01-02-2015, 07:19 AM
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in a van by the river
Industry Role:
Join Date: May 2003
Posts: 76,806
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Out of all the accidental shootings I've read about this one takes the cake. It was on Reddit the other day..
A Laywer defending a man on murder, accidentally shot and killed himself while trying to show how the victim might of accidentally shot and killed himself. As result the accused was let free.
Clement Vallandigham - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Quote:
Vallandigham died in 1871 in Lebanon, Ohio, at the age of 50, after accidentally shooting himself in the abdomen with a pistol. He was representing a defendant in a murder case for killing a man in a barroom brawl at the Golden Lamb Inn. Vallandigham attempted to prove the victim, Tom Myers, had in fact accidentally shot himself while drawing his pistol from a pocket while rising from a kneeling position. As Vallandigham conferred with fellow defense attorneys in his hotel room at the Golden Lamb, he showed them how he would demonstrate this to the jury.
Selecting a pistol he believed to be unloaded, he put it in his pocket and enacted the events as they might have happened, snagging the loaded gun on his clothing and unintentionally causing it to discharge into his belly. Although he was fatally wounded, Vallandigham's demonstration proved his point, and the defendant, Thomas McGehan, was acquitted and released from custody (to be shot to death four years later in his saloon). Surgeons probed for the pistol ball, thought to have lodged in the vicinity of his bladder, but were unable to locate it, and Vallandigham died the next day of peritonitis. His last words expressed his faith in "that good old Presbyterian doctrine of predestination".[64] Survived by his wife, Louisa Anna (McMahon) Vallandigham, and his son Charles Vallandigham, he was buried in Woodland Cemetery, Dayton, Ohio.
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