspiracy theories in print at that time..."

==================

"...many senior U.S. officials concluded that there had been a plot but rarely talked about it openly.

Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, publicly endorsed the Warren Commissions conclusion that Oswald acted alone. Privately,
LBJ told many people, ranging from Atlantic contributor Leo Janos to CIA director Richard Helms, that he did not believe the
lone-gunman explanation.

The president's brother Robert and widow Jacqueline also believed that he had been killed by political enemies, according to
historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Tim Naftali. In their 1999 book on the Cuban missile crisis, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev,
Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964, they reported that William Walton -- a friend of the First Lady -- went to Moscow on a previously
scheduled trip a week after JFK's murder. Walton carried a message from RFK and Jackie for their friend, Georgi Bolshakov, a
Russian diplomat who had served as a back-channel link between the White House and the Kremlin during the October 1962 crisis:
RFK and Jackie wanted the Soviet leadership to know that "despite Oswald's connections to the communist world, the Kennedys
believed that the president was felled by domestic opponents."

In the Senate, Democrats Richard Russell of Georgia and Russell Long of Louisiana both rejected official accounts of the assassination.
In the executive branch, Joseph Califano, the General Counsel of Army in 1963 and later Secretary of Health Education and Welfare,
concluded that Kennedy had been killed by a conspiracy.* In the White House, H.R. Haldeman, chief of staff to President Richard Nixon,
wanted to reopen the JFK investigation in 1969. Nixon wasn't interested.

Suspicion persisted in the upper echelons of the U.S. national security agencies, as well. Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, chief of Pentagon
special operations in 1963 (and later an adviser to Stone), believed that there had been a plot.

Winston Scott, chief of the CIA's station in Mexico City at the time of Kennedy's murder and an ultra-conservative Agency loyalist,
rejected the Warren Commission's findings about a trip that Oswald had taken to Mexico six weeks before the assassination. Scott
concluded in an unpublished memoir that Oswald had, indeed, been just a patsy.

None of these figures was a paranoid fantasist. To the contrary, they constituted a cross section of the American power elite in 1963.
Neither did they talk about a JFK conspiracy for public consumption; they talked about it only reservedly, in confined circles..."

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/11/the-kennedy-assassination-47-years-later-what-do-we-really-know/66722/

[Colin Crow]

Those are opinion polls on Jack Ruby's having just shot Oswald, not on the influence of conspiracy theorists.



Polls tightened in the wake of the Warren Report but widen with the first conspiracy books and debates.

And no real influence of the movie "JFK".