WALTERBORO, S.C. — A judge sentenced Alex Murdaugh to life in prison on Friday for the murders of his wife and son, condemning the once-wealthy and influential Southern lawyer to spend the remainder of his life behind bars, a powerful rebuke from the rural South Carolina legal system that his family dominated for more than a century.
Judge Clifton Newman handed down the sentence after berating Mr. Murdaugh for nearly 20 minutes, urging the lawyer he had previously encountered in courtrooms to come clean about the shocking crime and the lies he said Mr. Murdaugh had told to cover it up.
His shifting stories, the judge said, “necessitated more lies,” a pattern that kept repeating itself. “Where will it end? It’s already ended for many who have heard you and concluded that it’ll never end,” he said. “But within your own soul, you have to deal with that.”
Mr. Murdaugh, 54, maintained his innocence as he stood in handcuffs and a tan jail jumpsuit in place of the blazers and dress shirts he had worn during the six-week trial. “I would never hurt my wife, Maggie, and I would never hurt my son, Paul-Paul,” he said, using a nickname for his slain son. The sentence came a day after jurors decided that Mr. Murdaugh had fatally shot his wife, Maggie Murdaugh, 52, and their younger son, Paul Murdaugh, 22, at the dog kennels on the family’s rural estate in June 2021.
Judge Newman homed in on the Murdaugh family’s extensive influence in the state’s legal world. Mr. Murdaugh’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all served in a top regional prosecutor role, and the judge ordered that a portrait of Mr. Murdaugh’s grandfather, Randolph Murdaugh, be taken down from a courthouse wall before trial began.
He suggested that Mr. Murdaugh may have been lucky that prosecutors in his case had asked for a sentence of life in prison, rather than the death penalty, for which the case would have qualified under South Carolina law.
“Over the past century, your family — including you — have been prosecuting people here in this courtroom, and many have received the death penalty, probably for lesser conduct,” he said.
Court records indicate that Randolph Murdaugh was a prosecutor in cases against Willie Daniels, who was convicted of rape and burglary and electrocuted in 1957, and Benjamin Heyward, who was convicted of murder and electrocuted in 1941. The Post and Courier reported that the three Murdaugh patriarchs who served as top prosecutors had sought the death penalty against more than 30 people during their reign, which stretched from 1920 to 2006.
Throughout the nationally televised trial, prosecutors had sought to paint Mr. Murdaugh as a man who viewed himself as above the law, driving around with blue lights installed in his car and leaving a badge from the prosecutor’s office — where he volunteered on a handful of cases over two decades — on the dashboard. He viewed himself as so untouchable, they argued, that he thought he could get away with killing his wife and son, murders that prosecutors said were committed in order to distract from investigations into his theft of millions of dollars from clients and his law firm.
For some around the state, there were questions about whether the state attorney general’s decision not to seek the death penalty had been a final moment in which Mr. Murdaugh had been able to exercise the privilege of his station.
“We currently have people right now that are waiting to get executed who have done things that are far less savage and violent than what Alex Murdaugh did,” said Joshua Snow Kendrick, a lawyer in South Carolina who represents several clients on death row. “This probably helps show how arbitrary the death penalty is.”
Mr. Kendrick said that many death row prisoners who were born into impoverished or troubled families never had an opportunity to make the connections Mr. Murdaugh had. Mr. Murdaugh had also hired a powerful legal team, including a sitting state senator, Dick Harpootlian, who is also a former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party.
In South Carolina, as in many other states, prisoners on death row are disproportionately Black. According to data from the state prison agency, about half of the 35 people awaiting executions are Black, even though Black people make up only about one-fourth of the broader population.
Prosecutors said a range of factors led them to decide, a month before trial, not to pursue the death penalty in Mr. Murdaugh’s case, including the cost and complexity of such a case, the uncertain legal state of executions in South Carolina, and the lengthier trial required in death penalty cases.
“He’s 54 years old, and if you know anything about the death penalty it doesn’t happen overnight,” Creighton Waters, the assistant deputy attorney general who led the prosecution, said in an interview after the sentencing. “Proceeding forward as we did — without the additional complications of a death penalty trial — and seeking to put him in prison for the rest of his life, seemed to be the appropriate way to go.”
Some lawyers said the decision had been a wise legal move and could have been motivated by an issue that prosecutors may have been hesitant to say out loud: The case against Mr. Murdaugh was built largely on circumstantial evidence and the crime had gone unsolved for more than a year, a sign that it was far from an open-and-shut prosecution. In cases with no witnesses or confession, jurors are often wary of sentencing a defendant to death, they said.
“Rarely are death penalty cases whodunits,” said Scarlett A. Wilson, the top state prosecutor in Charleston, who was not involved in the case. “I believe Alex did it, but there are still a lot of questions about how or why. In a death penalty case, you can’t have lingering questions like that.”
Also looming over the prosecution’s decision was South Carolina’s troubled death penalty laws. No one has been executed in the state since 2011, in large part because it is among the states where officials have struggled to get lethal injection drugs since medical groups and activists began ramping up pressure on pharmaceutical companies.
A court found last year that the state’s two viable execution methods — the electric chair and a newly created firing squad — were unconstitutional, and an appeal of that decision is currently before the State Supreme Court. Among the lawmakers who proposed the firing squad alternative was Mr. Harpootlian.
At a news conference in front of the Colleton County Courthouse on Friday, Mr. Harpootlian said he understood the prosecution’s decision not to seek the death penalty against his client, and believed that he would have made the same choice in his previous role as a prosecutor.
“I’m somebody that’s prosecuted and defended a bunch of death penalty cases, and you never do it in a circumstantial case, because 99 times out of 100, a jury’s not going to sentence someone to death without an ‘I saw him do it,’ ‘He confessed,’ or great, great forensic evidence, at the minimum,” Mr. Harpootlian said. “They had none of that here.”
Lawyers in death penalty cases, he added, are also allowed to question prospective jurors one-on-one during the jury selection process, something he believed would have been advantageous to the defense.
Jim Griffin, another lawyer for Mr. Murdaugh, said that the lawyers planned to appeal the case, which came to a close after less than three hours of deliberations by the jury on Thursday.
Mr. Griffin said he believed Judge Newman had inflicted a crippling blow to the defense’s chances at trial when he allowed prosecutors to present detailed testimony about Mr. Murdaugh’s thefts from clients, many of whom were seeking compensation in cases he was handling after having been severely injured.
Asked why no family members had come forward to speak on Mr. Murdaugh’s behalf during the sentencing, Mr. Griffin said they remained convinced of his innocence but there appeared to be little chance of persuading Judge Newman, whom Mr. Griffin called a “very stringent punisher,” to go easier on the sentence.
“We could have had Mother Teresa up there speaking on behalf of Alex at sentencing,” Mr. Griffin said. “He was getting a double life sentence. That was expected.”
When he testified at his trial last week, Mr. Murdaugh admitted lying to the police about where he was on the night of the murders but insisted that his wife and son were alive the last time he saw them.
He cried repeatedly as he said that he would never harm his family and that he still believed, as he had told the police from the start, that someone else had killed them, possibly someone targeting his son over his involvement in a fatal boat wreck in 2019.
But Judge Newman made it clear that almost no one who had listened to these protests had believed them. He said in his years as a judge, he had never succeeded in getting killers to explain the moment when they had decided to commit their crimes.
“I know it had to have been quite a bit going through your mind on that day,” he said. “But, amazingly, to have you come and testify that it was just another ordinary day, that ‘My wife and son and I were out just enjoying life’ — not credible. Not believable.”