Sam Houston Clinton

Diagnoses

Personal

Vocation

American lawyer who represented both atheist leader Madalyn Murray O'Hair and Jack Ruby, the man who shot and killed alleged presidential assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Clinton later served as a Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Judge. He was able to get the guilty verdict against Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who killed Lee Harvey Oswald on national television, reversed on appeal, based on procedural errors. A change of venue was asked for and granted and a new trial was set for February 1967, in Wichita Falls, Texas. Ruby, meanwhile, had died of cancer while in prison. In addition to representing O'Hair, Clinton won a lawsuit to desegregate women's dormitories at the University of Texas at Austin in the late 1960s. Clinton was elected as a Judge to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in 1978. Clinton served three consecutive six-year terms on the state's highest criminal court. His 1,094 opinions were the second-most ever written by a judge on the court. He retired in 1996. On 5 October 2004, Judge Clinton died, at the age of 81, of Alzheimer's disease at a retirement home in Austin, Texas. Link to Wikipedia biography