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DOJ's The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King – Conspiracy Theory & The Official Investigation


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The following comments appear in a review of the King vs. Jowers trial by the DOJ. This was published in the DOJ's website in 2015 and printed in their 2017 book The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King – Conspiracy Theory & The Official Investigation.

I was under the impression that Judge Joe Brown's examination of the ballistics evidence was pretty conclusive towards Ray being framed. Is the author of this DOJ material trying to bamboozle us or is there some truth to it?

Excerpt:

 

Quote

The rifle has been examined and test-fired numerous times -- in 1968 by an FBI firearms examiner, in 1977 by five firearms examiners retained by the HSCA, and in 1997 by three examiners hired by Dr. Pepper in Ray v. Dutton. On each occasion, the experts compared the test-fires with the bullet extracted from Dr. King's body. As noted above, they each found that the bullet and the test-fires share the same general rifling characteristics. Ultimately, however, none of the experts were able to determine conclusively whether the bullet was or was not fired from the rifle. Such an inconclusive result is not uncommon in the field of firearms identification, particularly when testing of a high-powered rifle like a 30.06.

Contrary to the inconclusive findings of all the firearms identification experts who have examined the rifle, Tennessee state court and television personality Judge Joe Brown, who presided over Ray v. Dutton in the 1990s, recently testified in King v. Jowers that he did not believe it was the murder weapon. His opinion, however, does not alter the prior consistent findings of the FBI, the HSCA, and Ray's experts. Judge Brown is not a professional firearms examiner and never conducted scientific comparisons himself. More significantly, his conclusions are based on several, incontrovertible factual inaccuracies.

For instance, Judge Brown testified that the bullet recovered from Dr. King did not come from the same batch as four similar cartridges found in the bundle with the rifle since, according to the FBI, the bullets from those four cartridges were metallurgically identical to each other but different from the bullet taken from Dr. King. This testimony, at the outset, is based on the factually incorrect presumption that cartridges boxed together always possess identical trace elements. Very often they do not. More fundamentally, Judge Brown's testimony is directly contradicted by the very FBI records on which he claimed to rely. According to those records, the FBI found five similar unfired cartridges in the bundle with the rifle -- not four -- and, contrary to Judge Brown's assertions, none of the bullets from those cartridges were metallurgically consistent with each other. At the same time, the FBI found the composition of the bullet from the fifth cartridge -- the one Judge Brown overlooked -- to be consistent with the composition of the bullet recovered from Dr. King's body.

Judge Brown also opined that the assassin would have missed Dr. King with the rifle found in front of Canipe's, because the scope attached to the rifle was not "sighted in" and, when tested by the FBI, was four feet off horizontally and two feet low. In fact, the FBI determined that the sight, on average, was only an insignificant three inches off to the right and less than an inch low when test-fired at 205 feet, the approximate distance between the rooming house and the Lorraine's balcony.

Apart from his inaccurate testimony, Judge Brown suggested that additional cleaning of the rifle barrel might produce a conclusive comparison result. Ray's defense team took the same position after their experts' initial series of tests proved inconclusive. They requested permission to clean the barrel with a brush and solvent, believing that that cleaning had never been done. However, our review of the records of the HSCA panel revealed that prior to its final round of test-fires, the panel actually used the brush-and-solvent cleaning method. The test results following that cleaning were again inconclusive.

Ultimately, Judge Brown's misinformed opinions and suggestions do not undermine the consistently inconclusive results reached by every firearms identification expert who has ever tested the rifle. As a result, neither Judge Brown's testimony nor any related physical evidence reliably supports the claim, advanced by Jowers and others, that the assassin did not fire from the second floor bathroom window. Instead, scientific analysis, combined with all the other evidence discussed above, suggests that the assassin shot Dr. King from the bathroom, then raced down the stairs and dropped a bundle containing the rifle used to murder Dr. King in front of Canipe's store. Regardless of whether this evidence establishes Ray's guilt, it clearly refutes Jowers' claim that the assassin fired from behind Jim's Grill.

https://www.justice.gov/crt/iv-jowers-allegations

 

https://books.google.com/books?id=wctxDgAAQBAJ&pg=PT62&lpg=PT62&dq=Judge+Brown+testified+that+the+bullet+recovered+from+Dr.+King+did+not+come+from+the+same+batch+as+four+similar+cartridges+found+in+the+bundle+with+the&source=bl&ots=vozQdWHi37&sig=DVrGtxvhjZakplKDmgaUBerAHMs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjWhq2X-q_TAhWLyoMKHce3C_YQ6AEIJDAA#v=onepage&q=Judge Brown testified that the bullet recovered from Dr. King did not come from the same batch as four similar cartridges found in the bundle with the&f=false

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If the FBI was complicit in the murder, what would one expect the DOJ to say?

