The facts that he was a self-identified Marxist and had lived in the USSR looked bad enough in the court of public opinion.
The court of public opinion..... Where did the public get the information on which they based their opinion? News papers radio and TV...... And the reporters got their information from the authorities.....Like Henry Wade who told reporters that they had found Lee Oswald's finger prints on the rifle.....It was a bare faced lie, they had not found any identifiable finger prints on the rifle, but the reporters didn't know that, so they passed that information to the public.
Carl Day, Dallas Crime Lab on work done November 22nd ...
"I took it to the office and tried to bring out the two prints I had seen on
the side of the gun at the bookstore. They still were rather unclear.
Due to the roughness of the metal, I photographed them rather than
try to lift them. I could also see a trace of a print on the side of the
barrel that extended under the woodstock. I started to take the
woodstock off and noted traces of a palmprint near the firing end of
the barrel about 3 inches under the wood-stock when I took the
woodstock loose."
"These are prints or pictures, I should say, of the latent—of the traces of
prints on the side of the magazine housing of the gun No. C-2766 ...
They appeared to be the right middle and right ring finger of Harvey Lee
Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald."
Day's photographs of the trigger-housing prints were confirmed as Oswald's in the 1993 PBS-TV
NOVA Frontline program "Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?" (See also: "JFK First Day Evidence" by Gary Savage, p.120 and "Reclaiming History" by Vincent Bugliosi, pp.803-04)
(Yet another example of the exemplary unbiased work contributed by the Dallas Police Department.)