True crime thread

I wonder how they decided when to rent them? We're a long way from having a trial date set.

edited to add: Looks like Since 1969 was already on this line.

 

What I meant was - a presumption of innocence, the "beyond a reasonable doubt" conviction standard, and 6th Amendment requirement for unanimous jury verdicts should all add up to more than just a lean toward the defense. A prosecution should be a true uphill climb. Because, let's face it, when someone gets arrested based on mere probable cause, 90%-plus of the jury pool assumes guilt until convinced otherwise, so the presumption of innocence is really just aspirational. Add to that, prosecutors still have tons of resources and weapons, not the least of which is another trigger point for me - stacking charges. Which is why I couldn't agree more about all the ex-prosecution, Nancy Grace types. No coincidence Nancy Grace was leading the lynch mob on the Duke case. And I still don't think she's ever apologized or even acknowledged that she was wrong.

Funny. I was pretty sure about the Nancy Grace-Duke thing, but I did a quick search just to be sure. One of the first articles that comes up - a 2020 Daily Beast article entitled, "Nancy Grace Doesn't Regret a Goddamn Thing." Heh. Of course she doesn't.

 

This is not an American case and the UK does have some very funny laws (not haha) but here's another example of where social media is going to have to get kicked in the teeth a few times to let the rest of society work properly.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opin...d=hpmsn&cvid=44ed77e6174c48aa96d77925a2442f49

 

I would be pleasantly surprised if Murdaugh gets convicted but I doubt he does. Too much power and influence and those small town SC people are forgiving folk

I love how Murdaugh had a little "drug problem" as its being portrayed in court and the media. But some guy from the hood wrecks his life over drugs and murders his wife and he would just be some disgusting junkie. That trial would be very quick

 

I don't think Murdaugh is going to get convicted for the murders. The evidence for is circumstantial and it is matched by circumstantial evidence for the defense.

I suppose the jury could hang depending on how they're composed.

The prosecutors are trying to make the case that Murdaugh's illegal financial maneuvers drove him to kill his wife and son but there's a much better motive out there in his son's killing of a 19 year old girl. They can't match anybody specific to that motive but the community apparently had been up in arms and confrontational both with that son and with his mother while she was defending him.

 

Oh it appears he's definitely crooked but convicting somebody for murder because he's committed financial crimes is out of the pale.

The prosecutions case apparently hangs on the motive that Murdaugh killed his family to avoid being prosecuted for financial crimes. Anybody can see how ridiculous an assertion that is because he was going to be prosecuted for those crimes one way or another.

 

well that and he was a $50k a week junkie, his wife wanted a divorce and his kid brought legal heat to the family for killing some pretty coed


The motive was more than just concern over the financial crimes

 

People don't kill their grown children over financial issues. It's part of the whole genetics thing. You have a huge interest in passing your genes down and it's very rare when somebody raises a kid for 18+ years and then kills them.

Murdaugh would have been much more likely to commit suicide than to kill his kid for financial reasons. The fact that he hired somebody to shoot him in the head for insurance purposes is validation of that notion. Of course this is a purely circumstantial piece of evidence but in that it joins *everything else* in the evidence docket.

 

yeah I dont think he set out to kill his kid.

I think he wanted to kill his wife and the kid just happened to be there and discover what was going on so he took him too. She was gonna leave him and expose his crimes/drug addiction and he couldn't take that

 

Is this your hypothesis or is there some actual evidence on the topic?

Has anybody testified that the marriage was in trouble? The back and forth between the two of them doesn't suggest that anything was amiss that day.

One of the huge problems with this case is that everything is circumstantial and the way the prosecution is trying to sidestep that fact is by continually raising the financial crimes - which have nothing directly to do with the murders. He can be guilty as sin on the financial stuff and still not be the person that pulled the trigger on his family.

The motive that the prosecution has put forward is that by killing the two of them he would get sympathy and thereby somehow avoid the civil and criminal express rolling towards him at top speed. The problem with that motive is that there was no way he was going to derail those twin expresses by anything that happened to him personally - short of his own death. As a long time lawyer he would have known this to be the case.

In short the motive just seems very iffy and combined with all the circumstantial evidence it should not be anywhere near enough to convict a guy of two murders.

I can think of a number of reasons that somebody might have wanted the kid dead and possibly the mother too and if they killed the kid they'd have had to do the mother also. However this is all circumstantial also. The fact that the mother was shopping in the next town over because there were rumbles about her son everywhere she went in town is something that is also circumstantial but noteworthy.

Murdaugh may well have killed them both however I think proving that beyond a reasonable doubt is going to be very hard in the absence of a murder weapon or eye witnesses. Having somebody identify Murdaugh's voice on a video that happened 5 minutes before the authorities believe the shooting occurred makes it *less* likely that he was the shooter since his son wasn't saying things like "hey dad why do you have a gun?" and such. Also, we don't know that the murders happened when the prosecutors theorize they happened. They could have happened 10 minutes later.

The point of all this is that what the prosecutors are trying to do is to influence the jury to have an opinion on the case based in large part on the reputation of the defendant and in part on a long piece-meal circumstantial chain of evidence that should not be enough to convict somebody of murder.

 

That doesn’t make a lot of sense though. The son he killed was going to expose all of his financial crimes through court findings because of the hefty sums of money he was going to have to pay civilly due to the sons boat crash that left a girl dead.

 

However he was already in trouble at the law firm, as meetings earlier that month had shown. He'd already been confronted about large sums missing from various accounts that he had control of. His liability on that front was going to happen way quicker than any resolution of the civil suits against *him* and his son. Murdaugh was being sued on the boating death alongside his son. It was his boat that he let his drunken son pilot. Killing his son did nothing to lessen his potential liability.

 

Good points I guess nothing makes too much sense when you are dealing with an entitled junkie criminal

 

Maggie Murdaugh’s sister testified at the trial that their marriage was on the rocks for quite some time.

Then there was the report she had seen divorce attorneys a couple weeks before her murder.

Murdaugh denies it of course but since she’s dead we don’t have anyone to tell her side

 

I'm surprised he didn't end up killing himself before he killed his wife and kid. He testified today that he was taking over 60 oxy pills a day