Murdaugh verdict sends a Lowcountry message: No one is above the law | Opinion

Finally, handcuffs were clicked onto the wrists of Alex Murdaugh.

And as he was led out of the Colleton County Courthouse Thursday night, it had the sound of the end of an era.

That would be a good thing, if anything good can be said amid one of the harshest looks at the ills of humankind that will ever seep out of the South Carolina Lowcountry.

The disbarred attorney from Hampton, whose family has had its thumb on the scales of justice in this five-county area since 1920, was found guilty of brutally murdering his wife and son on June 7, 2021.

The jury took less than three hours to reach a consensus after six weeks of sometimes gruesome testimony that was watched worldwide.

In the Lowcountry, it’s impossible not to grieve the deaths of Maggie, 52, and Paul, 22, as depicted time after relentless time in the stately old courtroom in the heart of Walterboro.

It was significant that the S.C. Attorney General’s office would take on a Murdaugh. It was a swing for the fences in a circumstantial case that will doubtless be appealed.

That the case was brought, even coming before Murdaugh’s potential trials of numerous financial crimes, is progress.

Murdaugh, described in the trial as an expert in “the art of bullshit,” and seen now as a human crime wave, was running around with a badge from the 14th Circuit Solicitor’s Office, which was run by his father, grandfather and great-grandfather.

His grandfather, Randolph “Buster” Murdaugh Jr., was accused in a federal whisky conspiracy case in 1956 of taking a $200 bribe in the same courthouse where Alex pulled every string he could to escape what a jury of his peers found to be a no-brainer.

He arrived at court daily with a sports coat draped over his handcuffs. By the time he got into the courtoom, the handcuffs were gone. He didn’t look like the inmate that he is, but rather like one of the four attorneys representing him.

If those televised handcuff clicks mean that the state judicial system will now insist that no one is above the law, the jury’s verdict is a milestone.

The jury apparently saw right through the age old Murdaugh game plan, used by his grandfather in the public corruption charge he beat amid accusations of jury tampering, and used by Alex and his late father, Randolph Murdaugh III four years ago when Paul Murdaugh was accused of crashing a boat while heavily intoxicated, killing one passenger.

The game plan in their system of justice is to rush to the scene and immediately set in motion a narrative that points the finger at someone else. They manipulate witnesses and evidence. They try to bully opposing counsel. They know everyone, and everyone has believed for generations that the Murdaughs were untouchable and could either get you in trouble or get you out of trouble.

The jury heard from courageous witnesses that Alex Murdaugh tried to get them to change their truth to fit his alibi. Then the jury saw his alibi crash and burn when a video of a dog with a hurt tail placed him at the scene of the murders when he had denied for almost two years that he was there.

In a slice of Lowcountry life that will never be forgotten, it was Bubba the yellow Labrador who was chasing a chicken at the kennels on the sprawling Murdaugh estate that prompted Maggie to shout, “Hey, he’s got a bird in his mouth!”

Those eight syllables, played over and over again in the trial, were poor Maggie’s posthumous testimony to the truth. Her husband’s distinctive voice was heard clearly in the background. He was busted.

And the jury apparently didn’t buy the high-powered defense attorneys, or Alex Murdaugh himself who dramatically testified on his own behalf, when they constantly depicted Alex Murdaugh’s family as the Brady Bunch.

No, it was a family in deep financial trouble, with a father taking drugs and stealing massive sums of money from innocent clients and his best friends, with a mother who did not like to stay at the family compound called Moselle, and a poor elder son whose life has been shattered, unable to say on the witness stand what his father’s birthday was.

In sum, Alex Murdaugh was seen by the jury as a total fraud.

Would that the old Lowcountry system of so-called justice can now also been seen as a total fraud.

This story was originally published March 2, 2023 at 8:31 PM with the headline "Murdaugh verdict sends a Lowcountry message: No one is above the law | Opinion."