https://en.wikipedia.org/...

Vallandigham died in 1871 in Lebanon, Ohio, at the age of 50, after he accidentally shot himself in the abdomen with a pistol. He was representing a defendant, Thomas McGehean,[69] in a murder case for killing a man in a barroom brawl in Hamilton, Ohio. Vallandigham attempted to prove the victim, Tom Myers, had in fact accidentally shot himself while he was drawing his pistol from a pocket while rising from a kneeling position. As Vallandigham conferred with fellow defense attorneys in his hotel room at the Lebanon House, later the Golden Lamb Inn, he showed them how he would demonstrate this to the jury. Selecting a pistol he believed to be unloaded, he put it in his pocket and enacted the events as they might have happened, snagging the loaded gun on his clothing and unintentionally causing it to discharge into his stomach.

Although he was fatally wounded, Vallandigham's demonstration proved his point, and the defendant, Thomas McGehean, was acquitted and released from custody (only to be shot to death four years later in his saloon).[70] Surgeons probed for the pistol ball, thought to have lodged in the vicinity of Vallandigham's bladder, but were unable to locate it, and Vallandigham died the next day of peritonitis. His last words expressed his faith in "that good old Presbyterian doctrine of predestination".[71] Survived by his wife, Louisa Anna (McMahon) Vallandigham, and his son Charles Vallandigham, he was buried in Woodland Cemetery in Dayton, Ohio.