The burden of proof in a murder case is usually on the prosecution.
But this case is a different kind of trial—there can be no question that Ruby killed Oswald.
Despite all his assurances to Jack (at their first meeting) that in court he becomes “sedate and scholarly,”
Belli tries this case at the top of his usually nuanced voice.
“He and Tonahill tried to outdo each other,”
Though Belli is learned and eloquent, he has an obvious desire to be “one of the boys.”
His language is studiedly coarse; he likes to recall his days as a seaman; and he makes no secret of his attraction to the ladies—“I believe in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and sex, and not necessarily in that order.”
Alexander, with his instinct for the jugular, knows what he is doing when, at the trial’s outset, he called newsmen’s attention to the “fruit boots.” Many short men have an instinct for “seeking higher ground.”
Belli, a short man, calls those he admires “stand-up guys,” or praises men’s “stand-up qualities.” He can be impressively energetic when allowed to prowl the courtroom.
The prosecution, therefore, has the judge remind him, each time he tries to rise, that in Dallas a lawyer must question witnesses from his chair.
“They wore him down,” Tonahill claims. “If we made any mistake in the trial I think it was his wrangling back at them. We agreed at the outset that I would be the rough-and-tumble Texan, and he would be the suave and polished one. But when we got in court, he started slugging harder than I did.”
Alexander remembers; “we called them Flopsie and Mopsie.”
Original Ruby defence lawyer, Tom Howard would have forced the State to prove malice.
In this case it is now difficult for two reasons.
First, the defence said split-second timing brought Jack into the basement, ruling out premeditation unless, like European conspiratorialists, one considers the whole Dallas police force in on the plot (which the prosecution could hardly argue).
Second, Ruby’s many comments to the police—that he did their job for them, and was glad he had—were of doubtful admissibility, since they were taken while he was in custody.
For three days the prosecution made its case—policeman after policeman remembering this damaging thing or that thing he had said.
Twenty prosecution witnesses testify during the trial.
Of those, Detective James R. Leavelle, who had been handcuffed to Oswald, testifies that as he lay bleeding, Ruby said, “I hope the son-of-a-bitch dies.”
Officer D.R. Archer testifies that he told Ruby, “I think you killed him,” and Ruby’s reply was, “I intended to shoot him three times.”
Sergeant Patrick T. Dean, Ruby’s friend, is the testimony most damaging.
Ten minutes after the shooting, he says, Ruby told him that on Friday night, “when he noticed the sarcastic sneer on Oswald’s face,” he thought he would kill him.
Jack looks at him without reproach while he gives evidence.
(Jack later gave Dean a copy of The Warren Report with a fond inscription in it, and tried to give him his watch and his gun.)
Officer Thomas D. McMillon testifies that he heard Ruby say, “You rat son-of-a-bitch, you shot the president.”
The defense’s rebuttal that…
- None of the testimonies from witnesses regarding what Jack Ruby uttered before the shooting were recorded when there are lots of cameras and microphones where it happened.
- Demeanor and activities that witnesses testified on supported Jack Ruby’s peculiar behavior.
The defence counters: A review of television tapes, however, show that, as Ruby fired at Oswald, McMillon was far to the rear and looking away from the action and therefore couldn’t have heard anything.
Though the police are against him. That doesn’t matter, now.
He knows that.
The defense’s case that claims Jack Ruby is not guilty of pre-meditating the killing, and if any, was a case of sudden passion killing stressing that…
- Jack Ruby was overcome by emotion and is not in his right mind when it happened.
- He was a peculiar character to start with and has scientific proof through electroencephalogram (EEG) to support it.
- His manner of shooting a gun is unorthodox.
What eats at him those first days, jolt after jolt, is the defense.
Belli tries to make each policeman admit that Ruby was a “character” (he meant an oddball, unaware that “character” means “police character,” or criminal, in Dallas cops’ jargon).
Isn’t he like the village idiot—Belli phrased and rephrased the matter—who is tolerated till one of his weird pranks misfires?
Tonahill recalls Jack’s squirming agony those days. “‘Why is he doing that, Joe?’ he would ask me.
Jack wants to have his cake and eat it too.
He knows the defense has to make an insanity case, but he wants them to do it, and leave him a great big hero.
He keeps saying he wants to be dignified.
‘Dignity’ is one of his favorite words—but the defense has to show him for the nothing that he is.”
