“I can hardly believe the fact that, apart from the courtroom participants, only Memphis TV reporter Wendell Stacy and I attended from beginning to end this historic three-and-one-half week trial. Because of journalistic neglect scarcely anyone else in this land of ours even knows what went on in it. After critical testimony was given in the trial’s second week before an almost empty gallery, Barbara Reis, U.S. correspondent for the Lisbon daily Publico who was there several days, turned to me and said, ‘Everything in the U.S. is the trial of the century. O.J. Simpson’s trial was the trial of the century. Clinton’s trial was the trial of the century. But this is the trial of the century, and who’s here?'”
– – Jim Douglass
CourtTV advertises today that it’s running a full day of programming in honour of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but according to the online guide, the day ends at 2pm.
The schedule includes “Railroaded in Texas“, “Home of the Brave“, “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till“, and “Mississippi Justice“. I’d have watched any of these docs with interest if I had CourtTV, but I’d also like to view Michel Parbot’s “Who Killed Martin Luther King?” (1995), “Assassination of Martin Luther King” (1993), and what a reviewer notes is missing in the latter, “footage of James Earl Ray’s confession and the Senate Commitee Hearings on his killing in 1977.”
CourtTV’s Crime Library includes James Earl Ray: The Man Who Killed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., by Mark Gribben, who builds a case and renders judgement – Ray acted alone – by leaving out important facts on the record.
Gribben’s chapter on Loyd Jowers – a name he misspells – is a case in point:
Although Lloyd Jowers refused to cooperate with authorities, the furor over his claims prompted the Shelby County District Attorney General to open an investigation into the restaurateur’s claim. It didn’t take those investigators long to debunk Jowers’s assertion that he was part of a conspiracy. Gerald Posner also investigated Jowers and found that he had asked others to back up his story in return for part of a $300,000 Hollywood movie deal.
The King family, however, latched on to Jowers’s claim. The family never accepted the FBI’s conclusion that Ray acted alone, and the Kings sued Jowers in civil court for the wrongful death of Martin Luther King Jr. In 1999, the case went to trial and the King family persevered, winning a $100 damage claim. The money was never their goal, representatives of the family stated: “if we know the truth, we can be free to go on with our lives,” Coretta Scott King testified.
According to The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis by Jim Douglass (Spring 2000 Probe Magazine):
In the complaint filed by the King family, “King versus Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators,” the only named defendant, Loyd Jowers, was never their primary concern. As soon became evident in court, the real defendants were the anonymous co-conspirators who stood in the shadows behind Jowers, the former owner of a Memphis bar and grill. The Kings and Pepper were in effect charging U.S. intelligence agencies — particularly the FBI and Army intelligence — with organizing, subcontracting, and covering up the assassination. Such a charge guarantees almost insuperable obstacles to its being argued in a court within the United States. Judicially it is an unwelcome beast.
Many qualifiers have been attached to the verdict in the King case. It came not in criminal court but in civil court, where the standards of evidence are much lower than in criminal court. (For example, the plaintiffs used unsworn testimony made on audiotapes and videotapes.) Furthermore, the King family as plaintiffs and Jowers as defendant agreed ahead of time on much of the evidence.
But these observations are not entirely to the point. Because of the government’s “sovereign immunity,” it is not possible to put a U.S. intelligence agency in the dock of a U.S. criminal court. Such a step would require authorization by the federal government, which is not likely to indict itself. Thanks to the conjunction of a civil court, an independent judge with a sense of history, and a courageous family and lawyer, a spiritual breakthrough to an unspeakable truth occurred in Memphis. It allowed at least a few people (and hopefully many more through them) to see the forces behind King’s martyrdom and to feel the responsibility we all share for it through our government. In the end, twelve jurors, six black and six white, said to everyone willing to hear: guilty as charged.
We can also thank the unlikely figure of Loyd Jowers for providing a way into that truth.
Gribben continues:
The main reason the Kings won the case was because Jowers did not contest the claim and offered no defense. Instead, jurors were shown his videotaped interview with Sam Donaldson and never heard from Jowers himself. One of the main plaintiff’s witnesses was TV jurist Judge Joe Brown, who testified about ballistics tests done on the Remington rifle recovered at the scene. Brown is not a ballistics expert, but served as judge on one of Ray’s suits to gain a new trial.
Another plaintiff’s witness, New York-based attorney and media expert William Schaap suggested to jurors that the media was involved in a broad cover-up in King’s murder. According to Schaap, the FBI, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, infiltrated newspapers around the world and persuaded newspapers in the 1960s to run stories that discredited King. Schaap also believed that the government was behind the stories that discredited the conspiracy theories that emerged after King’s murder.
Douglass reported:
David Morphy, the only juror to grant an interview, said later: “We can look back on it and say that we did change history. But that’s not why we did it. It was because there was an overwhelming amount of evidence and just too many odd coincidences.
“Everything from the police department being pulled back, to the death threat on Redditt, to the two black firefighters being pulled off, to the military people going up on top of the fire station, even to them going back to that point and cutting down the trees. Who in their right mind would go and destroy a crime scene like that the morning after? It was just very, very odd.”
The King Center maintains the complete transcript of the trial.