Alex Murdaugh was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole Friday for the murders of his wife and grown son — another chapter in the downfall of the disgraced attorney whose dynastic family had significant legal reach for decades in parts of South Carolina’s Lowcountry.
“Amazingly to have you come and testify that it was just another ordinary day. ‘My wife and son and I were out just enjoying life.’ Not credible. Not believable. You can convince yourself about it but obviously you have the inability to convince anyone else about that,” Judge Clifton Newman said moments before the sentencing.
After more than a month and dozens of witnesses, jurors took less than three hours Thursday to convict Murdaugh of two counts of murder in the June 2021 killings, as well as two counts of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime.
The sentencing hearing took place in South Carolina’s Colleton County. Prosecutors asked for life in prison without the possibility of parole, sparing Murdaugh the death penalty.
“Justice was done today,” lead prosecutor Creighton Waters said in a Thursday night news conference. “It doesn’t matter who your family is. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, or people think you have. It doesn’t matter … how prominent you are.
“If you do wrong, if you break the law, if you murder, then justice will be done in South Carolina.”
The case brought national attention — including Netflix and HBO Max documentaries — to Murdaugh, the former personal injury attorney whose father, grandfather and great-grandfather served as prosecutors for a portion of southern South Carolina from 1920 to 2006.
Murdaugh’s wife, Maggie, and 22-year-old son, Paul, were found fatally shot on the family’s Islandton property on June 7, 2021. Murdaugh, who took the stand last week in his own defense, maintained he found the bodies after returning from a brief visit to his sick mother that night.
Prosecutors had argued Murdaugh’s motive was to distract and delay investigations into his growing financial problems. They homed in on a history of deceit, arguing he stole millions of dollars from his former clients and law firm and lied to cover his tracks — theft and lies that Murdaugh admitted in court.
The defense after the verdict asked for a mistrial, but Newman denied it, saying the jury had gotten enough time to consider the evidence — and the evidence of guilt was “overwhelming.”
The judge will likely consider two main factors when deciding the sentence: the nature and the gravity of the crime, including that Murdaugh murdered his own family members, legal experts told CNN Thursday night.
And some of what the judge said Thursday could foreshadow the sentence, legal experts said.
“I thought that the judge — who had been really so even-tempered and calm throughout the trial — he remained calm, but I thought he sort of showed his view of the evidence at last, when he characterized it as ‘overwhelming,'” said Jessica Roth, a law professor at the Cardozo School of Law.
‘The evidence was clear,’ juror says
It actually look the jury less than an hour to find Murdaugh guilty, juror Craig Moyer told ABC.
“The evidence was clear,” said Moyer, the first on the panel to speak publicly about the trial.
The jury began its deliberations with a vote: “It was two not guilty, one not sure and nine guilty,” he said Friday, adding his vote was guilty from the start.
“Everybody was pretty much talking, about 45 minutes later … we figured it out,” he said.
With little to no direct evidence tying Murdaugh to the scene, including no eyewitnesses, the prosecution largely relied on circumstantial evidence, including phone and vehicle tracking systems suggesting Murdaugh’s movements the night of the killings.
And prosecutors pointed to another lie that played a key role in the case: a video clip that placed Murdaugh at the murder site shortly before the killings, despite his repeated assertions throughout the investigation that he was not there.
The video, recorded by Paul near the family’s dog kennels shortly before the time prosecutors say they were killed, captured Alex Murdaugh’s voice in the background, nearly a dozen friends and family members testified.
Murdaugh then testified the voice was his — and that he’d lied to investigators about his whereabouts because he grew paranoid, which he blamed on his addiction to opioid painkillers.
Moyer, the juror, was surprised when Murdaugh acknowledged the voice heard in the video moments before the murders was his own, he said.
It was that fact that convinced Moyer that Murdaugh was guilty, the juror said.
Moyer said the defense argument that Murdaugh didn’t have enough time to commit the crimes and clean up wasn’t convincing.
Murdaugh was “a good liar,” Moyer said, “but not good enough.”
“I didn’t see any true remorse or compassion or anything,” he added, noting when Murdaugh took the stand, “He didn’t cry. All he did was blow snot.”
In the end, “it was the victim, Paul Murdaugh, who solved his own murder,” Dave Aronberg, state attorney for Florida’s Palm Beach County, told CNN Thursday night about the trial.
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