Free Impossible: The Case Against Lee Harvey Oswald by Barry Krusch

height and some way, somehow, ends up mired in the unreasonable chance quicksand: in other words, if there is any chance that you are guilty, then you are guilty, even if the chance is one in 1000 or one in 1,000,000 or one in 1,000,000,000! Therefore, you are damned if you did, and damned if you didn’t.
    Object to King’s reasoning? Well, shame on you, because someone does win the lottery . . . don’t they? Well, eventually. But that’s not really the point, is it? If you put people in jail based on the results of a coin flip , that approach would be light-years more fair than this standard!
    Can you imagine how full our prisons would be if we convicted people using the unreasonable chance standard of 1 in a 1,000,000??? If you can’t, consider the insight which emerges when we come at the ratio from another angle:

    If the chance you are innocent is 999,999 out of 1,000,000, get ready to do some hard time in the slammer!

    That’s right, under the Stephen King lottery-odds-are-the-benchmark version of the unreasonable chance standard, we’d all be calling Sing Sing home! And if that were true, would King be singing a different tune?
    I don’t know, probably not: if that person knocking at your door with a warrant for your arrest turns out to be Stephen King, I’d suggest you git while the gittin’ is good.
    Uh oh, too late . . . heeeeeeeeeeere’s Stephen!

    Ahhhh, you say, now the light bulb is turning on!
    Yes, unfortunately for the premise of King’s novel, it turns out that we do not live in North Korea, nor China, nor any imaginary dystopia which would employ a standard so bizarre . . . and so unjust .
    Instead, we live in the United States of America, where the standard of proof is much higher, and thank G-d for that (if you’re an atheist, thank the Constitution). Equally important, that standard of proof has to be determined by not just one person, but twelve people, all in agreement, gathered together in a group we call a “jury”, who listen to testimony from a jury box. Count the seats:

    So, whatever the standard happens to be, we know that it is much, much higher than the unreasonable chance standard, and because of it, the chance of convicting Oswald would be much, much lower, perhaps even approaching . . . zero !
    “But Barry, how can you say that?”, you say, “didn’t Bugliosi win before a jury on Showtime in 1986?”
    Yes, indeed; in 1986. But new evidence has come out since then, and the defense is a lot more refined than that presented by Gerry Spence. And who knows how that “trial” was controlled, anyway? And how the jurors were selected? And what nondisclosure agreements did they sign? Was it on Showtime for a reason?
    Indeed, another (later) mock trial did not have the same result (“Jury Deadlocks in Oswald Mock Trial,” ABA Journal , October, 1992, p. 35):

    Note what this article concludes, as I mentioned above: there have to be twelve people on the jury, and they all must agree. If they don’t all agree, that is a deadlocked jury, what is sometimes known as a hung jury . If the jury can’t reach a decision, then there has to be a new trial, with a new jury, and the cycle will start all over again, if necessary.
    And that is the way the justice game is played in the U.S. of A. Love it or leave it. For my part (for what it’s worth), I love it. I hope you do too.
    Now that the cobwebs have begun to clear away from our mind, it is time to get serious. We had a lot of fun with aliens and UFOs earlier on, but when the evidence doesn’t fit the conclusion, that hard dose of reality is going to wipe the smile off our faces. And the reality is that the standard of proof required to convict Oswald is a very difficult one to meet.
    Let's learn more about it.
    While typically thought to be a quintessentially American concept, it turns out that the concern for protecting the rights of the innocent by applying an extremely high standard of proof has an ancient, very rich history, a