Jack Ruby : A Review and Reassessment - Part 2

By Max Arvo

During that first week after the shooting of Oswald, while Belli, Woodfield, Shore and Earl Ruby were making plans in California, other crucial individuals were inserting themselves into the Ruby case. One of these individuals was lawyer and doctor Hubert Winston Smith, who was, at the time of the trial, a faculty member at the University of Texas. He was a professor both in the Law School, based in Austin, and of the Medical Branch, based in Galveston. He also ran the Law-Science Institute, based out of the University, which he had established.

The intersection of law and science had been at the heart of Smith’s career since at least the mid-1940s. Born in Texas, Smith received his AB and MBA from the University of Texas (UT), before receiving his law degree from Harvard in 1930. He then practiced law in Dallas for two different firms, until he entered the medical school of Scotland’s University of Edinburgh. He then returned to Harvard to complete his medical training; after that, he was an associate in medical-legal research for three years on the Harvard Law and Medical Schools. During World War Two, he served in the US Navy, running the Legal Medicine Section of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. He then worked as a Professor of Legal Medicine at the University of Illinois from 1946 to 1949, at which time he moved to Tulane University in Louisiana, where he held three faculty appointments and ran a newly established Law-Science Program.

In 1952, he&nbspreturned to UT. He founded the Law-Science Institute, which was tied to the University of Texas but, while there, he also founded the Law-Science Academy and Foundation. With these organizations, Smith’s law-science work became private, unaffiliated with any university, for the first time. The tension between these private entities and the law-science work tied to UT would ultimately be a primary reason behind Smith’s departure from UT in 1965.

All of Smith’s various law-science organizations offered courses which sought to share with attorneys the latest scientific and medical research and the various ways by which they might utilize it in court. They were attended by many of America’s foremost lawyers, scientists, doctors and psychiatrists. I have found syllabi, calendars and correspondence from almost all of the Law-Science courses Smith organized and attended between 1953 to 1964; those materials provide a detailed and extensive picture of Smith’s associations, closest colleagues, research, primary interests and activities throughout that time.

These materials, and various articles and other documents published during the trial, confirm that Smith had longstanding, close relationships with most, if not all, of the lawyers and psychiatrists who became involved in the Ruby case from the time Belli took the lead (between end of November to early December) to the time Smith left as defense lead, on June 3rd 1964. They also confirm that Smith’s involvement began months before he formally joined the defense team and that he was a hugely influential presence on Belli’s defense.

2.1 - Smith’s Early Involvement

The first three psychiatrists brought onto the Ruby case by any member of the Ruby defense team were Manfred Guttmacher, Walter Bromberg, and Roy Schafer. Belli himself wrote in his 1964 account of the trial Dallas Justice that Smith picked all three for him:

Firstly, this confirms that Smith was involved directly in Belli’s defense at least as early as mid-December, because Guttmacher and Bromberg first examined Ruby on December 21st. This never seems to have mentioned during the trial, in court or to the press. It also doesn’t seem to have been discussed anywhere since.

This also confirms that Smith’s involvement as early as mid-December was crucial. Even if the selection of these psychiatrists was all Smith had contributed, his role would still have been decisive. The entirety of Belli’s defense - as he states in the quote above - was predicated on the examinations and conclusions of these three individuals. They were also the first medical professionals to examine Ruby since the shooting, with the exception of Holbrook, who had conducted a very brief examination of Ruby within a day of Oswald’s shooting.

It’s also worth stating the obvious but crucial point that Belli and the defense team would have been completely neutralized if medical experts, after examining Ruby, presented any doubt, hesitation or skepticism regarding the defense’s foundational claim that Ruby had killed Oswald during an episode of  psychomotor epilepsy. They also announced that Ruby had this condition before any psychiatrists had examined Ruby, and without any evidence that Ruby had ever even suffered from anything remotely comparable to epilepsy, or had even suffered from any severe mental illness of any kind.