 

 

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5 hours ago, Micah Mileto said:

And is there a place to find these FBI reports that Brown cited

I have not looked thru all the folders and files...   but here's a push I hope to be in the right direction

https://www.maryferrell.org/php/showlist.php?docset=1661  

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MLK/mlk.html

Cheers

DJ

 

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2 hours ago, David Josephs said:

I have not looked thru all the folders and files...   but here's a push I hope to be in the right direction

https://www.maryferrell.org/php/showlist.php?docset=1661  

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MLK/mlk.html

Cheers

DJ

 

Thank you, I've seen those before, but I don't think they address most or any of the topic Brown talked about.

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  • 1 month later...

Micah, there are certainly open issues with the physical evidence, irrespective of the DOJ report.  Unfortunately they are just that and open means that its virtually impossible at this late date to resolve them one way or the other.  The one exception may have to do with unidentified fingerprints - or even the identified prints and even the HSCA inquiry found some serous problems there.  Stu Wexler and I summarized all this in our book The Awful Grace of God dealing with the King assassination - our research is ongoing as is our effort to have it officially reopened as a Cold Case. Stu is the real expert on the evidence and where the various items stand - certainly our view is that the open issues are just that and that they were not resolved in court or by the DOJ.  Along with that our view is certainly that there certainly others involved, not just Ray. 

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Hey, Larry. I was looking on the MFF and Weisberg sites for the FBI's report on the NAA of the MLK bullet, to see how their results lined up with Guinn's results for the JFK fragments.

But I wasn't able to find the report. Did you and Stu obtain this report?

And do you recall finding any explanation by the HSCA as to why Guinn wasn't asked to study the MLK bullet along with the JFK fragments and Walker bullet?

 

 

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Pat, I'm afraid I'm way to distant from that to give you any thing off the top of my head...I'll drop a note to Stu and ask him. 

While the HSCA found and reported on some discrepancies, such as in the area of fingerprints, my impression was that many of their MLK (not JFK) primary documents were still withheld - per restrictions that Blakey had placed.

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Let me make my point, Larry.

From the DOJ website:

"For instance, Judge Brown testified that the bullet recovered from Dr. King did not come from the same batch as four similar cartridges found in the bundle with the rifle since, according to the FBI, the bullets from those four cartridges were metallurgically identical to each other but different from the bullet taken from Dr. King. This testimony, at the outset, is based on the factually incorrect presumption that cartridges boxed together always possess identical trace elements. Very often they do not. More fundamentally, Judge Brown's testimony is directly contradicted by the very FBI records on which he claimed to rely. According to those records, the FBI found five similar unfired cartridges in the bundle with the rifle -- not four -- and, contrary to Judge Brown's assertions, none of the bullets from those cartridges were metallurgically consistent with each other. At the same time, the FBI found the composition of the bullet from the fifth cartridge -- the one Judge Brown overlooked -- to be consistent with the composition of the bullet recovered from Dr. King's body."

 

1. The FBI report is from 1968, based upon NAA. The FBI tested the JFK fragments via NAA in 1964, and found the results inconclusive.

2. The HSCA re-tested the JFK fragments in 1977.

3. Vincent Guinn, who did the testing, testified that M/C bullets were unique in that they were inconsistent from bullet to bullet. He testified further that there was a strong correlation between the wrist fragment and stretcher bullet. He testified that this supported the single-bullet theory.

4. His test was performed before the HSCA pathology panel visited the archives. Blakey almost certainly informed them, moreover, of Guinn's results before they inspected the evidence. (Eddy Lopez, if I recall, had a specific recollection of the staff announcing after Guinn's test that "we're going with the single-bullet theory.")

5. Well, this means that the HSCA knew, or should have known, that Guinn's results were based upon an incorrect assumption regarding M/C bullets... That 1) they were unique in their variation from bullet to bullet within the same box; 2) that the odds of their being a match between two bullets from the same box was next to non-existent, and suggestive that two matching fragments came from the same bullet, as opposed to two separate bullets from the same box.

6. And this raises some HUGE questions. 1. Was Guinn, in fact, supplied the MLK bullets, but asked to pretend he was not when the results cut into his spin on the JFK fragments? 2. If Guinn was not provided the MLK bullets, well, why not? Was someone afraid it would cut into his support for the single-bullet theory? 3. Why didn't anyone at the FBI, or within the HSCA, who was witting of the FBI's results, say anything after Guinn testified incorrectly?

IT SMELLS.

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You certainly don't have to make a point with me Pat, as I said in the beginning there are problems many of the items of evidence - and of course legally they were never challenged in Ray's initial trial, his lawyer just accepted them.  Very much the same as in the Sirhan trial.  When those initial legal hurdles don't come into play everything goes rapidly downhill from then on.

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  • 4 months later...

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