Assessing the Oddity of Murdaugh’s Sentencing
Many Americans followed Alex Murdaugh’s murder trial virtually gavel to gavel. There’s been no TV drama nearly anything like it since OJ.
OJ, though, was never sentenced. He never tearfully whined aloud to the judge about how deeply he loved Nicole and would never hurt her. We didn’t have to endure the dream team’s Mr. Johnnie zealously telling Judge Lance Ito why the Juice’s conviction was a miscarriage dreamed up by a vengeful Marcia Clark hell bent on landing a talk show. And we were never forced to watch the effete Ito playing to the cameras (and, notably, Cochrane too), for whatever Hollywood purpose he had for himself. Indeed, OJ was acquitted.
Murdaugh’s last chapter was vastly different, and with a totally anti-climactic sentencing. No tears. No sentencing adjournment allowing the defense to ready itself to wax poetic on judgment day. And, as would likely have occurred in LA, no prosecutor on an Elmer Gantry soapbox calling for vengeance — bloody crime scene photos in her hand for the 85th time.
No. At 9:30, the very morning after his conviction — and only because of the late hour of the verdict the evening before — in two simple sentences Murdaugh told the judge that he would never have hurt his wife or his son. Period!
The prosecutor would simply say there was nothing that needed to be said. Spectacularly, Murdaugh’s defense lawyers wouldn’t say one word — presumably because their client’s alibi defense blew up. This occurred when the prosecution offered an incriminating recording from Murdaugh’s own phone that sorely undermined his alibi.
Get Joel Cohen’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The judge went on for a bit describing Murdaugh and his (questionably) revered family that had prosecuted criminal cases in the same courthouse. He added poignantly that the man before him was not the man he had known. Without histrionics, he described how Murdaugh’s wife and son — that is, his demons — would unquestionably visit him nightly for the rest of his life. Importantly, the judge simply didn’t find the need to justify his punishment — consecutive life sentences. Indeed, he had told the jurors when releasing them after their verdict that he viewed the evidence against Murdaugh as overwhelming — thus describing laconically his view that articulated for him Murdaugh’s unambiguous guilt. And so, basically: “Goodbye Mr. Murdaugh. See you next trial”! After all, this is not the end of Murdaugh’s legal woes.
Many observers — those who perceived Murdaugh as guilty, and those still scratching their heads over the unprecedented rapid fire conviction — may have thought they were robbed. Why didn’t the defense lawyers say a word, or even try to move the sentence to a later date in order to gain more wits about them? I myself wondered. After all, lawyers typically try to drag out even the inevitable — and here, nearly every pundit had actually forecast a hung jury. So, wouldn’t the defense lawyers have had at least something helpful to say? Couldn’t they at least have offered in mitigation the obscene amount of drugs Murdaugh had used that theoretically might have had some impact? They wouldn’t have had to exhibit any disingenuousness by saying that Murdaugh was “innocent” or even “not guilty” in order to do that! It seemed that, in saying that “the man he was sentencing was not the man he had known,” the judge had done a better job for Murdaugh than his own lawyers.
Consider this, however. Although Murdaugh could have been sentenced to as little as 30 years rather than life, no realistic hope for that existed. The murders made Murdaugh death penalty eligible, even ignoring the hundreds of criminal financial charges he faces. In December, though, prosecutors had taken the death penalty off the table — they did so probably because the case was circumstantial which would have made the death penalty (to be decided by the jury in South Carolina) unlikely.
Also, in having successfully asked the judge to admit significant amounts of evidence of Murdaugh’s financial crimes as motive proof, the prosecutors were likely motivated by the reality that successfully defending the circumstantial case on appeal would have been much harder with a death sentence having been imposed. What’s more, in taking “death” off the table the prosecutors had circumvented South Carolina’s procedure allowing the defense lawyers to individually question the jurors in a death case — something prosecutors would desperately have wanted to avoid in a “big deal” circumstantial case. Those two factors may have been at play in the prosecutors’ thinking.
True, at the end of the day, hardly any judge would sentence a man he believed had murdered his own wife and son to anything but life. And maybe the defense couldn’t say anything that would have moved the judge away from that. Nonetheless, wasn’t the defense, perhaps unintentionally, demonstrating to an appeals court that it had given up — that there was nothing worth saying? Had they put all their eggs in the basket of a possible reversal on appeal over the financial crimes Murdaugh that was forced to admit? However, would you be the least bit comfortable with your lawyer telling the judge at sentencing, “I’ve got nothing to say”?
I don’t envy those defense lawyers given what they were faced with, whatever their role may have been in his deciding to basically jump off a bridge by testifying on his own behalf. And maybe (who knows?) the bizarre Murdaugh actually didn’t want them to say anything at sentence — he seemingly having made so many bad decisions over the course of the investigation and trial.
But still?