Belli’s defense team and the psychiatrists they introduced to the case therefore needed to work backwards from the assertion that Ruby had killed Oswald during an episode of psychomotor epilepsy. They needed psychiatrists to examine Ruby, and they then needed them to conclude that Ruby did indeed have that obscure condition; once they had done that, they then needed them to conclude that Ruby had suffered from a psychomotor epileptic episode during the Oswald shooting. 

Smith therefore needed to be as sure as he could possibly be that the psychiatrists he selected would produce the results and conclusions they needed. By taking Smith’s recommendations, Belli therefore also must have had complete trust and confidence in Smith and in the doctors he chose. They simply could not afford to produce any examination results, analyses, conclusions or diagnoses which suggested anything other than that Ruby had psychomotor epilepsy at the time of the shooting.

Their evident confidence in both the legal strategy and that the doctors would conclude Ruby had the condition already seems somewhat surprising, and, from the outside, perhaps a tad premature and unfounded. Ultimately, however, the psychiatrists Smith selected did indeed produce exactly the conclusions they needed. 

2.2 - Psychomotor Epilepsy

Besides being a stroke of almost unbelievable good fortune for Belli and his defense, our current medical knowledge makes their diagnosis of psychomotor epilepsy seem even more suspect. Psychomotor epilepsy has been an obsolete term for decades; the claim that any form of epilepsy could allow a complex, criminal act to be committed during a seizure has also not been considered possible for a long time.

To the extent that the diagnosis has some verifiable basis in biological reality, it is now referred to as ‘temporal lobe epilepsy’ - i.e., epilepsy originating in the temporal lobe of the brain. A 1966 paper on the condition stated that, even by then, ‘psychomotor epilepsy’ was no longer used as a term:

Besides confirming that Ruby’s defense team were using an already outdated term, that same 1966 article argues that the condition could not be blamed for complex acts, let alone targeted killings:

Numerous other articles from around the same time made the same point:

In short, research published as early as January 1963 demonstrated that epilepsy had no relation to criminal acts and that, even when prisoners diagnosed with epilepsy were surveyed, it was consistently found that epilepsy had nothing to do with their crimes.

We also now know that epileptic seizures last from a few seconds to two minutes, at most, and that complex acts cannot be committed during them. A 2023 overview of temporal lobe epilepsy confirms that a patient may or may not have awareness of the seizure as it occurs. If they do have awareness, they may experience ‘auras’, during which they may experience

They may also experience shaking in one part of their body, nausea, rapid and/or irregular heartbeat, dilation of their pupils, goosebumps, and flushed skin. This type of seizure lasts at most two minutes.

Such a seizure (a ‘focal-aware’ seizure) may then develop into one in which some awareness is lost (a ‘focal-impaired’ seizure):

Occasionally, such a seizure may then develop into a ‘tonic-clonic’ seizure. They typically last 1 to 3 minutes and are characterized by, first, the tonic phase, in which all muscles stiffen and consciousness is lost, followed by the clonic phase, in which arms and often the legs jerk rapidly, along with various other possible symptoms. [9]

Hopefully it is clear from all of the above that, even if Jack Ruby did have psychomotor - or, temporal lobe - epilepsy, and even if he did experience a seizure during the minutes in which Oswald was shot, he still would not have been able to shoot Oswald. Clearly, in the midst of such a seizure, Ruby would have been essentially immobilized. 

In 1983, the directors of The Epilepsy Institute in New York succinctly and emphatically expressed the numerous problems with legal defenses based on psychomotor epilepsy, and epilepsy of any kind:

Given all of the above, we can therefore confidently state that Belli’s psychomotor epilepsy defense had the following flaws:

1. it used an outdated term and diagnosis which are not only considered outdated now, but had been outdated for years prior to the Ruby trial;
2. even if Ruby had the condition, there has never been a form of epilepsy whose seizures can cause, or allow, a sufferer to commit a complex and/or goal-directed act;
3. the idea that epilepsy has any meaningful connection to criminal acts was already being dismissed and opposed in scientific literature.

How, then, did this diagnosis appear in the Ruby defense, and how did highly esteemed psychiatrists argue that Ruby had the condition?

