by Jackson Baker
t a press
conference at Memphis' downtown Crowne Plaza late last Thursday, a very
patriarchal-looking Joseph Lowery commented that the day's bizarre
events at the nearby Criminal Justice Center had seen the long-postponed
"wedding of Justice and Truth," and the "offspring"
he expected from that consummation was nothing less than a new trial for
James Earl Ray, the now-terminally ill convicted killer of Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
If the coupling which Lowery mentioned did indeed occur, it took second place for sheer shock value to another union which was formalized on the same day. That was the making of common cause between the camp of Ray and that of the late Dr. King -- including not just Southern Christian Leadership Conference president Lowery but the martyred civil-rights leader's son Dexter King and his widow, Coretta Scott King.
Ray's
end was held up by his attorney, conspiracy theorist William Pepper,
and by his brother Jerry Ray, both of whom sat at the Crowne Plaza
press conference table Thursday afternoon along with Lowery and Dexter King
to celebrate a ruling by Shelby County Criminal Court Judge Joe Brown
that indeed seemed to open the way to a new trial for the convicted
assassin.
In a rambling ruling which managed to mystify almost everyone in his courtroom until its meaning was finally grasped, Brown -- whom Pepper had petitioned to order new ballistics tests on the Remington rifle allegedly used by Ray to kill King -- had in effect punted the responsibility for decision to the state Criminal Court of Appeals. It eventually dawned on everyone that by forwarding his own finding recommending the tests and asking the appeals court to rule, Brown had given the petitioners excellent field position indeed.
It was as Joseph Lowery had said -- oddly -- during a break in the hearing, "Bedfellows make strange politics." There was much that was strange in Memphis last Thursday -- not the least of which was Brown himself, a judge whose campaign slogan in 1990 was "Send Brown Downtown" and who has earned a TV magazine-show segment or two for his distinctive mode of "alternative sentencing" (e.g., instructing a burglary victim to take what he wants from his victimizer's abode).
To say that Judge Brown has a theatrical instinct or two is an understatement, and, fairly or not, it was easy to imagine him enlarging upon the Ray saga (and his role in it) once it was presented to him for judgment. Rendering his judgment on Thursday, he was the proverbial ram in the thicket, meandering from legal point to rhetorical flight to erudite aside back to legal point. When he was done free-associating, everybody -- spectator, seasoned journalist, and lawyer alike -- seemed thoroughly confused.
As Rev. Lowery put things later, likening Brown's judgment to an obscure but passionate sermon, "I haven't the slightest idea what he said, but I like the way he said it." Jerry Ray was befuddled at first, saying of the judgment, "I don't like it. It sends us back to Appeals Court, and we don't have any luck there. The government won't let us win." (Indeed, the Appeals Court had countermanded Brown once already on the issue of a new ballistics test.")
For all their differences, the anti-government bias was something shared by Jerry Ray and the King contingent, who found in it a common ground of sorts. The Rev. James Lawson, formerly a close King associate and now a California minister, was especially critical of the FBI for its handling of the evidence at the time of the original crime and ever since, and went so far as to suggest a strategy of suppression on the agency's part.
Some aspects of the rapprochement between factions were truly startling. What had been Jerry Ray's attitude back there in 1968 when he had first heard of the assassination of Dr. King? "I felt real bad," Jerry Ray said after the hearing. "King never done nothing to us. He might have done something to the FBI!" (Ray's disdain for the Establishment extended to the national media, as when he said, "We got to look to the courts for justice. We won't get it from the New York Times and Time magazine.")
By both his account and Dexter King's, Jerry Ray had never met a member of the King family until Thursday. Approaching Dexter in the courtroom to say hello, he professed according to both their accounts that he felt "awkward." His brother had, after all, been accused and convicted of killing the man's father. Dexter had responded that he "understood." Then and thereafter, the two conducted themselves semi-fraternally, almost like people who had arranged to kiss and make up on a Sally Jessy Raphael show.
CORETTA SCOTT KING HERSELF apparently had no conversation with Ray's brother. The scheduled 9:30 a.m. hearing had been recessed until 10 o'clock while some routine cases on Brown's morning docket were cleared away, then for almost another hour pending King's arrival. She, her son, and the rest of a smallish entourage had entered the courtroom with Pepper just before 11 o'clock, at which point the hearing finally began.
