You both know that Joan Mellen's upcoming book is going to contest the whole Mac Wallace fingerprint issue, right?
So please do not talk about it and commit to it right now.
I look forward to what Joan has to say about this print... in the mean time there is nothing wrong with using one's eyes to tell if it's night or day.
If Joan is going to offer a different narrative as to where and when this print was lifted... ok.
As you and anyone else can easily see.... the ridges match exactly where ever there is enough detail.
I'm not concluding one way or the other Jim - it just does not take a fingerprint expert to see the match.
Add the descriptions of him by a number of witnesses and his history - and Joan is going to need to show and prove he was somewhere else... as opposed to attacking this ID and the man who did it.
Agree?
Once in a while you get shown the light
in the strangest of places if you look at it right..... R. Hunter
1.) Joan got the original print from the Harrison archives. She then brought the two to a computer technician who ran it through the latest fingerprint software, which theoretically at least, minimizes human error or bias.
2.) Her book is going to be, at least partly, a bio of Mac Wallace. And also a review of the literature on this guy.
I mean, I hope you are aware of how the whole Mac Wallace stuff started? It began with J. Evetts Haiey, a rightwing extremist nut from Texas and his book A Texan Looks at Lyndon. That book was published in 1964. And its a blatant attempt to attack Johnson from the right since Haley favored Goldwater. The John Birch Society backed the book and it sold literally tens of thousands of copies a week as the election approached. (This is in Part 2 of my Fetzer piece at CTKA.)
Then later, when Billy Sol Estes got in legal trouble, he then built his whole story about LBJ in on the JFK case through Haley. But he said he had tapes of the murder arrangement with Wallace. Except, even though they would be worth millions, no one has ever heard them.
So, like many things in the JFK case, you have a very biased and narrow source (Haley) then being expanded upon by a man who simply has little or no credibility. Which is what almost anyone who studies the Billy Sol profile concludes.
I am most assuredly not challenging Ms. Mellon yet the big warning sign to me is the FBI provided print used to ID the match in the first place.
The first thing the examiner did was to say that something was missing. He wanted a new photograph of the unidentified print, one made by the FBI. This photograph exists in the National Archives and anyone can obtain one. When the FBI's photograph came, it was of a very high quality, according to the examiner.
He compared that photograph with two other sets of Mac Wallace's prints. Those two sets matched each other, but neither matched the print that had been lifted at the Texas School Book Depository at the time of the Kennedy assassination. - See more at: http://joanmellen.com/wordpress/2014/04/...M9YH4.dpuf
So the entire case for debunking this fingerprint ID is the Print sent by the FBI which is only compared to the two sets of Wallace's prints...
Do we know if they compared it to the print Darby said did match? or only that the FBI print did not match Wallace's...
How do we know the FBI print is the same as the unidentified print?
As I read more about it - the issue is not whether it is Mac's or not, but whether it was planted at some point to ensure LBJ silence due to their known relationship.
Two men found they matched. One recanted once he learned it was JFK's assassination they were talking about.
Learning that the print which undermines all this confusion was finally supplied by the FBI remains very suspect...
After working on the identifications, Darby pronounced that he had a match. I think by the time he was done, he had 34 points of match. J then decided to get a second opinion, and found a print examiner named Harold Hofmeister, who verified Darby's identification. Shortly thereafter, Hofmeister called back and returned the check for $500, which had been issued to him by Barr McClellan. Hofmeister had changed his mind. He didn't like the fact that he was using Xeroxes. He repudiated his own statement and said that he could not verify that it was a match. No matter, the Darby identification, accompanied by an affidavit readily available on the internet, was announced as a fait accompli. The Austin police sent this material to the FBI, and after, I believe 18 months, the FBI lab replied that it was not a match. But who believes THEM, right? The FBI didn't provide any supporting material and that was pronounced disrespectful to Nathan Darby since it was a protocol of the trade when you go against an expert's conclusions to present evidence for your decision. - See more at: http://joanmellen.com/wordpress/2014/04/...M9YH4.dpuf
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index....topic=4966
3.) Darby's match was a BLIND match. Another Texas-based fingerprint expert, E.H. Hoffmeister, when presented with the two prints that had been given to Darby, concluded that they were made by the same person. When he was told that the Kennedy assassination was involved, he backed off the identification. The experts who concluded that the match was in error all knew the consequences of a positive match. In a perfect world this would not be important. In this world, unfortunately, even forensic judgements made by experienced scientists can be colored by many factors. The only two BLIND (i.e. scientifically proper) submissions of the latent print from the book carton and the inked Wallace print resulted in a match.