2.3 - Hubert Winston Smith’s 1953 Paper on Psychomotor Epilepsy

Belli was primarily a civil, not a criminal, lawyer; his expertise lay particularly in tort law, hence his nickname - the King of Torts. It was therefore already somewhat odd that he took the lead on Ruby’s murder case, in which the most severe sentence was not a fine but the death penalty; it was stranger still that he chose a defense as obscure and specific as that of psychomotor epilepsy. At this point in this essay, it is therefore hopefully unsurprising that Hubert Winston Smith, and not Belli, seems to have been the source of that obscure defense. 

Smith had published papers on psychomotor epilepsy at least a decade before the Ruby trial. In a 1953 issue of the Texas Law Review which Smith himself edited, he published an essay titled ‘Medico-Legal Facets of Epilepsy.’ [11]

In that paper, Smith provides a summary of what he suggests are the three main types of epilepsy - major epilepsy (grand mal), minor epilepsy (petit mal), and psychomotor epilepsy. This is his definition of psychomotor epilepsy:

This clearly aligns with the story Belli presented as to how and why Jack Ruby shot Oswald. Smith’s definition does not, however, align with any actually existing form of epilepsy. 

His suggestion that it can be used as an insanity defense seems to hinge on his assertion in the first sentence of the above quote, that a subject “may carry out complicated acts” while in a state of “altered consciousness” or “automatic behavior” induced by a psychomotor epileptic seizure. As already discussed, that is not possible. To the extent that epileptic seizures can produce automatisms, they only include small repetitive motions like lip smacking, picking, twitching of limbs, etc.

Smith also claimed that sufferers of the condition would have total or partial amnesia of acts committed in that state but, as also discussed above, persons with epilepsy only experience amnesia if consciousness is lost; there is not even amnesia before loss of consciousness, if consciousness is indeed lost. 

After providing a definition of psychomotor epilepsy which differs from real forms of epilepsy in the exact details needed for it to be used as a possible insanity defense, Smith then lays out the various ways such an insanity defense should be constructed, offering a lengthy discussion of how it could be used to satisfy the McNaghten rules. He does state that proving the defendant has psychomotor epilepsy is not enough, but that, if it is a “genuine case” of a crime committed due to the condition, the defendant would have been “unable to ‘appreciate the nature and quality of his act’, thus meeting the most basic of the McNaghten tests.” [13]

Whether he knew it or not, Smith’s suggestions for psychomotor epilepsy as a possible insanity defense was based on an incorrect definition and understanding of the condition. However, given the less extensive and widely known understanding of epilepsy at that time, and stigmas surrounding the condition, that may not have mattered - it just needed to convince a jury of a defendant’s innocence, or at least their alleged lack of premeditation.

The legal theory Smith describes in the paper was ultimately the same defense Belli presented ten years later. An April 1964 article also confirms that Smith had specifically advised Belli on exactly that defense, as early as “last December [1963]”:

Psychomotor epilepsy only appears to have been referenced in public reports on the Ruby trial beginning January 20th, 1964, when Roy Schafer’s testimony, as the first defense witness, was reported on. In that testimony, Schafer claimed Ruby had psychomotor epilepsy. Schafer was, as discussed, a psychiatrist Smith had introduced to the case when he chose Schafer, Guttmacher and Bromberg for Belli. All these details therefore seem to suggest that, by December 20th, Smith had presented the psychomotor epilepsy defense to Belli, and then selected three doctors who could be used to support that defense. Even though epilepsy could never have caused Ruby or anyone else to commit a murder, and even though their diagnosis of psychomotor epilepsy is now not considered to align exactly with any known form of epilepsy, the doctors Smith selected did, indeed, support the defense’s insanity defense on the basis of psychomotor epilepsy.

However, according to Smith in the above quote, even though it seems clear that Smith had a crucial role in crafting Belli’s defense, Belli’s defense “did not go far enough.” What did Smith suggest was needed to “get the facts out of Ruby?” On March 25th 1964, the same day Smith became defense lead, he told the press that “he would like to see Jack Ruby interviewed while hypnotized, or under the influence of truth serum.” [15]

Smith had also known about truth serum and its relevance to defense cases for a long time. An April 1953 course held by Smith’s Law-Science Academy included a section on ‘Special Devices and Techniques in Criminal Interrogation,’ which covered the following three topics:

Smith presented that last section, on the “medicolegal implications” of ‘truth serums’ (sodium amytal, sodium pentathol, etc.).