All the morning testimony -- except for hers and Dexter King's -- was technical in nature, concerning the pluses and minuses of the new technology (Scanner Electronic Microscopy) which the petitioners insisted could conclusively prove whether James Earl Ray fired the fatal shot. (Brown would rule that it might indeed do so.)
So technical was the testimony -- from defense witnesses Robert Hathaway, Marshall Robinson, and Anthony Owens and from the state's own gun expert, James J. Cadigan -- that many occupants of the courtroom had a hard time staying with it. Coretta King herself seemed to be dozing much of the time.
Eventually, in the afternoon, it was her time to testify. (Assistant District Attorney General John Campbell, who represented the state at the hearing, had committed something of a public relations faux pas when he protested earlier -- albeit gently and respectfully -- that Mrs. King and her son should not be heard, since their testimony would presumably not be germane to the issue of whether the 30.06 Remington needed to be retested; in reply, Brown read him a polite but firm lecture on victims' rights.)
Reading from a prepared statement, Mrs. King pleaded for the rifle tests, and the new trial they might occasion, to "bring about at least some sense of closure to the pain we have endured as a family over unanswered questions surrounding this tragedy." Due process for Ray would be due process for her family and for the nation, she said. "We believe that the only way this new evidence can be appropriately evaluated is in a court of law. Without a trial, this evidence will be the subject of unending speculation, depriving not only our family but the nation of the justice which can only be achieved through a jury verdict."
As she neared her conclusion, Mrs. King said, "Lastly, your honor, I would just like to say that Martin Luther King Jr. believed very deeply in civil rights and justice, even for his most violent and hate-filled adversaries. It would be a tragic irony therefore if the man accused of assassinating my husband is denied his day in court."
Similar notes were struck by her son Dexter, who would frequently cite his father (e.g., "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.") as he, too, pleaded to reopen the case. "If this is such an open-and-shut case," he asked at one point, "why are we still being asked, `Do you believe Mr. Ray killed your father?'"
AS FOR THE TECHNICAL EVIDENCE itself, what it boiled down to was that the various testifiers for the defense contended that the newfangled SEM method might be just enough to improve upon the earlier, admittedly inconclusive tests performed in 1968 by the FBI and in 1978 on behalf of the special House committee on the King assassination. And the state's witness noted that SEM tests were likely to be prohibitively expensive (although Judge Brown would call them a bargain by the standards of divorce-lawyer rates) and essentially inconclusive.
Even rounds fired by a tester and known to have issued from such-and-such a gun, said Cadigan, could be each different from the next and each might be untraceable technically to the weapon, even with the supposed precision of SEM testing.
BUT IT WAS GENERALLY UNDERstood by everyone in and out of the courtroom Thursday that technical or even evidentiary points were not the true issue. What was going on was a strange solidarity, a coming-together on the part of the aggrieved against perceived villainy in the Establishment. (It seemed almost a counterpart to the government-baiting which took over national politics in the mid-'90s.)
At the press conference, Dexter King and Jerry Ray once again exchanged deferential grace notes, and King held forth the promise that if the deathly ill James Earl Ray (who needs a liver transplant) should survive, he and the rest of the King family wanted to pay him a visit. If said visit were in the same spirit of the convening Thursday, it would outdo by far those pilgrimages of Northern liberal politicians to the homestead of George Wallace after the Alabama firebrand was crippled by an assassin 25 years ago.
A commentary this week by Time magazine senior editor Jack White in the online African-American journal Our World News puts the matter in a different perspective: "The King family already has a movie deal with Oliver Stone, who made a controversial film about JFK's assassination. Do they think a new wave of publicity triggered by a Ray trial would help a film about their father's death? A trial would be the worst way to get the truth. But it sure would make a good movie script."
And there were many who, like the Rev. Benjamin Hooks, wondered aloud why a new trial was necessary to prompt the ailing James Earl Ray to tell all that he knew.
One thing was certain: Whatever rough revisionist beast was slouching toward the New Bethlehem of the 21st century had made a fairly high-profile pit stop in Memphis last week.
ormer city-council member
Florence Leffler on the proposed new baseball-stadium site on Madison
Avenue: "A terrible mistake. It'll cause traffic jams and force the
city and county to spend money widening the surrounding thoroughfares. There'll
be all kinds of hidden costs. And if nobody can get there, it will become
just another professional sports failure."