Alex Murdaugh's attorney: People are telling me I should die of 'rectal cancer'
South Carolina state Sen. Dick Harpootlian, a Democrat and an ally of President Joe BIden who represented disgraced former attorney and convicted double murderer Alex Murdaugh, is complaining that people are telling him they hope he dies, reported Law & Crime on Wednesday.
"On Tuesday afternoon, the Richland County Democrat took to the floor of the state Senate and mused about his absence during the nationally watched murder trial – and the aftermath," reported Colin Kalmbacher. "'I really got up here to say this,' Harpootlian began. 'I got a number of texts, emails, especially from the senator from Lexington, wanting to know how I was. She always wants to know am I eating well? Am I sleeping well? And I really appreciate those of you who reached out to me in this maelstrom of a trial. It is hard to focus on anything except the trial. We stayed in Walterboro for six weeks.'"
On the other hand, he noted, some messages he got were less gracious. And he had a message for them: everyone has the right to a defense in court, even the most unlikeable and clearly guilty defendants.
“The folks who sent me: ‘you are a rotten piece of scum’ and ‘I hope you die of’ – let me clean this up a little bit – ‘rectal cancer,’ they have a misapprehension of the system,” said Harpootlian. “They have a misapprehension of our justice system – while they are very familiar with the Second Amendment, they apparently haven’t read the Fourth, the Fifth, the Sixth, the Eighth Amendments that guarantee us the freedom, the freedom – that guarantee our freedoms of ourselves and our property.”
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Murdaugh's trial, immortalized in a timely Netflix documentary, captivated the nation as the wealthy, privileged former lawyer was accused by prosecutors of having shot his wife Maggie and his son Paul to keep quiet an extensive scheme of fraud and embezzlement from his own law firm to support a $50,000 a week drug habit. Complicating the trial is a bizarre plan in which Murdaugh unsuccessfully tried to fake his own murder to arrange a $10 million insurance payout to his surviving son Buster.
A key part of his downfall at trial came from his insistence for months, backed up by his family and lawyers, that he was not at the scene of the crime on the night his family was killed, only for him to admit this was a lie on the stand after prosecutors showed clear evidence he in fact was there.