He had also been pushing the use of truth serums in criminal cases for insanity defenses as far back as 1950, when he was brought into a murder case to examine the defendant, Louis Eugene Hoover, after he had been convicted of the murder of millionaire James A. Mahoney. Hoover’s attorney Monk Zelden selected Smith and his Law-Science Institute at Tulane University to perform the “truth serum (sodium pentothal) and brain wave (electroencephalographic) tests.” Interestingly, this suggests that it was Smith and his institute themselves that would administer those tests, not just arrange and analyze them. [17]

Smith also said that Hoover told him he didn’t even know if he had committed the crime, but that his tests would help to confirm the truth, just as he would later tell the court of the Ruby trial that he could “get the facts out of Ruby.” 

Hoover’s defense told the court on appeal that “Hoover did not remember details of the night the murder occurred until Dr. Hubert Winston Smith of the Tulane University made psychiatric tests after the trial.” With his newly found memories of the event, Hoover said that he had attacked Mahoney because Mahoney had “made improper proposals to him in the hotel room,” thereby suggesting it could have been an accidental incident deriving from self-defense. [18]

Hoover’s attorney Monk Zelden, who hired Smith for the case, said he was called by Dean Andrews who “asked him if he would be interested in assisting in the defense” of Lee Harvey Oswald; during that call, however, “a news report came in that Oswald had been shot.” Andrews told this story to the FBI the following day, on the 25th. [21]

So - in 1963, Dean Andrews, at the request of Clay Bertrand, worked to arrange a defense for Oswald, and turned directly to Monk Zelden. Zelden was the same attorney who had turned to Hubert Winston Smith in 1950 to handle psychiatric tests for a client of his, a convicted murder who did not remember if he had committed the crime; Smith administered those tests, which used sodium pentothal, and the defendant suddenly regained memory of the event, including crucial details which pointed towards diminished responsibility, if not innocence. The parallels to the Ruby case are striking.

2.4 - The Long Relationships Between Smith, Belli, Tonahill, Guttmacher and Bromberg

Smith had known Belli since at least as early as October 1950, which is the earliest date the two corresponded in the papers I’ve been able to view. They discuss Smith’s 1951 law-science course in New Orleans, which Belli confirms he would attend and speak at various events. Having confirmed his attendance, Belli specifically tells Smith that he hopes he includes courses on “toxicology, common and new drugs and their effect; poisons…, food poisonings; spinal and caudal anesthesias….” [22]

Smith’s papers contain dozens of letters between the two lawyers for every year after 1950. In a November 4th 1952 letter, Smith discusses his efforts on the 1950 Hoover case (which in a 1951 letter he referred to as “my pet murder case”), confirming that “we won what some regard as a great victory - saving Hoover from the chair,” and references Monk Zelden. [24]

This correspondence also confirms that Smith had been directly helping Belli with the scientific and medical aspects of his cases throughout that time. In an October 8th 1951 letter, Belli wrote to Smith regarding a Houston case, stating that “if I am in it, that means that I necessarily must have you to help me on the psychiatric aspects. That’s going to be a terrific case. There’s a lot of money in it.” [25]

Smith was also in contact with Joe Tonahill throughout the Ruby trial, as well as Belli. On March 25th, the day Smith was announced as defense lead, an article stated that:

Given that he verifiably was also in contact with Belli, to the extent that he shaped the psychomotor epilepsy defense and selected the doctors whose conclusions Belli founded that defense on, Smith is - whether intentionally or not - obscuring the truth of his involvement here. He confirms that Tonahill was directly updating him on the trial throughout, but does not mention that he had also been crafting the defense throughout directly with Belli.

Tonahill was another close friend of Smith’s since the early 50s. Smith’s correspondence also includes letters between Smith, Walter Bromberg and Manfred Guttmacher, the first two defense psychiatrists to examine Ruby and hand-picked for that role by Smith.

