Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

Last night, I watched Twelve Angry Men which starred and was produced by Henry Fonda. He must have made a ton of money on that movie because practically the whole film takes place in one room, the jury room of a trial. After having made My Stretch of Texas Ground in which we had numerous and diverse sets on locations that were indoors and outdoors, day and night, foreign and domestic, it's dreamy to imagine being able to shoot a whole movie in one room. 

And here's another piece of irony: about halfway through, they decided to add a rollicking rainstorm which created a noisy racket. So, you had to listen to the dialogue through that constant background noise. I call it ironic because we tried very hard to do the opposite: to eliminate background noise from our movie, and it was no easy task.  

And, as simple as it was to make, Twelve Angry Men is highly rated. AFI judges it to be the second best courtroom drama of all time, right behind To Kill A Mockingbird. However,  my favorite courtroom drama of all time is the Australian film Breaker Morant which is based on the true story of Australian soldiers during the Boar War who were scapegoated by the British government. And what happens in it is that, since the outcome was predetermined - they wanted them found guilty and put to death- they assigned this Australian lawyer to defend them who had never tried a case before. He was an administrative lawyer not a courtroom lawyer. But, he turned out to be one hell of a litigator, and he put up quite a fight. I won't tell you the outcome. You really should see it if you haven't. 

But, in Twelve Angry Men (and I am going to talk plainly about it from this point on, so if you think you're going to watch it, you should do so before reading any more of this) the way it goes down is that one of the jurors, who is played by Henry Fonda, is the only one who votes not-guilty on the first tally. The other 11 jurors, who are all middle-aged to older white men, all vote guilty, and they are angry at Fonda because they want to get out of there. 

The case concerned an 18 year old boy accused of killing his father with a switchblade knife. Two witnesses supposedly saw him do it. One was a neighbor, an old man, who heard a fierce argument, and by the time he got to the window, he claimed to see the boy running away. And the other was a woman from across the street who was in bed, trying to go to sleep, but she was still awake, and the way her bed was situated, she could look right out the window, and she saw the whole thing go down and claimed it was the young man.

But, the whole quest revolved around "reasonable doubt." Someone noticed the deep impressions on the nose of a juror, played by E.G. Marshall, who wore heavy glasses, and he recalled seeing such impressions on the nose of the woman. So, it meant that the woman wore glasses, even though she wasn't wearing them in court. And surely she didn't wear them to bed. So, how well could she see the perpetrator to identify him? 

Another juror, played by Lee J Cobb pointed out that she could be farsighted, in which case the glasses didn't matter. That's true, but the point remained that there was a doubt about the reliability of her claim. But regardless of that, I will tell you honestly that I would put very little stock in eye witness testimonies. Look at the Innocence Project. They have gotten dozens of men off Death Row by using DNA evidence to prove that they were not guilty. Some of these men had been wrongly imprisoned for decades- right here in the USA. And all of these wrongly convicted men were convicted on the basis of eye witness testimonies- that were wrong.  

So, if the ONLY evidence against someone is somebody claiming that they saw him do it; if that's all there is, and nothing else, then I would say that reasonable doubt definitely exists. Because: that person could be wrong, regardless of how sure he or she thinks otherwise.   

But, I think it was a clever piece of writing to put that in about the impressions from the glasses. And then regarding the other witness, the old man, he was in question because he claimed to hear the son say "I'm going to kill you!" but there was a loud train passing at the time, so how well would he have heard it over the noise? Maybe that's why they added the rainstorm. Plus, he was a decrepit old man, and he would have had to cover quite a distance in his apartment in 15 seconds or less to get to the window in time. Could he do it? More reasonable doubt.  

Then, there was the switchblade knife which the prosecutor said was "rare" but it turned out that Henry Fonda just happened to have one on him that was identical to it. 

And, no blood or prints were found on the knife, which the prosecutor claimed was wiped off. But, the attacker plunged the knife downward into the victim, and the boy was considerably shorter than the father. But, they reenacted it and determined that he could still have brought his arm up and plunged it downward. But, someone else pointed out that people don't use switch blades that way. You open it, and the way you're holding it after you open it, precludes you from doing that. So, with a switchblade, you attack upward, not downward.

