On June 7, 2021, Alex Murdaugh brutally killed his wife, Margaret “Maggie” Murdaugh, 52, with an AR-style rifle, and their youngest son, Paul Murdaugh, 22, with a shotgun in the dog kennels at the family’s expansive hunting lodge known as Moselle.
On March 2, 2023, after a trial taking up the better part of six weeks, 12 of the defendant’s peers found him guilty in the Colleton County Courthouse; dinner was not necessary, the press learned, the jury told the court–meaning a verdict had been reached; the timestamp on that decision was 6:41 p.m. EST. Initial indications were jurors spent just shy of three hours deciding the disgraced and disbarred lawyer’s fate.
In an interview on Friday morning, however, one of the jurors spoke out – for the first time – and said the call was quite easy and even quicker: It only took 45 minutes to find the defendant guilty.
SEE ALSO: Carpenter who sealed Alex Murdaugh’s fate breaks silence, reveals just how quickly holdout jurors changed their minds—and why
Alex Murdaugh was convicted on two counts each of murder, one for each victim, and two counts each of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime related to each murder.
Prior to their decision, Judge Clifton Newman explained that jurors must find the defendant killed his family with malice aforethought, a legal term of art central to many definitions of murder in many U.S. jurisdictions.
“Malice is hatred, ill will, or hostility towards another person,” the judge said. “It is the intentional doing of a wrongful act without just cause or excuse – and with an intent to inflict an injury or, under the circumstances, that the law will infer an evil intent.”
And, clearly, such malice was found to have occurred in the Palmetto State that fateful, violent, awful night.
The defendant will be sentenced Friday morning.
Roughly an hour after the hearing ends, defense attorneys Dick Harpootlian and Jim Griffin will addressing the media.
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