Smith’s correspondence with Bromberg also dates back to late 1951, but it’s clear they had been close for some time before that; Bromberg’s September 24th letter references earlier correspondence and ends with “Until I see you in New Orleans, As ever, Walt.” Bromberg reveals that he was also involved in the Hoover murder case: 

In his reply, Smith describes plans in Texas to greatly expand the “Texas Hospital System” and, specifically, “the mental hospital in Austin.” He related these details as they had been told to him by Dr. George W. Jackson, who had become director of the Texas Board of Hospitals and earlier in 1951. Prior to that, Jackson had been superintendent of the Arkansas State Hospital, which he greatly expanded. His assistant, Dr. Hayden Donahue, resigned his Arkansas post and joined Jackson in his Texas role. 

Donahue had worked with Roy Grinker during World War Two; they developed the technique of ‘narcosynthesis,’ in which “under the influence of the narcotic a synthesis of the personality conflicts is attempted.” [30]

Grinker also once wrote that “latent psychotics are disintegrating under the influence of even single doses” of LSD, demonstrating once again that the psychiatrists in the orbit of West, Smith and MKULTRA were well aware of the ease with which severe and sudden episodes of insanity could be rapidly induced, with substances like LSD which they all had easy access to. [31]

Grinker was also known to Jolly West; he was one of the over 20 individuals West sent the same letter to on 1st February 1956, seeking their participation and advice for an Air Force program examining “advisability of employing certain methods of training flying personnel in survival techniques.” The others West sent the letter to include most of MKULTRA’s most prominent and infamous researchers, such as Harold Wolff, Lawrence Hinkle, John Lilly, Stewart Wolf, and Jules Masserman. [32] By then, West had been working with MKULTRA’s director Sidney Gottlieb for at least three years.

Donahue would later return to Oklahoma where he worked as mental health director, in which capacity he worked closely with Jolly West and a subsequent Oklahoma mental health director, Col. Albert Glass (I’ll discuss Glass at length later).

To return to Bromberg - Smith discussed his detailed knowledge of the plans Donahue and Jackson had for the Texas and Austin mental hospital system in November 1951. He also describes his efforts to help Bromberg secure a position in Jackson and Donahue’s Texas hospitals, which Smith describes as “the number one opportunity in the United States.” Smith even tells Bromberg that “I do not doubt that adequate arrangements could be made to have the interesting criminal offenders sent to that hospital if a man like you were there.” [33]

In subsequent letters, Smith and Bromberg discuss the Hoover case at length. Smith frequently mentions Monk Zelden, confirming that Smith worked closely with him on the case. Smith discusses the urgency of getting Bromberg down to New Orleans to testify at the trial, which Bromberg did ultimately do. He also references Bromberg’s thoughts on Hoover and his possible psychiatric state during the murder: “I believe you are right in suggesting that a “fugue state” might explain the situation more satisfactorily than just amnesia.” [34]

Over ten years later, in a motion for a bail hearing submitted by Belli and Tonahill on January 20th 1964, Bromberg’s conclusions regarding Jack Ruby are quoted, and they are remarkably similar to his thoughts on Hoover, provided after Smith got him involved, just as he did on the Ruby case. Bromberg said that Ruby had been in a “fugue state,” was “without conscious knowledge,” suffered an “episodic psychosis” and had “amnesia — no recall.” [35]

Correspondence in Smith’s papers with Manfred Guttmacher dates back to 1950 and reveals that they were extremely close, personally and professionally. Like Bromberg, Guttmacher had particular expertise in the relation between psychiatry and law. Once Smith established his Law-Science Academy, both Bromberg and Guttmacher would be regular attendees. 

