Prominent Cases
Many famous cases were tried at the city hall while it was a U.S. courthouse. Representative Sam Houston was tried and convicted for using his cane to beat another member of Congress on the House floor in 1832. Richard Lawrence, the failed assassin of President Andrew Jackson, was tried on the site in 1835 and was sentenced to a mental institution. The building was also the site of the 1867 trial of John Surratt, an alleged conspirator in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln who was later acquitted. However, Charles J. Guiteau, the assassin of President James A. Garfield, was convicted at the courthouse in 1882.
The Old City Hall was also the scene of a fugitive slave trial known as the "Pearl incident," the largest single escape attempt in U.S. history. Two men were convicted in 1848 of attempting to free more than 70 slaves by sailing them from Washington up the Chesapeake Bay.
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