The defense sets out to prove that Jack Ruby had a troubled mind.
Attorney Belli first called Little Lynn, a 19-year-old stripper, who says Ruby “has a very quick temper.
He’d fly off the handle.” Another stripper, Penny Dollar, tells of Ruby’s fighting with a taxi driver, beating his head on the sidewalk, then stopping suddenly and asking, “Did I do this?”
Bob Denson, the private investigator Belli hires in Dallas, watches inside the courtroom as “Belli lost his client”—as Jack shies away from him, from everyone, withdraws into himself, withering as the “village-idiot” theme recurrs in every variation.
All through the trial Alexander takes a blunt he-man approach toward the dandyisms of the defense lawyer and his client and his witnesses.
He calls “Larry” Crafard, who had been living in the backroom of Jack’s club, “the boy whose eyes wiggled,” and when George Senator is on the stand, Alexander asks about the arrangements of beds in the apartment he shares with Jack.
In the courtroom, he calls his foe “Mr. Belly” until informed from the bench that the correct pronunciation is Bell-eye.
Too low for judge or court reporter to hear him, he whispers mock encouragement toward the defense table:
“ Atta boy, Melvin. Show ’em your muscle, Mel. Show ’em your words. Show ’em your fruit boots.”
Under this prodding, the “suave and polished one” has to stand up and slug.
Does this disturb him?
“He’d come unwound.” Tonahill shakes his head sadly and says, “They de-energized him.”
As he grows more frustrated in court, he grows more vehement at the press conferences that occur several times daily, he calls reporters into his hotel room, grows more and more insistently “one of the boys,” less and less “sedate and scholarly.”
Through glassy eyes Jack Ruby watches the metamorphosis.
For a while, he had been in his own mind another Belli (“This gave him masculinity”), had mimicked him, almost mirrored him.
He too became a winner—the “great lady’s man.”
Now he sees the original Belli weary; shouting and agitated; looking arteriosclerotic and over-coffeed; hyperventilating.
He hears him say things like, “I am just too tired to respond to that one, Judge,” and “I’m still tired from yesterday’s beating.”
He sees Belli becoming Ruby.
For a few days of the trial, Ruby keeps up surface appearances of liveliness and poise.
But girder by girder the structure is giving.
Alexander sees what was happening. “I always keep one eye on the defendant to see what rattles him. I want to know, in case he takes the stand.
With Jack, I also have one of my men watching him all the time, to see how things registered.”
On the trial’s fourth day, George Senator takes the stand and described Jack’s wild behavior on Saturday and Sunday.
He is wearing Jack’s suit.
Alexander falsettos questions at him insinuatingly before limp-wristing him away. Jack is wild-eyed?
But whenever he is thinking, “It is just like looking into a crawfish’s eyes, isn’t it? That’s right, isn’t it?”
Alexander draws everyone’s attention to the broken man at the table: “Take a look at him . . . see if you don’t agree.”
Ruby is being killed.
He looks like one who could kill.
The scant life left him now all glitters in his eyes. Their hurt cringe can be made to look like guilt.
Alexander uses those startled eyes as he had used Candy Barr’s impudently prominent “bosom,” to indict their owner—to trap the man averting them, hiding from his judges.
Jack does not want attention now. The Friday before Alexander’s assault on Monday, the TV films of his crime were screened—run three times, the first times he has seen them.
He tries to hide from the comparison of that celluloid thing up there to himself: “Sit nearer me, Joe,” he says, crouching under Tonahill’s bulk. “Don’t let them see me.”
But this is only the beginning.
Belli tries to introduce the family medical record to prove Jack congenitally insane.
Jack, the family protector, hears his brother’s and sister’s psychiatric care likened to his mother’s final madness.
Belli elicits from Dr. Towler the fact that Jack had contracted gonorrhea, though Towler himself said this had no relevance.
(“Joe! why that? What has that to do with the case?”)
Next came testimony from the experts. Dr. Roy Schafer, associate clinical professor of psychiatry and psychology at Yale University, has performed psychological tests on Ruby.
“I determined that he did have organic brain damage,” Schafer says. “The most likely specific nature of it is psychomotor epilepsy.”
He adds: Ruby, suffers from “mood swings” and “impulsiveness.”
Would Ruby be subject to states of rage? asks Belli. “Yup,” says Schafer.
