Murdaugh prosecutors should be barred from using financial motive, defense attorneys say
The allegation that Alex Murdaugh killed his wife and son to cover up for a decade of alleged financial crimes is “absurd,” “illogical” and should not be allowed in court, his attorneys say.
With barely a month to go until the start of Murdaugh’s trial in the killing of his wife and son, prosecutors and Murdaugh’s attorneys are trading heavy blows in court filings. Both sides are seeking to gain an advantage through what evidence will be allowed in the upcoming murder trial, which is scheduled to start Jan. 23 in Colleton County.
The South Carolina Attorney General’s Office says it plans to seek a sentence of life without parole.
In the latest exchange, Murdaugh’s attorneys have attempted to block the prosecution’s intention to use unproven in court allegations of financial crimes to establish a motive for the brutal double murder.
Lead prosecutor Creighton Waters has argued that Murdaugh was driven to shoot and kill his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul, on the night of June 7, 2021, in order to distract from the imminent discovery of his financial crimes.
“There is zero evidentiary support for this motive,” Murdaugh’s attorneys wrote in the memo filed Monday. “It is nothing more than a transparent effort to improperly persuade the jury that Murduagh is a person of such bad character that he can commit the most heinous crimes imaginable.”
The prosecution asserts that on the morning of June 7, 2021, an employee of Murdaugh’s law firm demanded answers about missing legal fees in a case where Murdaugh was co-counsel. In addition, the prosecution alleges that Murdaugh was under threat of exposure from an impending motion requiring him to disclose his finances in a civil suit stemming from the 2019 boat crash that killed Mallory Beach.
Paul was facing criminal charges in the boat crash, and Beach’s family had filed suit against the family.
But Murdaugh’s defense attorneys, Jim Griffin and Dick Harpootlian, have attacked this argument not only on procedural grounds but also because they say prosecutors are advancing illogical assumptions about Murdaugh’s behavior.
Allowing the evidence to be introduced would result in “mini trials within the murder trial” for the other charges and would likely prejudice a jury, according to Murdaugh’s attorneys.
Evidence of alleged previous crimes is generally not admissible in court unless it meets one of the few exceptions available under South Carolina law. While Murdaugh faces 99 charges across 19 different indictments, he has not yet been convicted on any of the charges.
“When this case started, a lot of people assumed this was a murder case, and then a couple of months later, some white-collar fraud thrown in there,” Waters said at a recent hearing in Colleton County. “But what we have realized is that this is a white-collar case that culminated in two murders. This is an unbroken chain of lying misappropriations and thefts.”
Murdaugh is accused of stealing millions of dollars from his legal clients and the law firm that his family founded over 100 years ago. He is accused of a range of schemes from pilfering trusts set up for his clients to having checks directed to a bank account he controlled disguised as a legitimate structured settlement company.
Among the tests for whether this evidence can be allowed is whether it can be shown to “logically relate” to the crime that the defendant is charged with, according to the defense’s motion.
No such logic exists, Murdaugh’s attorneys have argued.
“This motive theory is simply created out of whole cloth,” the attorneys wrote. “There is absolutely no evidence that Murdaugh’s wife Maggie or his son Paul were a threat to expose Murdaugh’s financial crimes.”
Defense attacks financial motive for double murder
The defense’s motion portrayed a decidedly different view of the events surrounding the murders than recent statement by prosecutors.
Where Waters described June 7, 2021, in a recent court hearing as a “a day of reckoning” that led to the murders, the defense memo portrays the inquiry by Murdaugh’s law firm that day as a one-off instance that was unlikely to put pressure on Murdaugh.
“The state has not pointed to any evidence suggesting that the law firm was even questioning transactions other than this isolated fee matter,” Griffin and Harpootlian wrote in the motion.
The defense attorneys also dismissed the prosecution’s claim that a discovery motion in the Beach lawsuit threatened to expose Murdaugh’s financial thefts. In all likelihood, Griffin and Harpootlian argue, the information would have been little more than what’s included on Murdaugh’s tax returns.
“That Murdaugh would choose to murder his wife and son instead of simply falsifying financial information ... as he allegedly had been doing for years ... is not only illogical; it is completely absurd and ludicrous,” according to their filing.
In their memo, Griffin and Harpootlian also attacked the prosecution’s request to include in the murder trial information about Murdaugh’s alleged suicide attempt on the side of a road in September 2021.
Murdaugh was charged with organizing the shooting along with alleged drug dealer, Curtis “Eddie” Smith. Smith has denied any involvement in a premeditated scheme to defraud Murdaugh’s insurance.
In their recent filing outlining the motive in the murders, prosecutors reframed the incident as an attempt by Murdaugh to gain sympathy and distract attention away from himself in the wake of the murders.
The defense argues that including this evidence contradicts the insurance fraud charge. In that separate case, Murdaugh is accused of organizing his own killing so that his surviving son, Buster, could receive a $10 million life insurance payout.
Griffin and Harpootlian argue that prosecutors cannot say “in Hampton County that Murdaugh genuinely intended to die so his son could obtain life insurance proceeds” while arguing in Colleton County that Murdaugh “faked his suicide attempt as a ploy for sympathy to distract attention from alleged financial crimes.”
Allowing evidence of the suicide attempt into court risks prejudicing the jury, the memo warns. Citing a case out of Virginia, Griffin and Harpootlian warn against a situation where collateral evidence added “impermissible substance to the prosecution’s otherwise weak case (creating) the likelihood that the jury would convict the defendant solely because of his prior criminal conduct.”
Murdaugh’s attorneys also refuted “irresponsibly reported rumors” that Maggie had hired a forensic accountant and consulted a divorce attorney. They also denied in their memo that Murdaugh had life insurance policies on his wife or son.
The memo goes as far as arguing that Maggie’s murder actually hurt Murdaugh’s financial situation. Maggie was in the process of arranging an inspection of the family’s Edisto Beach home, which had been approved as the basis for a $750,000 loan from Palmetto State Bank.
She had scheduled the inspection for the morning of June 8, 2021, the day after her murder.
This story was originally published December 20, 2022 at 6:41 PM.