The State of the Murdaugh Trial Revisited: An Inappropriate Evidence about a Financial Misconducting Felony
Though this financial evidence is not directly related to the murder charges, the judge overseeing the case ruled to allow it in, saying it was “so intimately connected” with the state’s case “that proof of it is essential to complete the story.” He has instructed jurors to only consider this financial evidence as part of the motive and not as a broader criticism of the defendant’s character.
For the defense, that evidence amounts to little more than “speculation” and “conjecture,” attorney Dick Harpootlian argued. They have highlighted Murdaugh’s loving relationships with his family and ridiculed the prosecution’s focus on irrelevant financial misconduct.
“They’ve got a whole lot more evidence about financial misconduct than they have about a murder and evidence of guilt in a murder case,” defense lawyer Jim Griffin said in court during a debate on the relevance of this testimony.
A series of witnesses have accused Murdaugh of extensive financial wrongdoing at his namesake law firm and presented evidence that he had lied to nearly everyone around him in a yearslong fraud. A “day of reckoning” was coming from several different angles, so he killed his family to distract and delay those financial investigations, the prosecution has argued.
The lack of direct evidence makes it difficult to convict, according to legal experts who have followed the trial.
It makes the case more difficult, according to the trial attorney. “But at some point, if the prosecutors have enough evidence that they can put together that story, and show motive and opportunity, it can certainly rise to the level needed to get a conviction.
“Jurors want science, jurors want DNA, jurors want something that’s persuasive,” Azari said. “Becauseprosecutors lack it, they focus on the tenuous motives and the lies after the fact but neither of those things substitute the evidence that they need.”
Video Recording Paul and Maggie Murdaugh at the Islandton Dog Kennel Kennel Centre, Inc. The Two Shootings Formed in July 2016
The video was recorded on Paul’s phone at 8:44 PM on June 7, 2016 just minutes before the two were shot dead. David Dove is a supervisor in the computer crimes center.
The video focuses on one of their dogs and appears to have been recorded at the kennels at their family home in Islandton. Family friends identified the voices that were heard in the background as those of Paul,Maggie and Alex Murdaugh.
The prosecution said Murdaugh told anyone who would listen that he was never there. “The evidence will show that he was there. He was at the murder scene with the two victims.”
Harpootlian said in his opening statement that the audio showed a normal discussion between Murdaugh and his wife. Paul is “very happy,” Harpootlian said. “Nobody’s down there threatening him. Daddy is not going to kill him with a shotgun.
The prosecution has been using his claims about how long he had been with his mother to try and prove that he was asleep.
An investigation of Murdaugh’s actions against a 19-year-old man and his wife, Mallory Beach, in connection with an alleged murder spree
State prosecutors have been trying to explain why Murdaugh killed his wife and son.
The CFO of the law firm testified that she confronted Murdaugh about missing funds on the morning of June 7, 2021, hours before the killings. After the murders, the internal investigation into the funds was put on hold.
“We weren’t going to go in there and harass him about money when we were worried about his mental state and the fact that his family had been killed,” the CFO, Jeanne Seckinger, testified.
Second, Murdaugh was facing a lawsuit from the family of Mallory Beach, a 19-year-old who was killed in February 2019 when a boat, owned by Murdaugh and allegedly driven by Paul, crashed. Prosecutors argued that a June 10 hearing in the civil case could reveal his financial problems.
Indeed, that day of reckoning didn’t arrive until three months after his law firm confronted him about the misappropriated funds.
More than 60 witnesses were called by prosecutors to support their argument that Alex Murdaugh shot and killed Margaret and Paul Murdaugh at the family’s estate in June 2021, in order to distract from financial issues.
His use of the narcotic was definitely a cause of his financial problems, but it is not the only cause. He said he was using some of the money he stole from clients to buy pills, but not all of it. Murdaugh said he would not object to the term wealthy lifestyle, which was being used to fund what the prosecution called a “wealthy lifestyle”.
Murdaugh’s lawyers have previously acknowledged he struggles with an opioid addiction and prosecutors presented evidence Friday showing Paul confronted his father about a stash of pills a month before he and his mother were killed.
The jury has heard about a roadside shooting that injured Murdaugh after the killings. Authorities have alleged that Murdaugh arranged for another man to shoot him so that Buster could obtain millions of dollars in life insurance.
Upon returning home to the family’s sprawling estate, he told investigators, he found the bodies of his wife and son on the ground by their dog kennels and called 911.
Richard Harvey, the Coroner, and Paul Murdaugh During the July 7, 2021 Killings: A Videotape Testimony
The first witness in the trial was the county Coroner, Richard Harvey, who estimated the times of death of Paul and Maggie to be around 9PM on June 7, 2021, using body temperature checks.