What might set him off?
“Very strong emotional stimulation … states of fatigue … certain kinds of light stimulation, a certain kind of flickering light.”(referring to the newsmen’s flashbulbs in the garage while Oswald was being transported.)
Dr. Martin L. Towler, neurologist at the University of Texas in Galveston and a court-appointed expert who had examined Ruby, testified to the defendant’s has of head injuries and probable “psychomotor variant epilepsy.” During a seizure, asks Belli, “Will he know what he is doing?”
“No,” replies the witness. “He is behaving as an automaton. Most patients will be amnesic.”
The state’s rebuttal which pointed out…
- Jack Ruby’s unorthodox shooting technique is actually instinct shooting, a result of being a retired army shooter.
- That if he indeed was not in his right mind or was in a fugue state, he wouldn’t have memories of what happened before, during, and after the shooting.
The prosecution counters. Ruby was not amnesic, and offers again the statements said to the police as evidence:
Officer D.R. Archer testifies: that he told Ruby, “I think you killed him,” and Ruby’s reply was, “I intended to shoot him three times.”
Sergeant Patrick T. Dean:
Ten minutes after the shooting, he says, Ruby told him that on Friday night, “when he noticed the sarcastic sneer on Oswald’s face,” he thought he would kill him.
The prosecution also points out, Ruby’s unnatural wanting to be near Oswald as he trails him over two days in the Dallas Police Department.
Dr. Manfred S. Guttmacher, chief medical officer of the Supreme Court of Baltimore and an expert on criminal psychology, testifies, “I don’t think he was capable of knowing right from wrong or understood the nature and consequences of his act.
I think he was struggling to keep his sanity… I think he had an unusual degree of involvement in the whole tragedy … [there was] disruption of his ego, a very short-lived psychotic episode in which the hostile part of his makeup, which is very strong, became focused on this one individual. Homicide was the result.”
Jack Ruby, stares at him with a dead chicken stare.
Belli is in full stride now. Dr. Guttmacher says that Jack told him he “fell for that man” Kennedy.
Would you say (Belli pounced on the phrasing) this indicates latent homosexuality?
“I think that there are suggestions of it.” Ruby writhes around, visible to the audience, his mouth working.
It is his final shudder of life in that courtroom, the throes of dignity’s last going off.
That is on the fifth day of trial.
Alexander tells reporters what happened the next morning.
“Four days before the verdict, the guards had trouble getting him to dress. ‘Why put on my clothes,’ he said, ‘just to go be sentenced to the chair?
’ Even when they got his other clothes on, he tried to go out without socks.” Men going to the chair do not wear socks.
Just before Tom Howard left the case he remarked that the ability of Wade’s team had not yet soaked into Belli, “But I think it’s about time it did.”
Howard would not have tried to prove strict insanity, merely instability—enough to make Ruby, in an uncontrolled instinctive moment, murder Oswald “without malice.”
But Belli assumes a complex burden of demonstration. To make his point, he will have to prove :
(a) Jack Ruby was subject to psychomotor epilepsy fits; and
(b) his E.E.G. readings proved this; and
(c) not only was he a psychomotor epileptic, but he was in a fit at the precise moment when he shot Oswald; and—essential step in a “M’Naughten defense”—
(d) this fit made him incapable of knowing right from wrong at the time of the shooting.
To these absolutely necessary steps Belli adds a fifth.
Leaning on Dr. Bromberg’s description of Ruby’s amnesial “fugue state,” Belli reasons that Ruby’s remarks to the police were a form of “confabulation,” that is, filling in, on his own, what happened after his state of amnesia.
Belli gratuitously undertook then, to prove that:
(e) Ruby was not only in a fit but in a fugue state—though his own favored expert on the former said that normally it is not accompanied by the latter.
Belli had to prove (a) through (d)—all the steps—in order to establish his case; and he gave the impression that he had to prove (e) as well.
Belli says he took the case in order to fight the M’Naughten Rule concerning legal insanity.
Several people have wonder how, at that stage, Belli knew Ruby was insane. He had not talked to him or to any of his doctors.
Luckily, the first interview with his client (the one to which he tried to bring a Life photographer) bore out Belli’s premonition—he finds Jack not only arteriosclerotic in appearance, and over-coffeed, but “too excited”: “He was overcontrolling.
It didn’t reach the manic step, since I never saw the other side, the depressive.
