WASHINGTON -- His grandfather's name is Mudd -- Dr. Samuel Mudd -- and he's getting another chance to clear that name 133 years after the doctor was convicted of helping presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth.
U.S. attorneys said Tuesday they will not appeal a federal judge's ruling in the case, in effect sending it to the secretary of the Army for a decision on whether Mudd's conviction should be set aside.Mudd's grandson, 97-year-old Dr. Richard Mudd of Saginaw, Mich., was encouraged by the development in his decades-long attempt to clear his grandfather's name.
"This was a big hurdle that I had to pass over. I am very much relieved," Mudd said in a telephone interview. "In my 80 years of fighting this, there have been so many hurdles."
The morning after Booth shot President Lincoln in the head at Ford's Theater on April 14, 1865, he knocked on the door of Dr. Samuel Mudd's Maryland home, seeking treatment for the leg he broke jumping from the president's box onto the stage.
What happened after that is in dispute. How well Mudd knew Booth and what he knew about his plans have been the subject of historical debate and controversy.
Mudd said he did not know of Lincoln's assassination and did not recognize Booth, a popular actor, when he put a cast on Booth's leg.
But a nine-member military commission convicted him in 1865 of aiding Booth in his escape. He was sentenced to life in prison in Florida. He served four years, receiving a pardon in 1869 from President Andrew Johnson.
Lawyers for Richard Mudd argue his grandfather, who was a civilian, was entitled to a civil trial and jury of his peers. Lawyer Candida Ewing Steel says the distinction is important because Mudd wants the conviction set aside -- something the pardon did not do.
In a twist of history, Steel's great-great-grandfather, former Union Brig. Gen. Thomas Ewing Jr., was Mudd's lawyer in 1865 and made the same argument for a civil trial.
In 1992, the Army Board for Correction of Military Records concluded that the military tribunal that convicted Mudd lacked jurisdiction and recommended that his conviction be set aside. However, William Clark, an assistant Army secretary, declined to adopt the recommendation, saying that argument had already been heard and rejected by a federal court during Mudd's lifetime.
Richard Mudd appealed, but in 1996, Sara Lister, another assistant Army secretary, said the military tribunal had the proper constitutional authority. Last year, Mudd filed suit in U.S. District Court against the secretary of the Army, saying Lister's decision was arbitrary and should be reversed.