DPD officer L.C. Graves identifies the revolver as the one he took from Ruby:
It was simply a matter of the police identifying the weapon under oath.
Here is what Vincent Bugliosi wrote about the issue of chain of custody: (page 4720 of the Kindle edition of Reclaiming History)
An argument frequently heard in the conspiracy community is that Oswald could not have been convicted in a court of law because the “chain of custody [or possession]” of the evidence against him was not strong enough to make the evidence admissible in a court of law. Just one example among many: In Jim Marrs’s book Crossfire, he writes about the palm print of Oswald’s found on the underside of the Carcano, and says that “the palm print would never have been admitted as evidence in any courtroom trial because it totally lacked a chain of evidence—the unquestioned and documented path from discovery to presentation in court” (Marrs, Crossfire, p.443).
The first observation I have to make is that I would think conspiracists like Marrs would primarily want to know if Oswald killed Kennedy, not whether he could get off on a legal technicality. Second, there is no problem with the chain of custody of much of the physical evidence against Oswald, such as the rifle and the two large bullet fragments found in the presidential limousine. Third, and most important on this issue, courts do not have a practice of allowing into evidence only that for which there is an ironclad and 100 percent clear chain of custody, and this is why I believe that 95 percent of the physical evidence in this case would be admissible. I can tell you from personal experience that excluding evidence at a trial because the chain of custody is weak is rare, certainly the exception rather than the rule. The typical situation where the chain is not particularly strong is for the trial judge to nevertheless admit the evidence, ruling that the weakness of the chain goes only to “the weight of the evidence [i.e., how much weight or credence the jury will give it], not its admissibility.”
Raising objections to the chain of custody in a trial is a two-edged sword. Any challenge could backfire because it would signal to the jury that the item in question was important.
Previous Relevant Blog Posts
I worked with Steve Roe to prove that the initial of Elmer Todd are on CE 399.
Mantik admits the obvious but other conspiracy theorists are reluctant.
Oliver Stone's so-called documentary series would have you believe that most of the physical evidence in the JFK assassination is not legitimate.
In a private interview, Tomlinson identified CE 399 as the stretcher bullet.