There was no swing. But there was something there, I could tell.
I have informal training in these matters, and most of my cases involve some neurology, some psychopathology, some physiology.
But I didn’t want to make a hasty diagnosis—that’s where those small-claims-court professors are so wrong, thinking I made the diagnosis first.
But I get the best there is in the United States on this thing. There’s enough money in this case!’
Then my doctors find psychomotor epilepsy, and everything they say is being proved right.
Though at the time, no one knows much about psychomotor variant.
Dr. Roy Schafer of Yale gives Ruby the Rorschach and other psychological tests: he diagnoses organic brain damage, says Ruby’s test responses are similar in many respects to those obtained from patients who have psychomotor seizures.
Belli is exuberant: “Organic damage is demonstrable!
This is familiar territory to the dramatizer of personal injury in suits against insurance companies.
He was especially impressed when the E.E.G. is taken and sent to the foremost expert on psychomotor epilepsy, Dr. Frederic A. Gibbs of Chicago.
Gibbs says Jack has a rare variant of rare epilepsy called “psychomotor.”
(He also said in effect that there was no way Dr. Schafer could have diagnosed this from the tests he gave Ruby.)
Now Belli, who likes court “props,” is given something to handle, hold, and flourish—his “sheet of paper,” six hundred feet of electroencephalographic readings, coiled up in two shoe boxes.
Yet not one of Belli’s four experts would testify to all five conditions— or even to the four essential ones.
Dr. Schafer refused to testify to
(d). Doctors Towler and Guttmacher refused to testify to (c).
Dr. Bromberg refused to testify to (a) or (b) or (c).
The prosecution had no difficulty finding experts who would deny one or several of the essential links; and one of them denied all five.
Furthermore the National Epilepsy League, resenting any public suggestion that epilepsy leads to murder, harasses Belli (who exasperatedly called their representative “the sandwich man for a convulsion league”), and supplies the State with expert testimony.
Then Belli’s main prop turns out to be a bore—the jury easily tired of the search, through six-hundred feet of inky spiderings, for ten runs of deviations in two series in the frequency and voltage of the brain waves.
Defense expert Frederick Gibbs, one of the pioneers in the use of electroencephalography for the diagnosis and management of epilepsy, testified that Ruby’s EEG showed right temporal 6/s sharp waves, and that this was evidence of “psychomotor epilepsy”.
Gibbs suggests that affected patients manifest personality instability, lack of emotional control, convulsive and excessive types of behavior.
He, and other physician experts at the trial further postulate that Ruby killed Oswald during a fugue state induced by a psychomotor seizure.
The prosecution’s neurology expert disagrees, stating that the EEG findings were a “slight abnormality” and didn’t indicate epilepsy.
Furthermore, he indicates that Ruby’s demeanor and behavior, as described by witnesses, are not consistent with a psychomotor seizure.
This image of Ruby shooting Oswald was used at trial – Ruby is seen using his middle finger to pull the trigger, with his left hand thrown out in the opposite direction, supposedly indicating a seizure.
The prosecution counters with testimony of Ret. Col and pistol shooting instructor Alfred Breneger, who says shooting with the middle finger is actually a type of instinct shooting.
The colonel says, use of the middle finger might be done “if you’re in a hurry, when you have no time to use the sight.” We call it ,”instinct shooting.”
To rear this elaborate structure of medical inference is difficult enough, even for one with Belli’s virtuosity; but it is made even more difficult by several things—by Joe Brown’s unpredictability, by a jury already alienated under the repeated assertion that they could not be fair and by a set of prosecutors Belli consistently underestimates.
Alexander’s cross-examination of Dr. Gibbs is not all gimmickry – he has been doing his homework on the E.E.G. since Belli tips his hand at the bond hearing.
“I took a copy of Jack’s E.E.G. to Chicago and Madison [another went to Houston, New York and Baltimore] to talk with the best specialists we could find.
Alexander’s thoughts move tidily on to the trial: “Belli gave it to us by going for broke—all or nothing.
He forces the jury, if it thinks Jack has even a little bit of guilt, to give him the chair. He tells them it is an acquittal or nothing.
You can’t give a jury that kind of dare.
And all he has going for him was some fancy doctors’ talk and a few mildly abnormal squiggles on a piece of paper” (the electroencephalogram).
“He came to town to sell a piece of paper.