They had both also held senior military and government roles during World War Two, when much of the leadership, structure and priorities of US postwar mental health were established. Guttmacher had been a Lieutenant Colonel in the Medical Corps, and had also led the neuropsychiatry consultants division of the Surgeon General’s office; in his various senior roles, he worked closely with the most powerful figures in US psychiatry at the time, including Brig. Gen. William C. Menninger and Winfred Overholser (who was also Superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, where extensive drug and brainwashing research took place; Overholser also led the wartime research seeking a truth drug, which began in 1943).       Bromberg had been a Lieutenant Commander in the Medical Corps of the US Naval Reserve. He was also head psychiatrist for the Navy’s Hart Island operations, where he ran a psychological rehabilitation program. [37]

Like Bromberg, Smith also served in the Medical Corps of the US Naval Reserves, where he worked as Officer in Charge of the Legal Medicine Branch of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery.

Numerous other characters in this story also had senior medical roles in the US military during the war; if they weren’t already members of the national medical and psychiatric leadership by the end of the war, they were close to that leadership, and took those same leadership roles once the older guard moved on. Jolly West, for example, was a Major in the US Air Force and received his medical training through various US military programs. After the war, he worked on research for the Air Force, exploring topics like brainwashing, susceptibility to interrogation, hypnosis; by 1953, he was working directly with Sidney Gottlieb on research for the CIA (which, in their letters to each other from 1953, Gottlieb coyly refers to as “our organization”). With Gottlieb’s help and connections, he extricated himself from the Air Force and moved to the University of Oklahoma, becoming head of its psychiatry department at only 29 years old. While at Oklahoma, he hired various longtime colleagues, who also had long histories of working for various military branches and intelligence agencies on the same kinds of issues: brainwashing, interrogation, prolonged sensory deprivation, hypnosis, the effects of drugs like LSD and sodium pentothal, psychosis, schizophrenia, and on, and on. Some of those old friends he brought to his department at U. Oklahoma included Jay T. Shurley, a psychiatrist who had published research on insulin shock therapy and sensory deprivation by the time he joined West, had also served in the US Air Force, and was, as he himself admitted, employed by the Defense Intelligence Agency. Another old colleague West brought to Oklahoma was Col. Albert J. Glass, the US Army’s foremost psychiatrist, pioneer of combat psychiatry, leading spokesperson against the threat of communist brainwashing, senior member of numerous government and military outfits, and mentor to Shurley and West. West didn’t just get Glass a professorship at his Oklahoma psychiatry department; he arranged for Glass to become Oklahoma’s director of mental health, recommending Glass directly to Oklahoma’s Governor Bellmon. Following West’s recommendation, Glass was given the role, which began November 1st 1963. He resigned his 22-year military career to take the job, leaving the military just the day before, on October 31st 1963. By December 12th, he was a clinical professor in West’s Oklahoma psychiatry department. On 29th November, 28 days after he began his role at Oklahoma, West was consulting him on his panel of psychiatric experts, which he was coordinating in order that those psychiatric experts - longtime colleagues of his, Glass, Shurley, et al. - could join the Ruby case and examine Ruby himself. 

West had that panel entirely ready just five days after Ruby shot Oswald. Until Tom O’Neill published his book Chaos in 2019, that aspect of West’s involvement - both the panel of experts and the strikingly early date of his involvement - was entirely unknown. All anyone knew was that he was the psychiatrist who examined Ruby, around the time Ruby had an extremely severe, sudden and brief psychotic episode, leading West to conclude that Ruby was entirely and hopelessly insane, needing psychiatric care and hospitalization as soon as possible. 

As I have argued, it seems that not only was West involved by 29th November, but so were Melvin Belli and Joe Tonahill; by the end of the 27th, Belli was already discussing which psychiatrists to use. If Hubert Winston Smith somehow wasn’t also involved by then, he certainly was within a few days, when he recommended Bromberg, Guttmacher and Schafer to Belli, and began to craft the psychomotor epilepsy defense. 

In the next part, I will argue that West’s efforts during that first week after Ruby shot Oswald also involved Col. Albert Glass; the American Psychiatric Association and its director Jack Ewalt; lawyer Charles W. Webster, who ran a law enforcement training program out of his offices at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and who had been in the Dallas Police Department for much of November 22nd, the day of Kennedy’s assassination; Henry Weihofen, nationally renowned law professor, expert in legal insanity and longtime colleague of Guttmacher, Bromberg, Smith, and Winfred Overholser; and several other individuals and organizations. 

