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Squalid Aftermath. The authors give high marks to Henry Wade as a trial tactician, even though they argue that he introduced improper evidence. By contrast, they note that Belli failed even to try to talk the jury out of the death penalty.
In the squalid aftermath, five other lawyers have since flitted in and out of the case, trading mutual insults through a blizzard of appeals. Equally "grotesque," say Kaplan and Waltz, was last winter's revelation that Judge Brown was not only writing a book on the case, which he was about to confront again in the form of a new hearing on Ruby's current sanity, but that he had sent a letter to his New York publisher proposing that he announce publicly: "I have not begun to write a book." It was that disclosure, the authors suggest, that forced Judge Brown finally to disqualify himself from the sanity hearing, which has been postponed ever since.
Jack Ruby's case may drag on for years. Whatever the outcome, his trial left Authors Kaplan and Waltz with grave doubts about the sole issue in question—whether he was indeed insane when he committed murder before 80 million TV witnesses. What was confirmed was that a highly publicized U.S. trial is more than likely to become a circus. And what is worse, that even an unpublicized U.S. trial metes out justice largely to the extent that the lawyers on both sides have equal skill—and equal luck.