Lincoln Assassination Figure Wrongly Tried, ‘Court’ Finds

More than a century after his conviction, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd’s appeal to clear his name as a co-conspirator in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination was finally heard.

That the defendant is long dead and the evidence long gone didn’t matter. No real court agreed to consider the case.

On Friday, the 184th birthday of the 16th President, defense attorney F. Lee Bailey argued Mudd’s case in a moot court trial at the University of Richmond’s T. C. Williams School of Law. “Mudd’s prosecution was one sledgehammer after another upon the Constitution,” Bailey said.

The three judges concluded that the Army commission that convicted Mudd had no right to try him in the first place.

John Paul Jones, a law professor, said he organized the moot court trial using the assumption that Mudd appealed his conviction to a military appeals court, a body that did not exist in Mudd’s day. Mudd had maintained that he was wrongfully convicted.

The prosecutor in the moot trial was John Jay Douglas, dean of the National College of District Attorneys in Houston and a former commandant of the Army Judge Advocate Generals School.

Mudd, a 32-year-old doctor, set the broken leg of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. The actor broke it when he leaped onto the stage at Ford’s Theater in Washington after shooting the President on April 14, 1865, five days after the Civil War ended. Union soldiers shot and killed Booth on April 26.

Mudd claimed that he knew nothing of the killing when Booth arrived on horseback in the early hours of April 15 at his home in Maryland 30 miles from Washington.

Bailey argued that the military commission that convicted Mudd and seven other defendants “was set up to satisfy the monumental embarrassment of lax security that allowed the President of the United States to be assassinated by an amateur.” He should have been tried before a civilian court, if at all, Bailey said.

Chief Judge Robinson O. Everett, retired senior judge of the U.S. Court of Military Appeals, agreed that because civilian courts were operating in Maryland at the time, Mudd should have been given a jury trial. Mudd was sentenced to life in prison and served four years before being pardoned by President Andrew Johnson.