Biography

Samuel Sheppard

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Sheppard was a young doctor working with his family at Bay View Hospital near Cleveland when his wife was brutally murdered on 4 July 1954. Suspicion centered on him immediately, and he was convicted of his wife's murder in December 1954, despite his claims of innocence, his cooperation with authorities, and the lack of any physical evidence linking him to the crime. Sheppard obtained a reversal of his conviction in the federal courts, and on his release in 1964, he immediately married his penpal and sweetheart. Two years later, in 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the reversal of his conviction in a landmark case, and Sheppard was tried again. This time, without the media hysteria surrounding the first trial, Sheppard was acquitted. He was unable to overcome the effects of his ten-year imprisonment, however, and died a broken man.
- IMDb mini biography by: George Carr <georgecarr@email.com>

Once tried professional wrestling and executed a mandibular nerve-hold similar to the one used by Mick Foley.
After his release from jail he became a professional wrestler.
It has often been claimed that his case inspired the TV series, The Fugitive (1963). Despite the similarities between the case and the series, Roy Huggins denied that the Sheppard case had any influence on his creation of the show.
While remembered largely as a case of wrongful conviction, the court case he brought (Sheppard v. Maxwell) was actually a case weighing freedom of the press against the right to a fair trial. The opinion that decided the case ruled that the right to a public trial transcended the right of an individual - that is, a defendant could not ask to keep a trial private to avoid the media. However, the court also agreed that Sheppard did not receive a fair trial, largely due to how much latitude the press was given: they were allowed, among other things, to sit so close to Sheppard and his lawyer (F. Lee Bailey) that they could not have private conversations. The headlines that were written also prejudiced potential jurors, painting him as the prime suspect long before he was arrested.

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