WALTERBORO, S.C. — Alex Murdaugh’s defense attorneys will quickly file an appeal of their client’s double-murder conviction, they said in a press conference Friday.
Attorneys Jim Griffin and Dick Harpootlian said they believe they can get Murdaugh’s life sentence for the murder of his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul, overturned on appeal, questioning Judge Clifton Newman’s decision to allow prosecutors to present evidence of Murdaugh’s alleged financial crimes in his Colleton County murder trial.
The jurors “heard everything that would be in an HBO or Netflix documentary,” Griffin said.
After a six-week trial in which Griffin and Harpootlian did everything they could to undermine the state’s investigation and prosecution of Murdaugh, their client was convicted on all counts in less than three hours Thursday evening.
Earlier on Friday, Murdaugh was sentenced to two life terms in state prison after Newman delivered a scathing judgment of Murdaugh’s conduct, including a string of lies he told from the night of the shooting up until his testimony at trial.
Even as Murdaugh now looks ahead to spending the rest of his life in prison, he still faces almost 100 other criminal charges related to the millions of dollars he allegedly stole from the law firm founded by his great-grandfather and several of his own clients. Many of them were children injured in car wrecks who depended on Murdaugh to soundly manage settlement money he allegedly used instead to benefit himself.
The defense fought to exclude evidence of those crimes from coming into the murder trial. Normally, juries can’t consider other crimes a defendant may have committed in deciding their guilt in the charges they were being tried on, particularly crimes the defendant has not been convicted of. But prosecutors argued those financial crimes — and the looming circumstances that might lead to their exposure — motivated Murdaugh to commit the murders.
Griffin and Harpootlian believe that decision was improper and destroyed Murdaugh’s credibility as a defendant and a witness. But it also gave them grounds for an appeal.
Griffin said the defense may pursue a federal appeal, because they believe prosecutor Creighton Waters’ questioning of why Murdaugh did not volunteer information about a cellphone video shot by Paul after he was arrested violated Murdaugh’s Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. That video placed Murdaugh at the scene of the crime. Murdaugh admitted on the stand he had lied about being at the kennels to investigators.
Griffin said they would take their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary.
Harpootlian flatly denied that it was a mistake to allow Murdaugh to testify at the trial.
“We debated that,” Harpootlian said. “He always wanted to take the stand, (and) he had to take the stand to explain the kennel video, but his credibility had been destroyed” by the financial allegations against him.
Reporters also questioned why no one spoke up in Murdaugh’s support at his sentencing hearing Friday, including his surviving son, Buster, who earlier testified in his father’s defense. They said it was unlikely that would have made a difference to Newman’s decision to impose two life sentences and they didn’t want to put Buster through more trauma.
“You could have had Mother Teresa speaking, he would have gotten a double life sentence,” Griffin said.
Murdaugh will be transported from Walterboro to a S.C. Department of Corrections facility in Columbia, Griffin said. After a 30-day evaluation period, he will be assigned to the corrections institute where Murdaugh could spend the rest of his life.
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