Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 13, 1993 TAG: 9302130190
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By GREG SCHNEIDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium
MUDD NAME CLEANSED, BUT COURT IS MOOT
F. Lee Bailey, famous defense lawyer, won another big case Friday, but the real victor had a humbler name: Mudd.Three judges in a mock trial ruled that Dr. Samuel D. Mudd was wrongly convicted of conspiracy 128 years ago for aiding John Wilkes Booth after the assassination of President Lincoln.
"Any lawyer who wouldn't take Dr. Mudd's case," Bailey said afterward to a group of autograph-seekers, "isn't worth his salt."
Mudd might not have a case if not for a 92-year-old descendant who is as proud of his name as any Vanderbilt or Rockefeller.
Richard D. Mudd of Saginaw, Mich., is retired from his own career as a physician. He has spent more than seven decades trying to get a real court to do what the moot court did Friday at the University of Richmond law school.
"I hope I live long enough to get this thing settled," Mudd said. Relatives close and distant packed the hall, introducing themselves to one another during breaks with an earnest, "My name is Mudd."
All had come in hopes that the prestigious personages running the moot court would help their ongoing effort to win vindication from the government.
Until the predawn darkness of April 15, 1865, 32-year-old Samuel Mudd was nothing more than a balding, churchgoing Maryland physician who had neglected his practice in favor of farming.
That morning he awoke to an insistent pounding at the front door. On the step were slow-witted David E. Herold and dashing actor John Wilkes Booth. Wearing a false beard and using a fake name, Booth asked the doctor to treat his broken left leg.
Mudd prepared a splint, let the men rest upstairs in his house, and then directed the pair to a shortcut out of town through a swamp.
Booth and his accomplice were on the run, of course, from shooting Lincoln at Ford's Theater. Booth had broken his leg after vaulting from the president's box to the stage during his escape.
The assassin and his helper were captured in Virginia almost two weeks later. Booth died from a captor's bullet to the neck, and Herold was hanged with three other accomplices.
Investigators lumped Mudd in with the conspirators, and a military tribunal sentenced him to life in prison. He was released six years later for helping care for sick inmates in a Florida prison camp, but never shook the conspiracy charge.
Mudd claimed he didn't recognize Booth that morning, even though the men had met a few months before, and that he had just been doing his duty as a doctor. He died in 1883 a shamed, broken man.
Friday's mock trial was staged as though it was two years after the conviction. Bailey argued for Mudd along with Candida Ewing Staempfli Steel, great-great-granddaughter of the man who defended the doctor in 1865.
Steel last year got a military review board to agree that Mudd's conviction was improper, but acting Assistant Secretary of the Army William D. Clark refused to clear Mudd's name. The case is on appeal.
Leading the government's case in the mock trial was John Jay Douglass, dean of the National College of District Attorneys in Houston.
Bailey and Steel concentrated on their claim that the government had no business trying Mudd, a civilian, in a military court.
Douglass countered that the Union still faced pockets of rebel resistance at the time, and the conspirators were "a despicable group of men and women . . . who planned to continue the war not as honorable soldiers but as assassins and kidnappers who strike in the night."
After about two hours of argument, the three judges took a brief recess and then returned to announce their verdicts. Two felt that the government had no place trying a civilian in a military court. The third was willing to accept the military's jurisdiction, but said he couldn't swallow the evidence.
"I find nothing in this evidence that suggests Dr. Mudd either agreed, participated in or aided and comforted the conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of President Lincoln," said Judge Walter Thompson Cox III.
Afterward, Richard Mudd could hardly make it across the room through the crowd of happy relatives. None was giddier than Emily Mudd Rogerson, 86, his cousin and the late doctor's granddaughter.
"Everybody's proud of our name, because they know Dr. Mudd was innocent," the Richmond woman said with a giggle. "I cash all my checks and I sign them with my name, Emily Mudd Rogerson. That's my name: Emily Mudd Rogerson."