Trying for the Truth of It

Jack Ruby's main chance of escaping the electric chair lies in being found insane. Last week he was certainly trying to act like a madman.

During a predawn card game with a guard in his Dallas County jail cell, Ruby asked for a glass of water and, when left alone, charged headfirst into a plaster cell wall. He suffered only a two-inch cut and a knot on his skull; moments later, guards found him trying to rip his white jail uniform into strips -- presumably to fashion a noose.

Later that day, Dr. Louis J. West, a University of Oklahoma psychiatrist, interviewed Ruby for an hour, found him full of obsessions. Ruby had crashed into the wall, said West, in an effort to "end it all." His reason: "Last night the patient became convinced that all the Jews in America were being slaughtered. This was in retaliation against him, the Jew responsible for 'all the trouble.' " The psychiatrist said that Ruby also believed he had recently watched while his own brother was tortured and incinerated in the street outside the jail and that the screams still echoed in his ears. "Once or twice," said West, "the patient seemed about to attack me."

Later in the week, Dallas Judge Joe B. Brown, who presided at Ruby's trial, flatly rejected defense attorneys' request for a new trial based on their claim of 203 errors in Brown's handling of the proceedings. The defense, now led by Texas University Law Professor Hubert W. Smith, who replaced bellowing Melvin Belli, said it would submit a motion for a new trial to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals within six months.

But there was still the question of a defense request for a sanity hearing for Ruby, and Judge Brown seemed more sympathetic toward that. After he had heard Dr. West's report, Brown said: "I would like some real disinterested doctors to examine Ruby for my own benefit. I want to get the truth of it. If the man is insane he should not be executed. If he is sane, he should be amenable to the law." Later Brown assigned Dallas Psychiatrist Robert L. Stubblefield, who had found Major General Edwin Walker mentally competent after the Oxford, Miss, riots, to test Ruby's sanity.

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