An almost minute-long video filmed on Paul’s phone beginning at 8:44 p.m. shows one of the family dogs and appears to have been taken at the kennels, Lt. David Britton Dove, a supervisor in the computer crimes center at the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, testified.
The court adjourned for the weekend after about six hours of testimony on Friday and is set to resume on Monday.
You disagree with my portrayal that there is a photographic memory about the details that have to fit now that you know, but you are fuzzy on the other facts that complicates that? You disagree with that?”
At one point on Friday, Waters asked Murdaugh whether the dogs at the kennels on his property – where the killings took place – were barking when he was there with his wife and son.
Waters sought to undermine Murdaugh’s account of where he was on the night of the killings.
“I know what I wasn’t doing, Mr. Waters, and what I wasn’t doing is doing anything, as I believe you’ve implied, that I was cleaning off or … washing off guns or putting guns in a raincoat. And I can promise you that I wasn’t doing any of that,” Murdaugh said.
He said that he did not hurt his wife and child and did not make an alibi. I know for a fact that I have never created an alibi.
“I can tell you for a fact that the person or people who did what I saw on June 7, they hated Paul Murdaugh,” he testified. “And they had anger in their heart.”
The former lawyer Waters asked if the clients he stole from are real people, was asked about the financial crimes that the state alleges drove Murdaugh to murder.
After a brief break, Jim griffin began questioning Waters again after he had finished his cross examination. The court adjourned for the day after Griffin ended his questioning.
The Crimes and Killings of Jeremiah Murdaugh : A New Look at a Case of Financial Irrelevance
They aren’t fake people. They are good people. A lot of the people that I care about were wrong by me, according to Murdaugh.
I can’t answer whether that was from me looking at them or not. I agree with you that I looked every single client in the eye, and that they trusted me, even though I stole money from them for many years.
He told investigators that he was not at the estate on the day that the bodies of the two people were found dead. He said that his addiction to opiate painkillers led him to lie.
A cascading turn of events would include Murdaugh quitting his law firm, his disbarment, and revelations his shooting was a ruse to provide life insurance money to his son, all in connection with the alleged financial crimes and killings.
Before Murdaugh testified Thursday, a motion from the defense to limit the scope of questioning he would face was denied by Judge Clifton Newman – in particular, allegations of financial wrongdoing.
He said various factors contributed to his “paranoid thinking” which led to his decision to lie to police, including his “distrust of SLED,” (South Carolina Law Enforcement Division), questions about his relationship with his wife and son, and “the fact that I have a pocket full of pills in my pocket,” he said. The police interview was played by the prosecution.
It was said that Murdaugh took up to 1200 milligrams a day if he didn’t take as much.
The murder trial of Alex Murdaugh: Is it a double-edged sword to accuse him of being an opioid addict?
After hearing from dozens of witnesses in the high-profile murder trial of Alex Murdaugh, a South Carolina jury last week heard from the man himself after he took the stand – a move legal experts say was risky but could have helped his case.
Mark Eiglarsh, a criminal defense attorney and a former prosecutor, thinks that if you are going to have somebody testify, you want someone who has been in court and lied to before. All it takes is one juror connecting with him.
Several attorneys told CNN Murdaugh had no choice but to testify in the case, despite the fact that he could not get a fair trial.
Everyone wanted to know why you lied about not being at the kennels. So he had to give an explanation as to that,” criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor Bernarda Villalona said. That’s the main reason the criminal defenseattorney in this case made a calculated decision to place him on the stand.
What will be key in the end, several attorneys said, is whether Murdaugh’s long-winded answers were able to convince at least one person on the jury panel – which could save him from conviction on the charges and potentially spending the rest of his life behind bars.
He is sympathetic for trying to wrestle with addiction and may have made him paranoid by telling the police he wasn’t there.
“But if he was that addled by the addiction, he might have been acting very irrationally at the time and the jury might believe that this very opioid-addicted person went off into this paranoid frenzy and did slaughter his own family,” Wu noted. “So, it’s a double-edged sword.”
“What they’re doing, the prosecutors, is saying he’s a liar, he’s a cheat, he can’t be trusted and you should not at all take whatever he says at face value,” criminal defense attorney and CNN Legal Analyst Joey Jackson said.
It went well for the defendants, and not so well for the prosecutor. Murdaugh is a skilled lawyer, so he was a tough witness. He changed the pace of the deposition from one where the person doing the cross should control him to one where he was able to control the pace.
Jessica Roth, a law professor at the Cardozo School of Law, says that one of the biggest issues for the prosecution is whether or not he actually did it. “Despite all the other crimes he’s admitted to, would he actually kill his wife and son?