Now, if you just get a psychiatrist to put his views in everyday language, it will sound like damfoolishness to a jury.
I have learned, for instance, that if you ask a psychiatrist whether he thinks sexual aberrition [sic] shows a man is mentally unbalanced, he’ll say no.
That doesn’t go down with a jury.
Alexander also uses five EEGS, two normal, two abnormal and one in the middle. He asks the expert to identify Jack Ruby’s EEG , but it happens to be one that is normal.
“As for the squiggles, I get Dr. Gibbs, their main witness on them, to admit that electric impulses can stray onto the paper. Then I walk over to the courtroom wall like this.”
He rises, pins in one shoulder, puts his corrugated face against the wall, his eyes those of one listening, eyes vainly semaphoring, indecipherable.
“‘You know, doctor,’ I say, ‘if you go to the wall here, this wall [indicating], and lay your ear against it, you can pick up a sixty-cycle hum that’s in the building?’
The bailiff told me that, at the next recess, the whole jury went running over to the wall of their chamber and listened to the wall hum.” So much for unexplained squiggles.
The E.E.G. shoe boxes were put in their chamber while the jurors ponder their verdict, but it is a safe bet there is no stampede for “the piece of paper” during that short session— as there is the humming of the courthouse wall.
Even Belli’s vocally caressed terminology is not as impressive as it might have been—not, anyway, after Alexander says to the jury,
“I wonder if they got their psychomotor variant from the psychomotor pool.”
When Belli rose to give his closing argument, it was late—nine minutes to midnight—and everyone was weary.
“By the end,” says Tonahill, “I had to steer him out on the street to keep him from being run over by a cab.
He was taking all those pills—to go to sleep, to wake up. He’d take out a handful and offer me some.”
Jack’s sister says on the last day of the trial he looks as if he had just suffered a stroke.
Night Session began on Friday, March 13, 1964 at 8pm
Before closing arguments Judge Joe Brown took 17 minutes to read his charge, taking drinks of water in between.
The contents were confined to the legal directives, he read off as to if no human being at all but, more as if they were catalog items.
” If you find the defendant guilty of murder with malice, the penalty under this verdict can be death in the electric chair or a term in the penitentiary of two years to life.”
If you find the defendant guilty of murder without malice the penalty under this verdict a term in the penitentiary of two to five years.”
“If you rule him not guilty, by reason of insanity which is the verdict you would return if you are convinced the defendant can not distinguish right from wrong, you must rule on his mental condition now.
If you insane then and now, he must go to an insane asylum.
If you rule him sane now, but insane then, he must go free.”
“You will not consider the defense failure to testify on his own behalf, nor will you consider any experience or knowledge you may have, nor any fact or matter outside this case as evidence.”
The judge then asks , ” Mr. Wade how long do you want?
Mr. Wade lightly replies, ” Two Hours”
Juge Brown: “Two hours, Mr. Belli ?”
Mr Belli replies: “We should like at least three, your Honor.”
Judge Brown asks amiably : Two and half?
Mr. Belli: “Alright.”
Each side now has two and a half hours for closing arguments.
District Attorney, Bill Alexander goes first to the jury box with an tense uncertain smile:
“May it please the court, Ladies and gentlemen of the jury…
“Malice…malice can be formed in the twinkling of an eye (snapping his fingers).
This man (drooling out the next words) who looovved President Kennedy and Jaqueline Kennedy and the kids ( takes two steps forward), he wouldn’t stir himself five blocks to see the parade.
The defense claims he suffers from some weird psychomotor variant they seem to have developed for this man.”
” I wanna talk to you about this psycho- motor business, I’m not trying to be funny, but I wonder if they got this psycho motor variant from the psychomotor pool.”
A small table near the jury box has been placed to display evidence, the money order, some photographs and the gun.
Alexander picks up the gun and hams the shooting.
(Breathlessly) ” Did you realized how fast it happened until you saw those movies?” It was twelve seconds from the time it starts until they are in the jail office.”
(Relaxing) ” Now that’s fast folks. Oswald sank down gunshot and dying, while he was handcuffed to an officer. And he (Ruby) was still trying to get off shots. (lips drawn over the teeth, snapping the gun)
“Those boys were fortunate. Graves was a lucky man! Leavelle was a lucky man!”
