In closing argument, Murdaugh's defense says investigators fabricated evidence
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The State via AP, Pool
The legal team for Alex Murdaugh, center, is presenting their closing argument in his double murder trial on Thursday. He's seen here listening to prosecutor Creighton Waters make his closing arguments at the Colleton County Courthouse in Walterboro, S.C.
Updated March 2, 2023 at 1:14 PM ET
Alex Murdaugh's defense team is making its final bid to prevent him from spending decades in prison, delivering their closing argument in the trial of the disbarred South Carolina attorney charged in the murders of his wife and son.
The trial resumed shortly after 9:30 a.m. Thursday the day the case is expected to go to the jury,
more than a month after the court heard opening statements on Jan. 25.
After the defense presents its closing argument, the prosecution will offer a response. Judge Clifton Newman is then expected to give final instructions to the jury, and charge them with coming to a verdict.
Murdaugh, 54, is charged with using a rifle to kill his wife, Maggie Murdaugh, 52, and a shotgun to kill his son Paul, 22. They died on the night of June 7, 2021, at the family's sprawling Moselle hunting estate in South Carolina's Lowcountry region.
Murdaugh faces the possibility of life in prison if he's found guilty of two counts of murder and other charges. He's being tried at the Colleton County Courthouse in Walterboro, S.C.
His defense team has sought to sow doubt about the work by police and forensics teams, saying they fell far short of preserving evidence from the crime scene and the hunting estate's main house.
Murdaugh's defense says investigators fabricated evidence
Defense attorney Jim Griffin said law enforcement was biased against Alex Murdaugh from early on adding that they later fabricated evidence against him. Pulling at threads of the prosecution's case, he said state investigators "failed miserably in investigating this case."
Had the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, or SLED, done a "competent job" of gathering evidence, Griffin said, Murdaugh would have been excluded from the list of potential suspects long ago.
"Unless we find somebody else, it's gonna be Alex," Griffin said, giving his version of investigators' thinking. Saying his client's opioid habit made him "an easy target for SLED," Griffin added, "They started fabricating evidence against Alex."
SLED took samples from Alex's clothes, but they never took DNA samples off Maggie and Paul's clothes, Griffin said. Once investigators seized on the idea that tests showed high-velocity blood spatter on Alex Murdaugh's T-shirt, he added, they refused to dismiss that idea and pursued it "with vengeance."
But when the state was faced with mixed results and questions over tests of Murdaugh's shirt, Griffin said, they embraced a "Mr. Clean theory," which purported that Murdaugh committed the grisly murders, quickly washed himself off with a hose and got into a golf cart "butt-naked, I guess," to drive back to the house, before leaving to visit his mother.
Griffin accused the agency of a list of failures, saying the state never explained if tests were performed on hair he said was found in Maggie's fingers. He also faulted the way Maggie's phone was secured after it was found on June 8, accusing investigators of not preventing the device
from continuously pinging GPS locations which, he said, eventually overwrote data from the night of the murders.
As for the lies Murdaugh admitted telling, Griffin said his client lied because "that's what addicts do." He added that Murdaugh had "a closet full of skeletons" that he didn't want exposed.
Defense pokes at prosecutors' use of phone data
Griffin replayed the video Paul took in the kennels around 8:44 p.m., minutes before prosecutors say the shooting started. It captured Alex, Maggie and Paul talking about dogs.
"Four minutes later, the state would have you believe that Alex Murdaugh up and blew his son's brains out" and killed his wife, Griffin said.
He also sought to sow doubt about investigators' findings of the time of death, saying that just because Paul's and Maggie's phones locked around 8:49 p.m., that doesn't mean both of them were dead.
Griffin ran through phone data reflecting the minutes after 8:49, laying out a theory in which the slain mother and son might have simply set down their phones at the kennels. Orientation changes and other movements Maggie's phone recorded, he said, might have indicated that she was still holding her own phone or perhaps that a "bad guy" had it.
Murdaugh would never kill his wife and son, attorney says
Griffin replayed witness testimony describing Murdaugh as a loving husband and father. As for the accusations of financial misdeeds that arose in Murdaugh's law firm the morning of June 7, 2021, Griffin insisted it was not different from any other day in the "frenetic" life of Alex Murdaugh.
The pressures on his client have been overblown, Griffin said. When Murdaugh did finally feel pressure, the attorney added, he took steps to end his own life in September, asking his cousin to shoot him.
Griffin began his statement with an overview of the criminal legal system, comparing the trial to an instant-replay review in college football. Despite the charges against Murdaugh, he told jurors, the call on the field the default position of the law is that Murdaugh is innocent. It's the prosecution's job, he added, to prove Murdaugh's guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
If the government hasn't met its "high burden" of proof, he added, the jury must find Murdaugh not guilty.
A juror is removed, shortly before deliberations are to begin
As Thursday's court session began, Judge Clifton Newman announced that a juror is being replaced on the panel. The court received a complaint from a member of the public saying the juror, a woman identified only as juror No. 785, had "improper conversations" with people not involved with the case.
Newman thanked the woman for her attentive and positive attitude throughout the case, and the investment of her time. But, he said, she would be replaced so that the integrity of the trial would remain intact.
A light moment then erupted shortly before the juror left, as she said she needed her purse from the other room along with a dozen eggs that another juror had brought in for everyone on the panel.
"A dozen eggs?" Newman asked.
"You want to leave the eggs or take the eggs?" the judge asked. The juror affirmed that she wanted to take the eggs.
Newman also instructed her to not talk about the case until the trial is over.
The witnesses were murdered, prosecutor said
Prosecutors have built a case against Murdaugh using circumstantial evidence, lacking eyewitnesses, video records or a murder weapon.
"We couldn't bring you any eyewitnesses, because they were murdered," prosecutor Creighton Waters told the jury on Wednesday.
The trial is winding down one week after Murdaugh took the stand himself, to admit he had lied repeatedly to investigators when he said he wasn't with his wife and son at the dog kennels at Moselle shor
Thursday, March 2, 2023 at 3:07 pm