There's something called Playing Out the String, and that vintage sportswriter's phrase pretty much describes the situation in which poor old James Earl Ray and his legal handlers now find themselves. Having played public nuisances in their demand for new tests of the rifle with which Ray allegedly shot Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the assassin and his would-be exculpators evidently have found the results of the tests ordered by Criminal Court Judge Joe Brown unsatisfactory, even though they were conducted in a lab and by an expert of the defense team's own choice. Now Ray's men decline to advertise the results of the rifle tests and petition for new ones, to be preceded by a different rifle-cleaning method.
The rest of us are not such fools as not to know what this means.To invoke another old phrase -- Put Up or Shut Up -- Ray's team has failed to put up anything resembling a convincing ex post facto defense, and they should do the right thing now. So should Judge Brown, who in his rulings has probably indulged various prevailing conspiracy theories of the Ray case as far as any self-respecting jurist could. And so should the civil-rights martyr's widow and son, Coretta Scott and Dexter King, both of whom have allowed themselves to be used (this is the charitable interpretation, mind you) in a legal charade conducted by Ray's English-bred attorney William Pepper.
Most of all, so should James Earl Ray. We referred to him as an assassin because that is what he confessedly is. There is no compelling reason, despite all his subsequent writhing and blathering about a clearly imaginary "Raoul," why Ray couldn't have put up a defense in 1969 when he was first put on trial. Instead he copped a guilty plea.
Much has been made by the conspiracy theorists about the circumstances that saw Ray able to journey to Europe in the days after the assassination in April 1968. The fact is that he got about as far as a few thousand dollars would have gotten you or me or anybody else back then before he ran out of money in short order and got himself caught. Ray's defenders also note that the 1978 U.S. Select House Committee on Assassinations concluded that Ray was assisted by a "probable" conspiracy. Overlooked is the fact that the putative conspirators the committee had in mind were not federal types like the admittedly execrable J. Edgar Hoover but redneck sorts, including Ray family members, who were capable of raising the few measly bucks that got Ray started on his aborted getaway.
Months ago, the Rev. Benjamin Hooks -- pastor of Memphis' Middle Baptist Church, former director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and a civil-rights hero in his own right -- put things in proper perspective: Ray doesn't need a new trial; if he's got something else plausible to reveal or to say, all he needs to do is to reveal or to say it. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark suggested in our pages that a congressional hearing, not a trial, might be in order. But Ray needn't stand on ceremony. We're quite sure that Larry King or Oprah or Geraldo -- his pick -- would grant him a forum.
We do not rejoice that James Earl Ray has an apparently fatal liver disease, but we understand why various authorities have so far declined to rush him, ahead of long-deserving others, to the top of a transplant list.
The fact is, James Earl Ray has played his last trump card and failed to take the trick. Hard as it may sound, he should consider the option of going gentle into that good night.