What Murdaugh’s Testimony Can Teach Us

This article originally appeared in The Texas Lawbook. Reprinted with permission. Any opinions in this article are not those of Winston & Strawn or its clients. The opinions in this article are the author’s only.

Few things capture the public’s imagination and make headline news daily as does a jury trial, especially one for murder. The O.J. Simpson murder trial was perhaps the last century’s most famous example.

The latest example of such a case is the murder trial of disgraced South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh. Filled with Southern gothic details of a gruesome double homicide with bodies found outside a hunting dog kennel, theft of millions of dollars, and at the center of it all a powerful family with influence in local law enforcement and the judicial system. The case is the subject of daily, national news coverage in leading papers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as being a prominent feature on nightly network newscasts and cable news. For those who still can’t get enough, there are also multiple podcasts devoted to the case.

It’s also a case about which everyone has an opinion. But rather than offer an opinion about the merits of the case or predict an outcome (which seems likely to come this week), I wanted to offer some observations, from a trial advocacy perspective, of the conduct of the trial by the lawyers for the prosecution and the lawyers for Mr. Murdaugh.

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