WALTERBORO, S.C. — A South Carolina judge on Friday granted a motion from Alex Murdaugh’s attorneys to compel the state to turn over communications and underlying files that led an expert witness to say Murdaugh’s shirt was covered in blood from his son’s gunshot wound.
“We need that information in order to say whether or not that’s voodoo science,” Dick Harpootlian, Murdaugh’s attorney, told the court Friday.
Harpootlian argued that the defense needs the documents and an opportunity to interview the state’s expert witness Tom Bevel and agents with the State Law Enforcement Division under oath before making a decision on whether to file a motion excluding the T-shirt from evidence in the upcoming murder trial.
Murdaugh has been charged with murder in the grisly shooting deaths of his wife, Maggie, and youngest son, Paul, the night of June 7, 2021, on the family’s 1,700-acre Colleton County property. He has pleaded not guilty to those charges.
He is scheduled to stand trial Jan. 23.
Murdaugh’s defense team is requesting messages, meetings notes, recordings and Photoshop files that would shed light on why an outside expert changed his mind about a key piece of evidence, the defense has alleged.
The outside expert, Bevel, wrote a draft report in February stating that Murdaugh’s shirt from the night Maggie and Paul were shot had no evidence of blood spray caused by being in the presence of bullet wounds, according to Harpootlian.
After two SLED agents brought the shirt for Bevel to review in person, Bevel issued a report saying he had been able to use Photoshop to identify areas of the shirt with blood spatter evidence, Harpootlian said.
Harpootlian on Friday characterized this visit as suspicious, arguing that it would have been typical for SLED to send the evidence through the mail.
But lead prosecutor Creighton Waters stated that he made the decision that SLED agents should bring the shirt in person.
“I wanted to make sure that a major piece of evidence did not get lost in the mail,” Waters said.
Waters maintained that the state attorney general’s office was committed to sharing any evidence they had with the defense.
“This is an open-book process,” Waters said.
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