” Jack Ruby knew right from wrong [fortissimo vibrato] when he fired at Oswald, cursing while he did it and repeating the curse over and over again after Oswald fell”
“I am not going to defend Oswald to you , but I am going to defend American justice – it is American justice that is on trial- but Oswald is entitled to the protection of law- just as you ( swinging and pointing) Jack Ruby, are demanding for yourself.
“Now, don’t tell me it takes guts to shoot a man that manacled, it doesn’t take any kind of guts like that, that’s the thing the law seeks to deter and warrants the death penalty.
I ask you for that because of the crime committed. The flagrant disregard for the life of Lee Harvey Oswald. “
“Lee Harvey Oswald loved life, just like you the jury loved life, and he had the right to draw every breath that God and Dallas County would allow him, but his lips are sealed”
(Screaming ) “He’s dead! , He’s silent! Taking secrets to the grave!” ( It was hideously fascinating)
Belli leaps to his feet. ” Just a moment – just a moment there can be no questions on the part of Oswald. The F.B.I. has stated…”
Juge Brown passively says, “the Jury will disregard it.”
Jack Ruby speaks out ” To hell with justice, he went to kill for fame and money, and I tell you that he mistook the public temper at the time. He has mocked American justice while the spotlight of the world was upon us.”
But then it was the defense’s Phil Burleson’s turn to speak – he had his moments.
“Feeble, feeble, feeble.. Feeble! – is the state’s of proving this case!”
“No parade? !?”
Some of you on the jury might not have gone to that parade.
“Go home and ask your friends and your family, and when they tell you they didn’t- go tell them that they aren’t patriotic. “
” The only malice comes from the blistering lips of some police officers- this happened in their backyard , and was a breach of their own security… What prompted Jack Ruby was the sneering, smirking Communist killer of the the President of the United States.”
Then Frank Watts for the prosecution:
“Insanity is a simple rule devided by Godfearing people,
(paraphrasing Provebs 23:7) As a man thinketh, so is he
(quoting ruby) ‘I hope I killed the S.O.B.!’
‘ I meant to get off 3 shots!’- These words show a heart regardless of duty.
A black wicked heart, I say to you, that he was sane in November and he is sane now. “
“I say to you, that he was guilty in November, and he is guilty now. – The blood is still red on the hands of Jack Ruby.”
Jack Ruby sits with his hands folded and doesn’t even blink.
One of the lady jurist is fallen asleep and jolts awake at Thonahills loud voice.
The defense’s Tonahill then goes, “Many times in this trial when my nature- our natures – responded to assaults in a louder voice than was necessary to hear us… it is because I was shocked at the deliberate attempt to distort facts.”
” Ladies and gentlemen when you took your oath, each and every one of you shook hands with the Lord”…[Swelling] “I’d never thought I hear a jury told, Oswald too loved life.”
[Spitting in contempt]” They would have you too take Oswald by the hand and walk him by the hand.”
Wade rubles, ” No one said anything about taking him by the hand”
Tonahill again, ” They lost the great opportunity, and are no so wrought up they have to find a substitute for Oswald.- they would have you send a sick man suffering from psychomotor epilepsy to a penal institution to satisfy their political ambitions… their frustrations”
[Gentle again, but manly ] “Jack Ruby, this G.I. Jack is a good man… is a sick man – goes to the rabbi saying, ‘Nobody loves me’ …calling dogs, my wife and my children, throwing people down the stairs, howling in depression..”
As it’s late the trial takes a hallucinatory feel…
The jury’s attention is a commodity to be bargained for. He freshened it with periodic returns to the most interesting subject he could think of.
On the need for Faith he assures them “I once did a lecture on this.”
On the subject of compassion he admits, “I often say to myself, with this event that happened here, had I been there, had I been so situated, there but for the grace of God and a stronger constitution of mind could go I.”
Concerning the M’Naughten Rule: “I have been on a lot of programs pro and con.”
He enlivens the science of encepholography by claiming Dr. Gibbs invented it “the year before I got out of law school—I graduated from Boalt Hall, University of California in 1933.”
Reminding them that posterity would direct its attention to their verdict, he gave this warrant for that attention: “I have tried cases in any number of courts and jurisdictions in this country and abroad.”
He let them know that he frequently cites the Bible, though he doesn’t plan to that night.
His four experts have touched disconnectedly on the five key points of his case—he emphasizes their stature more than what they have said in his last argument.
