Alex Murdaugh: My Thoughts on a Messy Trial
I totally get that many American readers here have strong feelings about this one, but the murder trial centered around Alex Murdaugh has dominated the news cycle for weeks, and I have a few thoughts on it. This trial has shown a spotlight on the way our everyday devices flay away our privacy, has laid bare the deep-seeded prejudices many of us hold against the powerful, and has proved more and more that our mutual addiction to true crime shows has made it difficult to remain impartial.
With all of this being said, I have a confession to make: I don’t think I could’ve voted ‘guilty’ if I were a juror on that trial. I wouldn’t have been able to vote ‘not guilty’, either. I don’t know if Alex Murdaugh is innocent or not, so I would’ve voted ‘undecided’. Why? Because this case was a mess.
Part of this article will focus on the trial at hand, but the first part is going to focus on the attack on our privacy that we’ve come to expect and why that’s bad for us as a society. I think it’s also important to know that data isn’t always conclusive, so the problem with this particular stripping away at our privacy comes with the cost that others could read things into the data that aren’t there.
Part 1: The Need for Privacy
Living in a Brave New World
My mom was interested it this case long before I was. Usually, I resign myself to watching the documentaries after the fact rather than watching the trials in action, but Mom was so interested in this that I couldn’t help it. She couldn’t believe how much evidence they could gather from the defendant’s phone and car. It was incredible… and it was frightening.
We all know that our stuff tracks us. I wear a Fitbit Sense with a built-in GPS to let me know how far my hikes, bike rides, and other travels take me. My phone, too, has a GPS that, among other things, hatches Pokemon eggs for me in Pokemon Go. My truck finally gave up the ghost, but I can safely say that it was old enough that it didn’t record things like how fast I’m driving on any trips.
We give away our DNA to private companies while complaining that the government should never be able to hold onto that information. We willingly accept that cameras watch us whenever we’re wandering around in a big city. We don’t care when Edward Snowden warns us that our webcams are watching us, our government has computers that listen for certain words in a phone conversation, etc.
This should frighten us. We should be shaken to the core at these revelations. But I know I’ve bought a kit from Ancestry.com and I wear the Fitbit. I do have tape over my webcam, though. I suppose I’m not too far gone.
When reading through some comments on this case, I was amazed at how many people insisted that if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t care if you’re being spied on.
Wait a minute. What?
A lot of people take that attitude, and it’s problematic for a number of reasons. The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America exists to protect our privacy. The Founders never insisted that it exists to protect criminals, it’s to protect us. Refusing to allow police into your law-abiding home, for example, cannot be used in court to insinuate that you were hiding something. That’s because most normal people don’t want just anyone, badge or no badge, to come into their homes or rifle through their vehicles.
Our lack of reluctance to stand up for ourselves is evident when people make these kinds of comments, especially in light of the way police abuses have manifested in the past. Police are fully capable of planting evidence, of confirmation bias, of finding things in your home or car that are illegal even if you thought you were well within the law, and far more.
Don’t ever think, “I’m a good guy, so if I cooperate with the police, they’ll agree.”
That’s not how policing works in this country, probably throughout the world.
Moreover, if you wouldn’t allow, say, me to come into your home, then why would you allow a cop or anyone else? None of us keep an open house or leave our car doors wide open so everyone can come in and make themselves at home, so we shouldn’t relinquish that sense of privacy for anyone else.
There’s a reason why the characters in Brave New World have no sense of privacy and think anyone who does is strange. It’s easier to control a population that doesn’t understand that some things are best kept private. None of us wants to live in a world where our lives are 100% public and we drown out the stress this kind of existence manifests with a cocktail of psychiatric drugs, yet that seems to be where we sit at this point in history.
Don’t Underestimate the Human Imagination
Another part of the reason why we don’t allow people to know every facet of our lives is because it’s too easy to people to reach the wrong conclusions about what they see and hear. Rumors have managed to destroy lives and reputations for eons, and they often take root with just a small seed of fact that sprouts into wild speculation.
Now, I’m just as addicted to rumors and conspiracy theories (I do believe many of them are true, or at least partially true) as anyone else. That being said, these things are a testament to how crazy the human imagination is. With just fractured bits of a picture, we can concoct a painting that suits whatever mood or narrative we want.
In the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, there’s a paraphrase of Pilate’s Biblical question regarding truth: “What is truth? Is truth unchanging law? We both have truths! Are mine the same as yours?”
That’s how we operate. We see the data, the evidence, and then we form our own gospels in our heads. Are the ancient pyramids power plants? Nikola Tesla thought so and there’s some convincing evidence. Then again, there’s also convincing evidence that this isn’t the case. What’s the truth? Until we recreate the pyramids as they were and find out for ourselves, we probably won’t know, and that’s an expensive undertaking.
