Evento

The Judicial Murder of Mrs. Surratt

Four score and nine years the United States of America existed as an independent nation that had never once seen fit to execute a woman for any crime. Then came the infamous night of April 14, 1865. Inside Ford's Theatre, Washington, D.C., the famed actor John Wilkes Booth fired a bullet into the head of President Abraham Lincoln and, in so doing, set into motion a frenzy of events. Shocked and outraged by its first presidential assassination, the United States government launched an unprecedented dragnet to round up every suspect it could. Among the people arrested was Mrs. Mary E. Surratt, the widowed owner of a Washington boardinghouse where Booth and others implicated in the assassination were alleged to have conspired. She was charged with conspiracy to commit murder and, along with seven male co-defendants, tried before a military tribunal convened by President Andrew Johnson especially for the occasion. Those convicted could be hanged. Mrs. Surratt was on trial for her life. The Judicial Murder of Mrs. Surratt is a play based on that trial.