Former President Donald Trump weighed in on Alex Murdaugh’s case for the first time on Saturday, but said he did not know whether he should have faced the death penalty for killing his wife and youngest son.
But he also told DailyMail.com: ‘It looked bad, it’s okay.
‘It seemed very bad to me. He looked at me guilty. I will say that.
A day earlier, Murdaugh was sentenced to life in prison for the 2021 murders of his wife Maggie, 52, and their son Paul, 22.
The case qualified for the death penalty in South Carolina, but prosecutors chose not to proceed.
Analysts suggested that they may not have wanted further scrutiny of his case, which relied heavily on circumstantial evidence.
Alex Murdaugh was sentenced to two consecutive life terms on Friday for the 2021 murders of his wife Maggie, 52, and their youngest son, Paul, 22.
Former President Donald Trump said he did not want to get into the debate about whether Murdaugh should have faced a death sentence. He seemed guilty to me. I’m going to say that’, he said
But it has raised questions about whether Murdaugh may have enjoyed one last benefit of his status as a member of a wealthy white family that had dominated the local legal scene for generations.
Trump deflected when asked about the sentence during a brief question-and-answer session with a small number of reporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, DC.
‘I don’t know. I don’t want to get involved in that,’ she said before dismissing any suggestion that she may be soft on crime.
‘But many people should face the death penalty… the people who are destroying our country with drugs,
‘If they gave the death penalty to drug dealers who bring in a lot of drugs… who kill hundreds of people every year, those people should get the death penalty and they wouldn’t have a drug problem.
That problem would go away.
He spoke as Murdaugh, 54, completed his first 24 hours in a state prison surrounded by the country’s most violent criminals.
He won’t be on death row. Instead, she will spend the next few weeks at the Kirkland Correctional Center while authorities conduct an evaluation to decide where she should spend her sentence.
Justice Clifton Newman made a scathing assessment of Murdaugh’s ‘duplicity’; character
But in a searing sentence, 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 legal aggravating circumstances that two or more people have been killed by the defendant by an act or pursuant to a pattern or course of conduct,” it said.
“I do not question at all the decision of the State not to prosecute the death penalty.
‘But as I sit here in this courtroom and look at the many portraits of judges and other court officials and reflect on the fact that for the past century, your family, including you, have been prosecuting people here in this courtroom. court and many have received the death sentence, probably for minor conduct.
Alex Murdaugh is led out of the courthouse to a prison van waiting to start his life sentence.
Murdaugh walks out of the courthouse in a jumpsuit from the Colleton County Jail on Friday
A juror in the Alex Murdaugh double murder trial said he believed Paul, the legal scion’s slain son, helped solve his own murder after police found cellphone video showing Murdaugh at the scene. of the crime minutes before the murders.
James, who is 22, the same age Paul was when he was shot to death, along with his mother Maggie, told Fox News Digital that the jury prayed together before returning the guilty verdict in the rural courtroom of South Carolina on Thursday.
“We pray before we go in, we pray before we go out to render the verdict,” James said. “That was a huge factor in us being able to sit comfortably with our decision.”
After six weeks of dramatic testimony, it took the jury less than three hours to return a guilty verdict. James revealed that initially, nine of the 12 jurors voted guilty and three voted not guilty.
They continued to deliberate, discussing the evidence, including the kennel video that James called “crucial evidence”, before voting again.
This time, the vote was unanimous. Murdaugh was found guilty and sentenced the next day to two life sentences, which he will serve consecutively.