Between our confirmation biases that allow us to piece together a narrative that may not be true and find novel ways to dismiss evidence that points to the contrary and good old bad logic, we’re a species that’s terrible at discerning fact from fiction at the best of times. Imagine the narrative you can paint with just a handful of data from a phone and GPS combined with one person’s rather shady business. All of us have at least one skeleton in our closet, so think about how all our daily habits and actions, combined with that dusty old skeleton, can be used to weave a story about us that isn’t true.
Part 2: The Actual Trial
The Data
Let’s start with the most troubling part of the trial: the data from the iPhone and car. This is the bit I had the most trouble with because, if you start with the presumption of innocence, as you’re supposed to, this is where things get really muddled.
The problem with the data that can be pulled from our invasive devices is that is very seldom brings clarity to problem. If anything, it muddies the waters and makes you unsure of your logical footing.
As Xena, the Warrior Princess, once said (in the worst series finale to ever be aired on television, including GOT), “Don’t listen to the sounds. Listen to what’s behind the sounds.”
The prosecution looks at the data and tries to paint a dismal picture of what’s behind it. The defense tries to counter their narrative by ascribing perfectly innocent explanations to the data.
And, to my mind, they’re both valid.
Mr. Murdaugh was speeding away from the crime scene.
Mr. Murdaugh sped both to his mother’s and back, so maybe he’s just a fast driver in general.
Mr. Murdaugh’s wife’s and son’s phones were last unlocked at 8:49 PM, establishing a time of death.
Mr. Murdaugh’s wife’s and son’s phones may simply have been unused for a time; after all the coroner said it may have been as late as 10:00 when they actually died.
Mr. Murdaugh’s iPhone stops recording steps between 8:09 and 9:02, so surely he stashed his phone to commit the murders since he’s smart enough to remember that (but not smart enough to know better than to distract from legal troubles by winding up the prime suspect (the spouse is always the prime suspect) in even greater legal troubles) his phone could give him away.
Mr. Murdaugh’s iPhone stopped recording his steps because he wasn’t active at that time.
See how easy it is to assume the worst or the best whenever you look at impartial data? The problem is that the prosecution was looking at data and establishing a timeline, but there are other, more innocent explanations to account for the data.
And there’s a lot of data.
Videos, texts, and much more from three different phones
Phone call records from a myriad of family and friends
GPS and speed data from the defendant’s SUV
Logs from his office security system
Images from the license plate readers on public roads
Social network data
The 911 call
Financial records
The question becomes how much one can actually read into that data. If there was a murder in my own little town, how much could a prosecutor read into my data (or lack thereof) from just this morning?
I charged my Fitbit and my phone before running to the grocery store to grab some cottage cheese. Was I just trying to avoid having my devices track me as I drove to the store? I may have also not stopped at a stop sign because it was obvious there were no vehicles, pedestrians, or animals on the road. Was I trying to leave a crime scene?
I was scared and didn’t want to admit that, on top of all this circumstantial evidence, that I was actually at the store minutes before the cashier was murdered, so I lied and said I was at home, counting on my phone data to back up my story. Unfortunately, the cameras pointed at the door show that I was in the store around the time the murder was supposed to have taken place.
It’s easy to read a more insidious narrative into the data you have.
The Defendant’s Shady Past and Chronic Lying
It’s possible the prosecution knew it couldn’t rely wholly on the data, especially in the absence of evidence they’d need to conclusively point to Alex Murdaugh.
He had on clean clothes
There were no guns found
Alex’s DNA was found, but given that this was his property and his own family, it would be strange not to find it
The prosecution could only say that, although the coroner said the deaths occurred between 8:00-10:00 PM, the phones going silent at 8:49 meant that was the real time of death, and Alex was in the area just a few minutes before. Is it enough to say he was the killer? I’m not sure. It’s damning, but is it conclusive?
A comment I read in an article discussing the upcoming appeal shocked me. It said that it was better to convict and let an appeal sort out the problems than risk letting a killer walk free by holding the evidence to such a high standard.
I believe most of us would rather risk a criminal, even a murderer, walking free than risk sending an innocent to prison or condemning him or her to a half-life burdened by a criminal record. You cannot rely on the system to sort out the jury’s mess later.
For one, appeals are messy, at least in criminal cases. Appeals are filed all the time in civil matters, but in criminal cases, appeals can only happen if certain criteria are met. Even if you’re totally innocent there’s no guarantee that you’ll meet those criteria. Many innocent people have languished in the system for years, even decades, before something was found that made an appeal viable.
