Edwin Stanton

[Gene C]

Thomas Thorne wrote on post 112 in What are you reading now:
"I first read the Vallandigham death story years ago in American Heritage and remembered the story as V testing the gun in front of the jury and shooting himself. In rereading the account in Wiki,I overlooked the part where it clearly said it was done in a hotel room showing other attorneys his defense of a client. Sorry for the error. "

Stanton did something similiar - with better results.
"Defending a prisoner on a charge of first-degree murder, he deliberately swallowed some of the poison which had allegedly killed the victim in order to prove that because it could not be retained, the liquid could not kill. Horribly sick, he vomited it up, and saved his client's neck."
(from Stanton The Life and Times of Lincoln's Secretary of War" by Benjamin Thomas and Harold Wyman p. 57)