At 11:21 am CST, authorities were preparing to transfer Oswald by car from the basement of police headquarters to the nearby county jail.
Ruby, in full view of witnesses and in front of TV cameras, pulled out a pistol and fired a snub-nosed Colt Cobra .38 into the 24-year-old Oswald's abdomen.
[1] The defendant, represented pro bono by famed attorney Melvin Belli, requested that the trial be moved out of the Dallas area because of the enormous publicity.
Some observers thought that the case could have been disposed of as a "murder without malice" charge, roughly equivalent to manslaughter, with a maximum prison sentence of five years.
The appellate court overturned Ruby's conviction and death sentence, and ordered that he be retried in some location other than Dallas County.