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Commenting publicly for the first time since he was removed from the James Earl Ray case last month, a Memphis judge said Wednesday he believes the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated as the result of a high-level conspiracy.
"It was a flat, straight-out conspiracy and it reaches pretty high up," Criminal Court Judge Joe Brown said. "The record raises an inescapable inference that somebody else was involved."
Asked how high he believes the conspiracy reached, Brown said, "The federal government. Not officially, but it reaches some federal players."
Brown, who was assigned to the case in 1994, also said he does not believe the shot that killed King came from the Remington Gamemaster .30-06 hunting rifle that Ray admits owning and authorities say was the murder weapon. Three sets of ballistics tests done on the rifle in the past 30 years have come back inconclusive.
"What I'm looking at in the record is a conclusion that that's not the rifle," Brown said in a telephone interview. "And if [Ray] had anything to do with it, he did not act alone."
Brown, an avid hunter and gun expert, said he bases his conclusions about the rifle on several observations:
The death slug removed from King is not from the same lot as the spent casing found inside the rifle or from bullets recovered with the weapon.
That type of rifle could not be leaned against a window sill, as authorities have claimed Ray did when he fired the fatal shot from a rooming house bathroom window across the street from the Lorraine Motel. Because of the rifle's pump action, Brown said, had anyone leaned it against the window sill, the weapon would not have fired or it would have jammed. Also, he said, resting the weapon against a sill would have caused the rifle to miss the target because of vibrations.
The telescopic sight that Ray had installed on the rifle could not have been installed correctly because the Alabama shop where he bought the weapon did not have the proper equipment.
Ray, meanwhile, died early Thursday in a Nashville hospital, where he was admitted Monday afternoon.
Ray maintained his innocence since a few days after pleading guilty in 1969 to the April 4, 1968, assassination of King in Memphis.
Shelby County District Attorney William Gibbons issued a report in late March that concluded Ray was the gunman. On Wednesday, Gibbons disputed Brown's observations.
"We respectfully disagree, and our report speaks for itself," Gibbons said.
But Brown dismissed Gibbons' report, saying the Justice Department should open an investigation, as requested three weeks ago by King's widow, Coretta Scott King.
"The local group is not capable or competent to conduct the investigation," Brown said.
Justice Department spokesman Bert Brandenburg said Wednesday that Attorney General Janet Reno has not reached a decision.
Brown is particularly critical of Gibbons, who asked a Tennessee appeals court to remove the 50-year-old jurist from the case last year. The court removed Brown on March 6, saying he was no longer impartial. Brown countered Wednesday that he was just doing too good a job at finding out the truth.
"I got too close and I had too much information," he said.
Circuit Court Judge Robert "Butch" Childers, presiding judge of Tennessee's 30th judicial district, said Wednesday he has not chosen a new jurist to take over the case. Brown, who is black, blasted the district attorney's office, saying it suffers from extreme prejudices.
"They've got a race problem down there," he said. "They've got a gender problem. And they've got a religion problem. They have no Hispanics, no Asians, very few Jews, few women and only seven of their 240 employees are black. They don't even have a black secretary. They have one black investigator."
Gibbons disputed that allegation, saying that of the 22 people he has hired since becoming district attorney in December 1996, 10 have been African-Americans. And, Gibbons said, about 30 percent of his assistant district attorneys are women.
The district attorney's office does not have any Latinos or Asians, Gibbons said, but he doesn't believe that any have applied. None has been recruited, he said.
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