Mark Lane (February 24, 1927 – May 10, 2016) was an American attorney, New York state legislator, civil rights activist, and Vietnam war-crimes investigator.
Sometimes referred to as a gadfly,[1][2][3][4] Lane is best known as a leading researcher, author, and conspiracy theorist[5] on the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy.
[8][9][3] As a law student, Lane was the administrative assistant to the National Lawyers Guild and orchestrated a fund-raising event at Town Hall in New York City that featured American folk singer Pete Seeger.
He was elected with the support of Eleanor Roosevelt and presidential candidate John F. Kennedy[clarification needed] to the New York Legislature in 1960.
A Lawyer’s Brief", attempted to rebut various assertions made by Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade regarding the assassination and to offer a defense of Oswald.
[20] In his March 4 testimony,[21] Lane testified that he had contacted witness Helen Markham during the five days preceding his appearance before the Commission and that she had described Tippit's killer to him as "short, a little on the heavy side, and his hair was somewhat bushy".
[24] In addressing the assertion that Markham's description of Tippit's killer was not consistent with the appearance of Oswald, the Warren Commission stated that they had reviewed the telephone transcript in which she was alleged to have made it.
[30] Lane's work on the assassination prompted Bertrand Russell to rally support for the formation of a Who Killed Kennedy Committee in Britain.
[35] Lane responded that Connally had showed "an abysmal ignorance to the implications of his own testimony" and was seeking to "bring back the days of McCarthyism.
[14][37] Lane called the allegation "an outright lie" and wrote, "Neither the KGB nor any person or organization associated with it ever made any contribution to my work.
He noted that he collaborated with Donald Freed on it and after seeing subsequent drafts, they complained both privately to the producer and publicly at press conferences, pointing out errors in the work.
[40] In 1991, Lane described Plausible Denial as his "last word" on the subject and told Patricia Holt of the San Francisco Chronicle: "I'll never write another sentence about the (JFK) assassination".
[42] The political advocacy group Liberty Lobby published an article in The Spotlight newspaper in 1978 implicating E. Howard Hunt (a convicted Watergate burglar and former CIA agent) in the Kennedy assassination.
In the book, Lane claimed that he convinced the jury that Hunt was involved in the JFK assassination, but mainstream news accounts asserted that some jurors decided the case on the issue of whether The Spotlight had acted with "actual malice," as required by the Supreme Court's First Amendment precedents governing libel cases against public figures.
"[5][46] A similar suit filed by Robert J. Groden against Random House was dismissed the previous year by a federal judge in New York.
Lane's close association with the National Committee for a Citizens Commission of Inquiry on U.S. War Crimes in Vietnam and VVAW would be short lived.
Tod Ensign recalled It was a mistake to think that celebrities like Jane Fonda and Mark Lane who were used to operating as free agents would submit to the discipline of a steering committee.
[49]National Committee for a Citizens Commission of Inquiry on U.S. War Crimes in Vietnam staffers criticized Lane as being arrogant and sensationalistic, and said the book he was writing had "shoddy reporting in it".
VVAW did not wish to lose the monetary support of Lane and Fonda, so the National Committee for a Citizens Commission of Inquiry on U.S. War Crimes in Vietnam split from the project.
[50] James Reston Jr., in the Saturday Review, calls Lane's book disreputable, in that all of the reports contained in it are admittedly unverified, and lean toward the salacious.
Commenting on the book's redeeming social value, Reston added that "it would be to show that a pattern of atrocities exists in Vietnam, proving that while My Lai was larger, it was not unique.
Jones told Lane he wanted to "pull an Eldridge Cleaver", referring to the fugitive Black Panther who was able to return to the United States after repairing his reputation.
[63] Garry was also displeased with Lane for making a veiled threat that the Temple might move to the Soviet Union in a letter to Congressman Ryan.
[64] Late in the afternoon of November 18, two men wielding rifles approached Lane and Garry, who had earlier been sent to a small wooden house by Jones.
[65] After a relatively friendly exchange, the men informed Garry and Lane that they were going to "commit revolutionary suicide" to "expose this racist and fascist society".
[69] While Lane blames Jones and Peoples Temple leadership for the deaths at Jonestown, he also claims that U.S. officials exacerbated the possibility of violence by employing agents provocateurs.
[70] Lane is the author of the 1970 book Arcadia in which he details the effort to prove that James Joseph Richardson, a black migrant worker in Florida, had been falsely accused of killing his seven children.
Richardson had been on death row for almost five years for the crimes, escaping execution by virtue of the Furman v. Georgia Supreme Court decision.
Nineteen years after the book was published he received a hearing in which the charges were dropped thanks to the interventions of Lane and Miami's then- prosecutor, Janet Reno.
", Mark Lane was one of the twelve legal figures featured by panel moderator, Bernard Hibbitts, professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.