Belli can plea for a light sentence, “beat the chair,” or try to patch his medical case together again and “go for broke.”
He went for broke. “I guess,” Tonahill muses, “Mel didn’t want to spoil his record with a conviction.”
Belli says the jury did not “arrogate the right” to give his man a single year in prison: “If you put a felony of any kind on him, he won’t be eligible for Veteran’s Administration.
He is now, being an ex-serviceman. You men know that.”
Why did he take this course?
He tells us in his book: “Would it have been moral to take this sick man, this mental cripple and have him grovel, ‘I’m just a Jew boy and I’m sorry. Please forgive me.’ I can’t agree that demeaning Ruby in that way would have been right, tactically any more than morally.”
He would not demean Jack. Why, “I marched this boy” (he argued to the jury) before doctors—“I got the best in the world”—to show that he had gonorrhea, latent homosexuality, psychomotor epilepsy and village-idiocy:
“In the old days we used to call them—what?
The village clown? The village idiot?
There’s the chained wolf; there’s the hunchback of Notre Dame; there’s our own Emperor Norton out in San Francisco, the old humpty-dumpty who would bend over and allow people to hit him on the backside. . . . The man who is always around the police station, bringing the coffee, the man who brings the doughnuts, the sandwiches, the man who can be sent out for the cold beer. . . . The problem of the mother, the father, the sisters, the brother—who comes from the bad stock and has the personality problem plus the psychomotor epilepsy. . . .”
Tonahill wept at his colleague’s eloquence. (This midnight he has a handkerchief.) Ruby sits there, not reacting—deadened by now to everything.
District Attorney Wade, asses the courts mood, and cuts short is own time.
[Every sentence comes from the top of his lungs] ” Jack Ruby is a glory seeker who wanted the limelight, who wanted to go down in history.”
“You can bet your last dollar if you left this man go free the Communists will be darn happy. They believe in executing them on the spot. ..They don’t believe in innocent until proven guilty.. Turn this man loose and you’ll turn civilization back a century, back to lynch law. What will you want the history books to say about you? You want them to say we slapped this man’s wrists and gave him a little penitentiary sentance?”
“Now Jack Ruby and his defense ask for sympathy and mercy- I ask you to give him the same as he showed Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas Police Department. You want the world and Communism to know that we believe in a world of law.”
Upon these words at 1:05 am the case was sent to the jury, after almost five hours of arguments by the opposing attorneys.
The jury decides to not deliberate the case then but to go to bed and start a few hours later in the morning
The jury met at 9:15 am.
The verdict came fast—after two hours and nineteen minutes.
Men hesitate when asked to put a human being to death.
Judge Brown asks if they had reached a verdict and Deputy Sheriff W. W. (Bo) Mabry brings it to him from foreman Max Causey, the aerospace firm employee who was the first juror selected.
“We, the jury, find the defendant guilty of murder with malice, as charged in the indictment, and assess his punishment at death, ” the judge read.
Judge Brown then tells the jurors to hold up their right hands if they agreed with this verdict. They do so.
But this jury has seen Ruby gradually exanimated before their eyes, turned into a thing; and things are easily disposed of.
Jack hears the verdict without visible disturbance.
Belli boils over in front of the cameras, still a slugger, not the scholar; wearing an unexpected black sport shirt, buttoned at the neck, under his jacket
Before the jurors or the sallow, dazed-looking defendant are led away, the silver-haired attorney, pale and shaken, cries out to the eight men and four women in the jury box:
“May I thank you for a victory? I assure everyone on this jury I will appeal this to a court where there is justice and due process of law!”
Guards leap to the front of the trial room, between the press and the counsel tables, while others surround Ruby and run him out to the prison elevator.
As the 52-year-old onetime strip joint operator is pushed past him, Belli shouted:
“Don’t worry, Jack, we’ll appeal this and take it out of Dallas!”
In a rear bench at the left side of the courtroom, beneath the pooled TV, newsreel and still cameras allowed to shoot the judging of the man who committed the world’s first televised murder, were Ruby’s sister, Mrs. Eileen Kaminsky of Chicago and his brother Earl of Detroit.
“Oh God!” she weeps. Earl puts his arm around her and waves away a reporter. But she looks up at the reporter and says:
“What can we tell you? He didn’t get a fair trial, that’s what we can tell you.”
