The Dr. Sam Sheppard Collection

In 2012, William Mason, then Cuyahoga County Prosecutor, designated the Cleveland–Marshall College of Law Library at Cleveland State University as the repository for records and other materials relating to the Dr. Sam Sheppard case.  The material consists of over 50 boxes of photographs, recordings and trial exhibits.  Check out the collection here: http://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/sheppard/

Background on the Sheppard cases:

Dr. Sam Sheppard was convicted in 1954 of the murder of his pregnant wife, Marilyn Reese Sheppard, at their Bay Village, Ohio home. He spent almost a decade in prison, before a retrial was ordered, where he was acquitted in 1966. To his death, he maintained his innocence in the murder.

The murder of Marilyn Sheppard and the controversial murder trial of Sam Sheppard in 1954 drew widespread, nationwide attention from the media, creating what the U.S. Supreme Court later described as a “carnival atmosphere” which denied Sheppard his right to due process.

In 2000, Sheppard’s son, Sam Reese Sheppard, who was seven at the time of his mother’s murder, sued the state of Ohio for his father’s alleged wrongful imprisonment. After a ten-week trial, a civil jury returned a unanimous verdict that Sam Reese Sheppard had failed to prove his father had been wrongfully imprisoned.