A dramatic pause during Murdaugh’s sentencing drove home a haunting fact about capital punishment: legal expert

Alex Murdaugh got two consecutive life sentences for the murders of his wife and son, but he might well have gotten the death penalty in many states.

South Carolina attorney general Alan Wilson announced in December he would not seek the death penalty in the disgraced lawyer's case, but offered little explanation at the time, and law professor Austin Sarat wrote a column for USA Today arguing that Judge Clifton Newman seemed keenly aware that decision might have been the case if Murdaugh was a poor or Black man.

“As I sit here in this courtroom and look around at the many portraits of judges and other court officials," Newman said in court, "and reflect on the fact that 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.”

Sarat noted that Newman, who is Black, paused meaningfully to make sure his point was made and understood.

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"The judge then paused and let his silence envelop the courtroom," Sarat wrote. "His silence drove home the continuing legacy of racial and class privilege that haunts capital punishment in his state and elsewhere. He resumed speaking as if delivering the kind of judgment he would have handed down in a death penalty case, calling Murdaugh a 'monster' for the killing of his wife and son."

Newman spoke "deliberately and carefully" for nearly 20 minutes at the sentencing, Sarat said, and while he insisted he was not questioning the state's decision on the death penalty, he made clear that Murdaugh could have faced capital punishment for his crimes if he were not well-connected and wealthy.

"It is a stark reminder that the kind of scrupulousness the prosecution claims it used in deciding not to seek the death penalty for Murdaugh is all too rare in capital prosecutions," Sarat wrote. "America’s death rows are populated by people who are there after zealous prosecutors put on costly, circumstantial cases, even when there was no real prospect that the defendant would ever be executed. Justice demands that prosecutors everywhere be as careful as they claimed to be in the Murdaugh case, including when the people they are prosecuting are poor and Black."