Of course, the prosecution decided to largely rely on Alex Murdaugh’s character, or lack thereof. He’s a classic villain, the kind you might find in an old Hollywood flick (think the miserly old man in It’s a Wonderful Life) or even in a more modern film, such as Cal in James Cameron’s Titanic. He’s barely human in our eyes, a man you can really hate. He’s not the misunderstood underdog type we like to root for in these cases.
He’s not the abused woman who decided to get back at her abuser. He’s not a man who found out his child was molested and went out and assaulted the accused. He didn’t rob from the rich to give to the poor. He didn’t blow a whistle that exposed the government.
Alex Murdaugh was an opioid addict (probably buying pills for others, too, by the look of his finances) who stole from literally everyone, including the disabled, to feed his habit. He’d lived a double life for so long that he’d become a chronic and habitual liar.
...And that’s what the prosecution wanted you to see. Inflame the jury, make him (deservedly) untrustworthy, and create a motive.
The man is so shady and his family so powerful (shady poor people aren’t nearly as entertaining) that people are jumping to paint the entire family as a criminal enterprise with a body count going back generations. It’s the stuff of fiction! The problem is that truth yo-yos between being stranger than fiction and far more boring than it.
The problem is that, besides the motive they offered not making any sense (and then spending their rebuttal to the defense’s closing argument saying that it doesn’t matter if their motive makes sense or not because they don’t have to demonstrate motive), the fact that Alex is a chronic liar doesn’t prove his guilt.
Yes, he lied to the police about his whereabouts and only admitted it when he could no longer hide it. He claimed he was afraid – an excuse the prosecution argued made no sense. If Alex Murdaugh lied about not being there minutes before the murder, then surely it meant he committed the crime.
The problem is that his history of lying, to my eyes, just means that Mr. Murdaugh did what came naturally to him. I’m going to put on my psychologist hat (took the classes, but never went into the occupation because I loved languages, writing, and programming more) and say that, as a habitual liar, Murdaugh is likely to lie about anything.
There are two kinds of liars: compulsive and pathological.
Compulsive liars can tell lies that even tarnish their images and will not admit the truth even when confronted with it. Pathological liars usually don’t have a motive, although many will lie to gain sympathy, admiration, or just attention.
It’s unclear where Alex Murdaugh lies on this spectrum, but it’s very possible that he needs to motive to lie. He’s the type to lie about where he graduated from, his favorite food, his paycheck, the kind of car he drives, what he ate for breakfast, and everything else.
Liars are usually born from trauma, the lies initially being coping mechanisms. Murdaugh might’ve had trauma or his double life may simply have become so dependent upon lies to sustain that they spilled into every facet of his life. Either way, Alex lying to the police about where he was is not unexpected. He may have had a motive to lie or he may not have. Alex Murdaugh doesn’t need a motive to lie, and that’s why it’s hard to trust the prosecution’s assertion that the only reason Alex Murdaugh had for lying to the police was that he killed his wife and son.
I call bull on that. People like Alex Murdaugh need no motive to lie, it’s just what they do. It’s up to them to seek help and try changing, but until that happens, Murdaugh will continue to lie about everything.
Part 3
Why Was He Convicted?
I think Alex Murdaugh was convicted largely because of his character. The video placing him at the kennels minutes before the prosecution asserts the murders took place is damning, but is it enough to push someone who believes he’s innocent (as you’re supposed to) over the edge of doubt?
For many jurors, it may have been the video compounded with the lie and Murdaugh’s criminal history. Why lie about where he was and what he was doing? Because he can’t help it, he’s a compulsive or pathological liar.
Alex Murdaugh is the villain we love to hate. One comment on the trial read (paraphrased), “I’m sick of these rich, white men getting away with crimes.”
Perhaps our prejudices against the rich, against white people, and against men consciously or subconsciously influence us in ways we can’t predict. No one is exempt from harboring prejudices or making snap judgments about people we don’t know based on any number of factors, and it’s possible that those prejudices, combined with Murdaugh’s unlikable character, brought about an unwarranted conviction.
Will the Appeal Prevail?
I’m not a lawyer or judge. I don’t know the ins and outs of all the legal jargon that goes into an appeal, but from my own perspective, I’d say that the appeal will go through.
Alex Murdaugh’s lawyers intend to appeal on the grounds that his financial crimes shouldn’t have been admitted into evidence. They were, apparently, introduced to lend credence to the prosecution’s motive theory, and then they told the jury, after the defense poked holes in it, that they should just forget about assigning a motive to the murders.
The question that will decide if it goes through is this: if not for the history of his financial crimes, double life, and his chronic lies, would the jury have still convicted him based on the remaining evidence?
What do you think?