Ed. Note: Welcome to our daily feature Trivia Question of the Day!
Which prominent 19th-century lawyer — and one of the most notorious politicians of the Civil War era — was defending a man accused of murder, arguing that the victim had actually shot himself by accident while yanking his own pistol from his pocket. To prove it, the lawyer reenacted the scene with a gun he believed was unloaded. It wasn’t. He shot himself and died the next day — but he won his client an acquittal.
Hint: Before this grisly demonstration, he’d been an Ohio congressman and the leader of the anti-war “Copperhead” Democrats — so troublesome to the Union that President Lincoln had him exiled to the Confederacy in 1863.
The post He Took ‘Zealous Advocacy’ A Fatal Step Too Far appeared first on Above the Law.