WALTERBORO, S.C. — Alex Murdaugh, former South Carolina attorney and convicted murderer, was sentenced to two consecutive sentences of life in prison Friday.
Murdaugh was convicted Thursday of the murders of his wife Maggie and son Paul after a six-week trial at the Colleton County Courthouse. Jurors took less than three hours to return a unanimous guilty verdict for both slayings.
In a short pre-sentencing statement at the courthouse Friday, Murdaugh maintained he had not pulled the trigger at the family’s rural estate on June 7, 2021.
“I’m innocent,” Murdaugh said. “I would never hurt my wife Maggie or my son Pau Pau,” using the nickname Murdaugh frequently used for his youngest son on the witness stand.
Prosecutor Creighton Waters asked Judge Clifton Newman for the maximum sentence of life in prison. Murdaugh’s defense team of Jim Griffin and Dick Harpootlian did not make any comment Friday, and Waters indicated no victims had wanted to speak at sentencing.
“It’s a very complicated situation,” Waters said.
Addressing Murdaugh, Newman called Murdaugh’s conduct “duplicitous” both leading up to the indictment and throughout the trial. He said Murdaugh’s story of a “normal” day leading up to the murders was “not credible, not believable,” and he was unable to convince anyone else of his story.
He said Murdaugh’s family “controlled justice in this community for over a century, a man whose grandfather’s portrait hangs at the back of the courthouse, which I had to order removed to ensure a fair trial was had by both the state and the defense,” Newman said.
“As a well-known member of the legal community, you have practiced law before me,” Newman said. “It was especially heartbreaking for me to see you go from being a grieving father who lost a wife and son to being the person indicted and convicted of killing them.”
While Newman said he didn’t question the state’s decision not to seek the death penalty against Murdaugh, but he said many defendants who had been sentenced in the Walterboro courthouse had received death for less heinous offenses.
Newman asked Murdaugh what he meant when he said on the witness stand when he said “What a tangled web we weave” in reference to his previous lies.
“When I lied, I continue to lie,” he said.
“And the question is, when will it end,” Newman said, noting the jury determined “you lied throughout your testimony” and that many would say “you continued to lie in your statement to the court” at sentencing.
Newman said he could only imagine that Paul and Maggie “visit you every night when you go to sleep, and will continue to do so.”
“I respect this court, but I am innocent,” Murdaugh said in one last act of defiance.
“It might not have been you,” Newman said in response. “It might be the monster you become when you take 50, 60 opioid pills. You become a different person.”