Once in a while you get shown the light
in the strangest of places if you look at it right..... R. Hunter
Keep up the very nice work you are doing on the Mauser and the boxes and the shells.
I think these issues have been relatively ignored even though they are key.
One nigh,t back in the nineties, I interviewed the late Richard Sprague, the photo analyst at his house in Virginia.
He was sitting on his couch late that night and I was in a chair opposite him leaning forward.. And I was talking about the crime scene evidence against Oswald and mentioned the term "sniper's nest".
He shot back, "There was no sniper's nest."
I said something like, "What?"
He explained it to me through a series of photos from outside over the space of several hours.
But your evidence, from inside, with Alyea as a witness, is even stronger.
Every fundamental tenet of the WR is dubious today. And, in accepting some of this stuff, the first generation of critics did not understand just how bad it was. I suspect because they did not know just how bad people like Hoover, Dulles, McCloy and Ford were. Back then, it was something like the Age of Innocence.
Computers aren't very good (yet) at comparing fingerprints, according to all the fingerprint experts (who I concede have a financial interest in that fact). However, the current fingerprint system in use by the government (AFIS) stores information about prints which have been scanned or inked under near perfect conditions by a law enforcement officer, usually at a booking desk, such as the black and white part of the comparative image above. AFIS has a better than 95% rate of accuracy finding a match between two sets of "tenprints" (i.e. two sets of all ten prints inked under ideal conditions compared to each other). And AFIS can search a million records in a matter of minutes. However, AFIS has a much poorer rate of success in comparing latents. The best hit rate AFIS got was 70%, with a 25% false positive rating. That means if AFIS tells you there's a match, it's completely wrong slightly more than 25% of the time!
There are many reasons why this is true, most of which fall under the general rule that latent print at a crime scene are very rarely recovered under ideal enough conditions; smudged, or swiped, or partial, or elongated, prints require the good old "Eyeball Mark 1." The latent is the red part of the black/red comparison above. As you can see, while cops rarely record material between the ridges, a real latent will often not be just the ridges. Human experts have a far better accuracy rating than AFIS on latents. However, nearly half of the IAI professional experts fail their re-certification tests in a given year, and have to retake the test.
Even under favorable conditions, sometimes the latent print match is wrong. The most recent high profile case I recall is when a Seattle lawyer (Mayfield?) was accused of being a terrorist in Spain. The FBI claims a 100% accuracy rating for its print guys, but they blew that one. The actual terrorist was a guy from Africa, and the Spanish fingerprint experts, who named the real terrorist, have far more stringent requirements for a match than the FBI. I've also heard it said that the FBI's re-certification test is "too easy", and they use the same exact prints on the test every year.
The cute little fingerprint graphic you see on TV shows and movies are just a theatrical device for depicting 100 hours of grueling detective work in a single second. Fingerprint comparison is still as much of an art, as it is a science, and even well meaning professional examiners can have widely differing opinions, and often do.
"All that is necessary for tyranny to succeed is for good men to do nothing." (unknown)
James Tracy: "There is sometimes an undue amount of paranoia among some conspiracy researchers that can contribute to flawed observations and analysis."
Gary Cornwell (Dept. Chief Counsel HSCA): "A fact merely marks the point at which we have agreed to let investigation cease."
Alan Ford: "Just because you believe it, that doesn't make it so."
