by Jackson Baker
istrict Attorney
General Bill Gibbons has a fair track record as a seer, having guessed right
last year on a social issue which not everybody (read: not this writer)
saw as clearly as he did. Back then Gibbons was a member of the Shelby County
Commission, and his faction of seven white Republicans had locked horns
with the commission's six black Democrats over the question of how to elect
a Shelby County School Board.
The argument was whether residents of the city of Memphis were entitled to a vote on a county board or whether that still hypothetical board should be chosen entirely by voters in the suburban areas served by the schools. No need to unravel the complications now, which involved questions of which side's taxes actually subsidized the other side's schools.
The point is that Gibbons was confident enough to allow the other side's plan to be adjudicated first, sure that it would be found, as he said at the time, "unconstitutional." He was right; that's exactly how U.S. District Judge Jerome Turner ruled, and the point of revisiting that point in time now is to wonder whether the D.A. is equally Solomonic about current efforts to reopen the case of James Earl Ray, the convicted -- nay, the confessed -- murderer of Dr. Martin Luther King.
As he acknowledged last weekend, nibbling some ceremonial barbecue on the contest grounds of Tom Lee Park, Gibbons opted to keep a low profile for both himself and his prosecutorial office during the defense team's current efforts to get the ailing Ray a new trial. By re-testing the rifle he admittedly brought to Memphis with him in 1968, Ray's pleaders hope to prove that he could not have fired the fatal shot. Criminal Court Judge Joe Brown ordered the tests, which continue this week in a specially equipped lab in Pennsylvania.
From the beginning, Gibbons has let assistant D.A. John Campbell handle the state's case, and Campbell has steadily maintained that new tests -- even by the technically advanced method of scanner electron microscopy (SEM) -- would be as inconclusive as two old ones were, in 1969 and in 1978, when a congressional hearing was called. Ray's rifle was never positively linked to Dr. King's assassination; his conviction was based on his confession and on a mountain of other, mainly circumstantial, evidence.
Campbell and Gibbons reason that another inconclusive finding would doom Ray's quest for a new trial, and they are so confident about the outcome that they have so far made no provision for their own re-testing, though authorized by Judge Brown to do so at a laboratory and by a practitioner of their choice.
The defense tests were begun last week in Rhode Island, under the auspices of one Robert Hathaway, a ballistics expert whom Ray's team has employed once as a courtroom authority and who would almost certainly serve in that capacity again at a new trial. Imagine this: that Hathaway's team of analysts, though armed with the best will and conscience in the world, should yield -- perhaps subconsciously -- to the obvious wish of their clients not to see a connection between new rounds fired by Ray's rifle and the fatal bullet of 1968. Or imagine merely that there is no connection and that the new tests make that obvious.
Add the fact that Dr. King's widow and son Dexter are now on record as disbelieving in Ray's guilt and that momentum is gathering -- especially among African Americans -- in favor of various conspiracy theories about the assassination, some of them implicating the government.
What you would have in that event, should the new trial not occur, is a recipe for social unrest that might dwarf what happened when Rodney King's police assailants were let off in 1992 by a Simi Valley, California, jury.
Gibbons is confident that this is one hypothesis that won't be tested. Hathaway and the rest of the current testing team, he is sure, are people of impeccable integrity, who -- like all the experts before them -- will find nothing conclusive, and no need therefore, in this age of jury nullification, to convene a new trial. No need to tempt the fates -- or the furies.
Clearly, more things are at stake here than Bill Gibbon's reputation as a prophet.
(Jackson Baker is senior editor of the Flyer.)