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

The world is waiting to see if Eric Nelson, the lawyer of Derek Chauvin, is going to have him take the stand in the George Floyd murder trial.  

I don't know if he is or isn't, but I do know that the dumbest decision ever made, in that regard, was that of Jack Ruby's legal team to not have Ruby take the stand. 

It was so incredibly stupid, I have to wonder if they were really working for the other side. What were they afraid of? That the prosecution would trip him up? Over what? All he had to do was tell the truth. The facts of the case spoke loudly that he had no intention of shooting Oswald. 

If Ruby intended to shoot Oswald, you know, because he was a big Mafioso and his Capo ordered him to do it, he would have known that shooting Oswald in a crowd of police was going to result in his immediate arrest. Right? And he would have known that he wasn't going home again after that- ever. He wasn't going back to his life again- ever. So, his nightclubs, his beloved dogs, and everything else in his life was going to be lost. He would have made arrangements. But, not only did he not make arrangements, he actually brought one of the dogs, Sheba, with him and left her in the car. He dearly loved Sheba, and he often referred to her as his wife. 

This was proof-positive that Ruby had no thought of killing Oswald, and all that talk about a Mafia order is complete, utter nonsense.  

Ruby would have made a great witness for himself if his lawyers just let him tell the truth. But no; right away, his first lawyer, Tom Howard, instructed him to say that he shot Oswald to spare Jackie a trip to Dallas. Howard made it up, and it was the worst legal advice ever given. And when Belli was in charge, he didn't use it. He didn't tell the jury that Ruby shot Oswald to make it easy on Jackie. He said that Ruby shot Oswald because he has a disease, psychomotor epilepsy. You know how an epileptic has involuntary movements, right? You know how an epileptic flails his arms and swings his body, etc.  Belli actually had the nerve to claim that in Ruby's case, his epilepsy manifested with the movement of him taking his gun out of his pocket, rushing Oswald, and shooting him. And you thought the Twinkie defense was bad. 

An epileptic seizure is a chaotic discharge of nervous energy; a wild, uncontrolled eruption of random, disordered and unorganized contractions. To attribute the honed action of taking a handgun, which involves intricate manual dexterity, and rushing someone and shooting him to epilepsy is beyond wrong. It's lunacy. 

So, why did Belli do it? It's because he knew that Ruby had no memory of shooting Oswald. Ruby told him that that all he remembered was going to the garage and being jumped by police. He didn't remember anything else. But, there was nothing else to remember. Ruby was telling him the truth, the literal and complete truth. It was the Dallas Police who were lying, and Belli should have realized it.