Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 23, 1992 TAG: 9201230131
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A2 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
DR. MUDD'S FAMILY SEEKS VINDICATION
Descendants of Samuel Mudd asked the Army to clear his name Wednesday, 127 years after the doctor who set John Wilkes Booth's broken leg was convicted as a conspirator in Abraham Lincoln's assassination.In a hearing before a military panel, Mudd's relatives and Civil War buffs who support his claim of innocence depicted him as an honest man wrongly accused in the hysteria that followed the 16th president's murder on April 14, 1865.
"The Mudd family hopes - finally - for justice for Dr. Samuel A. Mudd," his grandson, Dr. Richard Dyer Mudd, told a five-member panel of the U.S. Army Board for Correction of Military Records.
Mudd's supporters argued that not only was he innocent, but that the military tribunal that convicted him had no jurisdiction and violated his rights.
Richard D. Mudd, of Saginaw, Mich., has lobbied for seven decades to have the charges dropped - even though President Andrew Johnson pardoned Samuel Mudd in 1869.
It has became a family crusade. Twenty of Mudd's descendants attended the hearing in a small room in the Pentagon. They ranged in age from Richard D. Mudd, whose 91st birthday is Friday, to 6-month-old Zachary Seidman of Baltimore.
And the attorneys who presented Mudd's case have family connections. Richard J. Mudd, 50, is great-grandson of Samuel Mudd. Candida S. Steel, 42, is great-great-granddaughter of Thomas Ewing Jr., the lawyer who unsuccessfully defended Dr. Mudd before the military tribunal.
Both practice in the Washington area and have long been interested in the Mudd case. Ironically, they met only two years ago, when they went head-to-head in a case.
Despite the eventual pardon, "the stigma of guilt still hung over Dr. Mudd's head" and he was left impoverished and emotionally devastated, Richard J. Mudd told the Army panel. He died in 1883 at age 49.
Several historians have been quoted in news stories as doubting Mudd's innocence, saying circumstantial evidence suggests he was involved in a failed plot to kidnap Lincoln. None testified at the hearing, however.
The panel will take as long as it wants, possibly months, to decide whether to recommend dropping the charges.