Former President Donald Trump weighed in on Alex Murdaugh’s case for the first time Saturday, but said he didn’t know if he should have received the death penalty for killing his wife and youngest son.
But he also told DailyMail.com, “It looked bad, okay.
‘It looked very bad. He looked at me guilty. I’ll say so.’
A day earlier, Murdaugh was sentenced to life in prison for the 2021 murders of his wife Maggie, 52, and son Paul, 22.
The case was eligible for the death penalty in South Carolina, but prosecutors chose not to pursue the case.
Analysts suggested they may not want to further investigate their case, which was largely based on circumstantial evidence.
Alex Murdaugh was sentenced Friday to two consecutive life terms for the 2021 murder of his wife Maggie, 52, and youngest son Paul, 22
Former President Donald Trump said he did not want to get involved in the debate over whether Murdaugh should have received the death penalty. He looked at me guiltily. I’ll say so,’ he said
But it has sparked questions about whether Murdaugh might have enjoyed one last benefit from his status as a member of a wealthy, white family that had dominated the local legal scene for generations.
Trump turned away when asked about the sentence during a short question-and-answer session with a small number of reporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference just outside Washington, D.C.
‘Don’t know. I don’t want to get involved in that,” he said before dismissing any suggestion that he might be soft on crime.
“But many people should be given the death penalty… the people who are destroying our country with drugs,
“If you gave the death penalty to drug dealers who bring in massive amounts of drugs… who kill hundreds of people every year, those people should get the death penalty and you wouldn’t have a drug problem.
“That problem would go away.”
He spoke as Murdaugh, 54, spent his first 24 hours in a state prison surrounded by the country’s most violent offenders.
He won’t be on death row. Instead, he will spend the next several weeks at Kirkland Correctional Center while authorities conduct an evaluation to decide where he should serve his sentence.
Judge Clifton Newman gave a sharp assessment of Murdaugh’s “duplicity”; character
But in a damning sentencing, Judge Clifton Newman described him as a “monster” who continued to lie even when the evidence was damning.
“This case qualifies under our death penalty statute based on the aggravating legal circumstances of two or more people murdered by the defendant by a single act or under a single plan or course of action,” he said.
“I have absolutely no doubts about the state’s decision not to carry out the death penalty.
“But as I sit here in this courtroom looking around at the many portraits of judges and other court officials and reflecting on the fact that over the past century your family, including you, have prosecuted people here in this courtroom and many have received the death penalty, probably for less behaviour.’
Alex Murdaugh is led out of the courthouse into a waiting prison van to begin his life sentence
Murdaugh leaves the courthouse on Friday in a Colleton County Jail jumpsuit
A juror in Alex Murdaugh’s double murder case said he believed the legal scion’s murdered son, Paul, helped solve his own murder after police found a cell phone video that Murdaugh used minutes before the murders. the crime scene.
James, who is 22 years old, the same age Paul was when he was shot, along with his mother Maggie, told Fox News Digital that the jury had prayed together before returning the guilty verdict Thursday in South Carolina’s nationwide courtroom.
“We prayed before we went in, we prayed before we came out to pronounce the verdict,” James said. “That was a big factor in us being comfortable with our decision.”
After six weeks of dramatic testimony, it took the jury just under three hours to reach a guilty verdict. James revealed that initially nine of the 12 jurors voted guilty and three not guilty.
They continued to deliberate and discuss the evidence, including the dog kennel video that James called a “critical piece of evidence,” before voting again.
This time the vote was unanimous. Murdaugh was found guilty and sentenced the next day to two life terms, which he will serve consecutively.