The efforts of all of these individuals were focused on both ensuring that Jack Ruby was deemed to be insane, and to ensuring that psychiatrists were introduced to the case, in order to examine Ruby one-on-one and administer endless batteries of tests, which also typically required him to be taken out of prison and police custody to major Texas hospitals, like Parkland. 

Why did this close-knit grip of the most esteemed and well-connected psychiatrists and lawyers in America care so much about Jack Ruby’s mental state? The most rose-tinted options include that they actually did believe Ruby was insane at the time of the shooting, and thus was innocent and needed professional help, but they committed themselves to the insanity of this previously unknown Dallas strip club owner within a week of his being charged, and without any evidence that Ruby was, or ever had been, insane. When they did then get involved, they said he had psychomotor epilepsy, a diagnosis which, besides the fact that it was halfway obsolete and known to be incorrect even by then, didn't even succeed in the courtroom. So, if they really did believe Ruby was insane, it seems they committed to that belief within days and without any evidence that he was or ever had been. If they then really did believe that he had psychomotor epilepsy and that it actually did lead him to not just shoot Oswald but to have no awareness in the moment that the shooting was ‘wrong’ and illegal, they were medically wrong and completely failed Ruby in the end anyway.

Another optimistic possibility is that they wanted to use the national spotlight on the Ruby case to create a new, widely publicized legal precedent which might finally lead to the replacement of the McNaghten criteria for legal insanity. However, by suggesting that, I’m offering an excuse which nobody involved in the case ever really advocated themselves. I also don’t think it explains why or how they all became involved, and why their involvement began so soon after the shooting. If they were trying to use the case to establish a new precedent, they picked a case with a defendant who had no evidence of ever having been anything close to insane, either temporarily or permanently; having picked such a case, they then labored to prove that he had an obscure condition, which was already partly obsolete, and then failed to convince the jury that Ruby - who was in the courtroom throughout, in a suit, sitting quietly and calmly - had been insane for the minutes or seconds during which he killed the alleged assassin of JFK on live TV. 

If they believed Ruby was insane, it seems they made that diagnosis without evidence and from a distance, which would have been deeply incompetent and unprofessional. If they used the case to create new legal precedent, they picked a terrible case for it and ultimately failed anyway, and failed Ruby too. In short, if they had any good motive and meant what they said, they were wildly incompetent. If they sought to exploit the case for legal ends, they were exploitative and also incompetent.

What, then, did all these esteemed lawyers and psychiatrists actually accomplish? They secured total control of Ruby, his public perception, his legal defense, his medical and psychiatric treatment, and all access to Ruby. Amidst all of that, they also secured - rapidly and completely - control over any ability Jack Ruby had to share information with the world. 

They also managed to get psychiatrists involved in the case, who were able to spend hours alone with Ruby, examining him and conducting psychiatric tests. They were also able to get Ruby removed from police custody and taken to hospitals, for further testing and examination, away from the prying eyes of police, journalists, the court, and so many others. They also did manage, to some extent, to convince the public - or at least have it widely reported that experts believed - that Jack Ruby was hopelessly insane, which would therefore discredit him as a credible witness - if, that is, he had anything to report.

In the end, however, all those legal efforts and arguments over psychomotor epilepsy became irrelevant. A few days after Ruby was convicted and sentenced to death, Hubert Winston Smith became defense lead. He immediately requested psychiatric tests using hypnosis and sodium pentothal, and that the CIA’s psychiatrist Jolly West administer those tests. West was an expert hypnotist, who had researched interrogation, torture, brainwashing, and the mind’s susceptibility to manipulation for years, on behalf of the US Air Force and the CIA; he had also conducted extensive research on the experimental induction of psychosis, or insanity, also for the CIA, research for which he and the CIA, as well as all branches of the military and the FBI amongst others, used powerful drugs to which only they had access, chief amongst which was LSD. Hours before West first saw Ruby, Jack had a severe, acute psychotic break. 

Click here to read part 3.

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Footnotes