Alex Murdaugh’s legal professional explains why he thinks the disgraced lawyer is harmless, will get a brand new trial

Two years after Alex Murdaugh’s homicide conviction, protection legal professional Dick Harpootlian nonetheless believes the disgraced lawyer is harmless within the murders of his spouse and youngest son.

Murdaugh, 56, is serving a life sentence for fatally taking pictures his spouse, Maggie, and youngest son, Paul, in June 2021 on their household’s searching property in Colleton County, South Carolina.

“Do I consider he did it? No,” Harpootlian advised Fox Information Digital. “I bought employed when Paul was charged with the boat case a yr earlier than the murders. And within the workplace I am sitting in proper now, no less than as soon as each two weeks, Alex and Maggie and Paul would come and we might meet and speak concerning the case and what was occurring and what we would have liked. Each time Maggie and Alex left this workplace, they had been holding palms. Paul was the apple of his eye. There is no approach in hell that he would have executed that child.”

Prosecutors argued that their murders had been an try to distract from Murdaugh’s mounting monetary crimes, which had been starting to come back to gentle round that point, and which Harpootlian wholeheartedly believes Alex is responsible of committing. The disgraced South Carolina lawyer was additionally sentenced to 27 years for his monetary crimes in a state case in November 2023.

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“Keep in mind, the state says he concocted this plan to distract from the cash he stole. Alex would … confess it if he thought it will shield Paul anyway and Maggie,” Harpootlian stated. “Whoever shot Paul, and that is public testimony, put a shotgun to the highest of his head and actually blew his brains out. His brains hit the ceiling. The top exploded. There is no approach in hell, in my view, Alex would have executed that. Now, his data of who might have executed it, that is one other matter altogether.”

There are nonetheless quite a lot of lingering questions within the case, Harpootlian stated, primary being: “Who killed them?”

“I believe…we have realized some issues because the trial that maybe will assist us result in — we do not have to show who killed them,” he stated. “We simply want to present the jury an affordable doubt as to [Murdaugh] killing [Maggie and Paul], and there are many them. I imply, forensically, earlier than you ever get to any testimony, whoever killed Paul would have been lined in blood and brains from head to foot. There is no proof in anyway that was a single drop of blood on Alex Murdoch. And he’s with different individuals … inside an hour of the time that the prosecutor stated Maggie and Paul had been killed.”

Alex Murdaugh sits within the Colleton County Courthouse along with his authorized crew, together with Dick Harpootlian, center, and Jim Griffin, proper, as his attorneys focus on motions in entrance of Decide Clifton Newman in a December 2022 listening to. (Tracy Glantz/The Stat

Harpootlian is optimistic that they’ll get a brand new trial primarily based on the “misconduct of the clerk of court docket,” he stated. He nonetheless talks to Murdaugh as soon as per week, he stated.

“He actually takes every thing in stride and when you think about the place he was and the way far he is fallen,” Harpootlian stated of Murdaugh. “I imply most folk can be curled up in a fetal place of their cell refusing to come back out. That ain’t Alex.”

Whereas Harpootlian is understood for defending Murdaugh within the double homicide trial, his skilled expertise within the courtroom dates again to the Nineteen Eighties. When he graduated from Clemson College in 1975, Harpootlian stated he was a “form of a long-haired hippie” who opposed the dying penalty and the Vietnam Battle.

Dick Harpootlian started his profession as a prosecutor within the Fifth Circuit Solicitor’s Workplace within the Nineteen Eighties. (handout)

When he started his profession as a prosecutor within the Fifth Circuit Solicitor’s Workplace, his perspective on the dying penalty started to shift. He has since prosecuted a whole lot of homicide instances and 12 dying penalty instances, together with the prosecution of Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins, who was South Carolina’s most infamous serial killer.

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Harpootlian discusses the case and his shifting perspective on the dying penalty in his new guide, “Dig Me a Grave: The Inside Story of the Serial Killer who Seduced the South,” co-authored with Shaun Assael.

Gaskins — nicknamed Pee Wee due to his brief stature at 5 ft. 2 in — confessed to 13 murders in an try to obtain a life sentence somewhat than the dying penalty within the Nineteen Eighties,. He disposed of his victims’ our bodies within the swamplands of coastal South Carolina.

Harpootlian discusses the Pee Wee Gaskins case and his shifting perspective on the dying penalty in his new guide, “Dig Me a Grave: The Inside Story of the Serial Killer who Seduced the South,” co-authored with Shaun Assael. (handout)

Nonetheless, he was finally sentenced to dying after being employed to kill a person in jail. In 1982, a person named Tony Cimo of Murrells Inlet employed Gaskins to kill Rudolph Tyner, who was on dying row for murdering Cimo’s adoptive mother and father. Nonetheless, the South Carolina Supreme Courtroom reversed the choice to condemn Tyner to dying, declaring “the dying penalty statutory assemble” prosecutors had been utilizing on the time to be “unconstitutional,” Harpootlian stated.

“The Division of Corrections knew that [Gaskins] had abilities as an electrician, a plumber, and so they made him the top trustee of the cell block to probably the most safe cell block at our central correctional establishment, and dying row was one of many tiers … in that cell,” he defined. “Cimo was upset that Tyner had not been executed, and it had been nearly a decade. And so he, by way of an middleman, contacted Gaskins by telephone, and organized for Gaskins to poison him.”

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The poisoning didn’t work, so Gaskins organized over the telephone to get explosives smuggled into the jail the place he was staying. Within the name, which Harpootlian performed from his telephone for Fox Information Digital, Gaskins might be heard asking in a heavy southern accent for “one electrical cap,” “as a lot of a stick of rattling dynamite that you would be able to get,” and a “rattling radio.”

“That son of a b—h will go off, and there will not be no rattling coming again on that,” Gaskins might be heard saying within the recording.

“The tapes clearly had been damning, and the jury sentenced him to dying, and he was executed in 1991,” Harpootlian stated. “By then, I used to be the DA, or the solicitor, and he had a plot to have his son kidnap my 4-year-old daughter, which was uncovered two weeks earlier than his execution. When he stated he appreciated killing, he actually did, and the week that was found, and my household and I lived with armed guards for a few weeks till he was solely executed within the electrical chair.”

After Gaskins efficiently executed Tyner, prosecutors once more sought the dying penalty for the serial killer.

Harpootlian recalled a second he shared with Gaskins when the serial killer advised him, “You want killing.”

“And I stated what do you imply I like killing? And he stated: ‘You want killing me. I can inform that you just’re having fun with killing me,'” Harpootlian recalled. “It turned clear to me, particularly after he was executed, that I participated in and take duty for killing him. After which the query is, did I prefer it like he stated? Was he proper? Or was I simply … doing my job that society, the group … employed me to do?” 

Harpootlian discusses what he described as that “ethical dilemma” in his new guide, which he stated was “cathartic” to write down. The guide comes out on Dec. 16 however is presently accessible for pre-order.

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