“Shoved Down Our Throat”
Above the pandemonium, Belli cried:
“I hope the people of Dallas are proud of the jury they shoved down our throat.”
Vowing to quit practicing law if he didn’t reverse the verdict, Belli shouted:
“This is the greatest railroading kangaroo court of law in history! Now do you believe there is justice and there is an oligarchy in Dallas? Do you believe this is part of the United States?”
He called Dallas “a little bit of Russia” and said the jurors “had their minds made up… they have made this city a shame forevermore!”
“Oh, Damn Him”
Behind the reporters, a Dallas girl among the spectators says: “Oh, damn him!” And staks out.
“Even in darkest Africa you wouldn’t argue for a man’s life after midnight,” Belli protests. He had asked the court to recess last night and let the lawyers argue this morning.
Belli, who is from San Francisco, says that “never, never, never will travelers come to Dallas again and remember it as anything but a city of shame.”
Then defense attorney Joe Tonahill, who is from Jasper, Tex., says grimly:
“This is a violent miscarriage of justice. I’m about to throw up!”
At one side District Attorney Henry Wade stands quietly Surrounded by his aids, Bill Alexander, Jim Bowie and Frank Watts.
On March 14, 1964, Jack Ruby was sentenced to death in the electric chair for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald
This verdict brought Wade’s death sentence victories to 25 out of 26 he had prosecuted. In the other homicide case, the defendant got life.
“I thank the jury for a fair and impartial trial,” Wade tells the small group of newsmen around him.
“Do you think they deliberated long enough, considering the trial?” A reported asks, referring to the testimony of 65 witnesses, much of it conflicting, and to the length of the trial.
It opened Feb. 17 and the jury began listening to evidence March 4.
“I think they had enough time,” Wade says.
Belli, Tonahill and Phil Burleson had pleaded with the jurors to acquit Ruby of murder as a sick man with brain damage who shot Oswald on Nov. 24 in the City Hall basement while in blackout caused by psychomotor epilepsy.
They had fought continuously to move the trial to another city in Texas, arguing over and over that Dallas could not give the onetime Chicago slim kid a fair trial.
“Had to Prove Something”
They had argued that Dallas, on the defensive over Kennedy’s murder, was going to condemn Ruby to death to prove to the world it is not a lawless city.
As the hubbub continued, Judge Brown spotted a camera televising the scene around Belli and began bellowing: “Get those TV cameras outta here! Get ’em out or I’ll clear this court of everybody.”
He had given permission for TV coverage only while the verdict and sentence were read.
Belli leaves the case as he had entered it, trying to get a photograph out of the prison to Life and trumpeting, Don’t worry, Jack, I’ll save you! But there was nothing now, to save.
Resources:
- Garry Wills, O. (1967, June). The Disposal of Jack Ruby: Esquire.
- Garry Wills, O. (1967, May). “You All Know Me! I’m Jack Ruby!”: Esquire: MAY 1967.
- Holloway, D. (2001). Dallas and the Jack Ruby Trial: Memoir of Judge Joe B. Brown, Sr.. United Kingdom: iUniverse.
- Bedford, S. (1964, March 27). Violence, Froth, Sob Stuff. Life, 31-71.
- Cartwright, G. (1975, November 01). Who Was Jack Ruby? Texas Monthly
- Worthington, P. (2014, May 08). Book excerpt: Ruby trial had everything, but dignity, decorum, law. Retrieved November 28, 2020, from https://www.thewhig.com/2014/05/08/book-excerpt-ruby-trial-had-everything-but-dignity-decorum-law/wcm/6b1839d5-e7ee-4ca7-b03f-e8b5c0df3df6
- Electroencephalogram. (2013, November 23). Retrieved November 28, 2020, from https://mmcneuro.wordpress.com/tag/electroencephalogram/
- Admin, P. (2020, July 22). Alex Haley Interviews Melvin Belli. Retrieved November 28, 2020, from https://alexhaley.com/2020/07/27/alex-haley-interviews-melvin-belli/
- https://www.justiceclearinghouse.com/resource/after-the-webinar-jack-ruby-the-original-trial-of-the-century-qa-with-brandon-birmingham/
- Jfkinvestigators. (2017, October 08). Jfkinvestigators. Retrieved November 28, 2020, from https://jfkinvestigators.wordpress.com/author/jfkinvestigators/