Monday, July 20, 1998

A case clear as Mudd

If you were an ancestor with a blot on your record, Dr. Richard Mudd is the kind of descendant you would want.

Mudd is the grandson of Dr. Samuel Mudd, the physician who set the broken leg of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth. Whatever the doctor's complicity in Booth's escape, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for that crime but pardoned four years later by President Andrew Johnson.

Richard Mudd has spent a lifetime trying to clear Samuel's name, and, at 97, "I'm hoping against hope we'll get this settled before I kick the bucket."

He's now in federal court seeking to have the secretary of the Army set aside the conviction on the grounds that the original military tribunal lacked jurisdiction.

The Army's position is that Samuel Mudd had his day in federal court on the jurisdiction question in 1865 and lost.

Even now, 133 years later, the motives and circumstances behind Lincoln's murder, including Mudd's role, are endlessly debated, and, with all respect to the doughty Richard Mudd, history is not subject to judicial restraining orders. This question is for the historians, not the courts.