A 137-year-old quest to clear the name of the Mudd family - descendants of the doctor jailed after he treated President Lincoln's fleeing assassin, John Wilkes Booth, for a broken leg - has reached the US Court of Appeal, only to run headlong into the modern war on terrorism. Dr Samuel A Mudd - whose conviction in 1865 is thought to have given common currency to the phrase "his name is mud" - took Booth into his rural Maryland home, giving him shelter, food and fresh horses just hours after the assassin fled Ford's Theatre in Washington, where he shot...