So, one by one, the jurors come around to admitting that there was some doubt, and it was reasonable. So, they go from practically unanimous guilty to unanimous not guilty. 

But, what if the case they were deliberating had been Lee Harvey Oswald?  Well, the so-called eye witnesses against him were even weaker than the ones in the movie. Then, there was the FBI claim of finding a partial fingerprint on the trigger guard of the rifle and also a partial on some boxes. But, he worked there and handled boxes all day. Plus, look how easy it would have been for someone to watch him move a box and then, wearing gloves, move that box to the Sniper's Nest to frame him. And then there was the fact that the Dallas Police reported finding no usable prints at all. There was the fact that he passed the paraffin test, which meant that he hadn't fired a weapon. They ultimately claimed to lift a palm print from his dead body but remember that that would not have happened if he had lived. So, that was not going to be part of the trial. And none of the things that Marina went on to tell the Warren Commission would have happened. She was his wife, hence, spousal privilege. Plus, they never would have gotten to brainwash her. On the day of the murder, she said that Oswald only owned a rifle in Russia, which he sold.  

The claim that he ordered a rifle from Chicago would have been contested strongly. Oswald denied doing that, and his lawyers would have easily falsified the paper trail. For instance, his letter supposedly got delivered from Dallas to Chicago overnight. Even today, with all the computerization and robotic automations of mail delivery, they can't deliver a stamped envelope overnight. Overnight delivery did not exist at all in 1963, not at any price. 

And John Armstrong points out that his alleged postal money order didn't have stamps on the back, that it never went through the banking system. He also points out that the name A. Hidell  wasn't even on the P.O.Box as an owner. And since you can't stuff a rifle into a small P.O. box, he would have had to go to the counter to get it, so why would they hand over a rifle addressed to A. Hidell to Lee Harvey Oswald? 

And please be aware that I dispute that Oswald even had a P.O. Box, because there are a lot of red flags connected to it. They claim that the only thing he got in that box were Socialist and Russian newspapers, but if that's true, why was there no pile of newspapers in his room? And what are the chances that Oswald, who earned $1.11/ hr at the TSBD, and who was constantly struggling financially and having to depend on the largess of others, spend money to have Russian newspapers mailed to him? From Russia? Imagine the cost. What did he need them for? He wasn't living in Russia any more. And why wouldn't he let newspapers be delivered to his house? Why have to make trips to the Post Office to get them? That post office was neither close to where he worked nor where he lived.  And since they have post offices scattered everywhere, why wouldn't he pick one that was more convenient? 

But, here's the biggest reason why I doubt that he had a P.O. Box: because they tried too hard to sell it. In the emergency letter that he supposedly wrote in Russian to Marina telling her what to do in the event that he was either killed or incarcerated for shooting at General Walker (which he never did) the very first thing on the list was telling her about the P.O.Box, where the key was, etc. that she needed to check it right away, etc. Why was that important? If all it contained was Russian and Socialist newspapers, why would it matter in the least to Marina? It wouldn't. It couldn't. It didn't. They just made that #1 in the phony letter to sell the idea that he had a P.O. Box. And in so doing, they told me that he didn't have one- the stupid dumb plucks.

We have a photograph of Oswald standing in the doorway during the shooting, and that no doubt, would have been center stage at his defense trial, and that is why they could not let him speak to a lawyer even once.  They had to get him dead ASAP, and they did. 

But, the point is that even if we didn't have the Altgens photo, that there is so much weakness, suspicion, and outright corruptness to the remaining evidence against Oswald that there is no way he could have been found guilty. If "reasonable doubt" is more than a catchphrase, then there is no way he could have been convicted. 

So, if you want to see a great courtroom drama (although it's really a jury room drama) then watch Twelve Angry Men. And, if you want to watch a modern thriller about a terrorist attack that falls on the shoulders of a small town Texas sheriff, then watch My Stretch of Texas Ground.