Alex Murdaugh stands murder trial over the killings of his wife and youngest son as his defense team issued one last statement, saying they would remain quiet during the hearing.
The suspect's defense team consists of South Carolina lawyers Dick Harpootlian and Jim Griffin. The two legal experts said they wanted to remain quiet to maintain the integrity of the trial process.
Alex Murdaugh Murder Trial
The statement from the lawyers read, "Our team will not be providing any further statements or responses to anything that occurs at trial." Murdaugh faces accusations of fatally shooting his 52-year-old wife, Maggie Murdaugh, and their youngest son, 22-year-old Paul Murdaught, on their family property in Colleton County on June 7, 2021.
On the other hand, the suspect's defense team said that they are ready to challenge those accusations in court and plan to demonstrate the "weakness" in the State's case against their client.
The defense lawyers' statement said that the defendant was looking forward to the opportunity to clear his name of the heinous charges. This is so that the Attorney-General can finally start searching for the real killer or killers of their client's beloved wife and son, as per Live5 News.
As seen in documents filed before the trial, the State has called for representatives from Snapchat and Google to testify during Murdaugh's murder trial. Officials claimed that the tech giants have crucial information regarding the case.
Furthermore, the State wants a blood spatter expert during the defendant's murder trial to testify as an expert on a white T-shirt that had blood on it and was known to have been worn by Murdaugh on the night of the murders.
On the other hand, the defense team called for the blood spatter expert to be excluded from the trial in favor of another expert who disagreed with the State's representative's statement about how blood transferred to the shirt.
A Series of Criminal Charges
Paul, the defendant's son, reportedly sent a Snapchat video to his friends a few hours before he was murdered. A legal contributor to ABC News, Dan Abrams, said that the prosecution's expert initially did not find blood spatter on the shirt but was able to find it after using a different kind of testing, according to ABC7 Chicago.
The defendant made a 911 call in June 2021, claiming that he found his wife and son fatally shot outside their family's hunting lodge. The month after, the disgraced attorney was indicted by a South Carolina grand jury for the double murders. During his indictment hearing, Murdaugh pleaded not guilty.
The murders of Murdaugh's wife and son initially appeared to be revenge killings over the death of 19-year-old Mallory Beach. The latter died in 2019 after Murdaugh's son Paul was charged with boating under the influence and was responsible for the death of the teenager.
On Feb. 24, 2019, Paul, Beach, and four other individuals were drinking and joyriding on a fishing boat near Beaufort, South Carolina. Then, the boat crashed into a bridge, throwing Beach from the boat, where it took authorities a week to find her body, said Rolling Stone.
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