Answer: Abraham Lincoln. Defending William “Duff” Armstrong — the son of Jack and Hannah Armstrong, friends from Lincoln’s New Salem days — Lincoln let the state’s key witness, Charles Allen, insist he’d seen the killing by bright moonlight. Then Lincoln produced an 1857 almanac to prove there wasn’t enough light for Allen to have seen what he claimed, and the jury acquitted Armstrong on a single ballot. Lincoln took the case for free as a favor to the widowed Hannah, and a legend later grew that he’d doctored the almanac to fool the jury — but historians have debunked that; the almanac was genuine and the moon really was low. The case became his most famous courtroom moment, immortalized in a Norman Rockwell painting and the 1939 film Young Mr. Lincoln. Read more here.