Simpich is a civil rights attorney and an antiwar activist in the San Francisco Bay Area. The main areas of his law practice are government misconduct and toxic tort violations. He also writes for publications such as Truthout, Counterpunch and OpedNews. He considers the assassination cases to be a poorly understood area of civil rights violations. To preserve cold cases, he is preparing a proposed JFK Preservation of Evidence Act that would be applicable in both of these areas of the law and administered by a citizen panel similar to the ARRB. His study of the JFK case focuses on the documentary evidence, rather than firearms, acoustics, and other forensic evidence. His current focus is on Mexico City and the counterintelligence aspects of the JFK case. 

In 2003, Patrick Speer began studying the assassination of President John F. Kennedy full-time. He continues studying and writing about the case, part-time. In 2004, and then again in 2005, Speer presented his findings on the medical evidence at the November in Dallas Conference. In 2007, The Mysterious Death of Number 35, a 4-part video series written by and featuring Speer, debuted on Youtube. In part 1 of this series, Speer demonstrated that Dr. Michael Baden, the spokesman for the House Select Committee on Assassinations' Forensic Pathology Panel (the last government panel to study the Kennedy assassination medical evidence), was confused by the evidence and testified with a key autopsy photo upside down. It is Speer's contention that Baden was confused because the medical evidence, as interpreted by his panel, made little sense, and was at odds with articles and textbooks written by the very members of his panel. On his website,  patspeer.com, Speer discusses a number of aspects beyond the medical evidence. Among the topics of discussion are the eyewitness evidence, the paraffin cast of Oswald's cheek, and the paper bag purportedly used by Oswald to transport his rifle into the building. Speer made an appearance at the 2009 COPA Conference in Dallas, and was the recipient of the JFK Lancer--Mary Ferrell New Frontier Award in 2012.