Convicted murderer Alex Murdaugh’s lawyers say they have “discovered evidence” that would require granting their client a new trial, but CrimeOnline’s Nancy Grace is skeptical.
Speaking with Fox News, Grace says that a grandstanding press conference scheduled for Tuesday afternoon is “very simply another tool in the arsenal of the defense.”
“First they try a motion for summary judgement … the next thing they do is — SOP, standard operating procedure — is demand a new trial,” she said.
Grace says she’s curious what new evidence Jim Griffin and Dick Harpootlian, who guided Murdaugh into two life sentences for the murders of his wife and son earlier this year, may have, adding that real new evidence should be turned over to authorities and not presented at a news conference in the state capital.
“When [courts] say ‘newly discovered evidence,’ they mean it,” Grace said. “It cannot be something that was discoverable at the trial. So I’m waiting to see what newly discovered evidence they’re talking about.”
Grace said that if there is indeed “newly discovered evidence” — a previously unknown witness who was at the Murdaugh hunting lodge the night Maggie and Paul Murdaugh were gunned down or previously unknown juror misconduct — “there should be a new trial.”
“Do I think there’s newly discoverable evidence? No,” Grace said.
The former prosecutor also reacted to surviving son Buster Murdaugh’s stated belief that his father did not kill his mother and brother on June 7, 2021. Instead, the remaining son told Fox Nation’s “The Fall of the House of Murdaugh” that he believes the jury didn’t convict his disbarred attorney father based on any evidence presented at trial but rather on publicity about Murdaugh’s tribulations prior to the trial.
Grace said that statement was “total BS.”
“They do not convict on something they may have read six months before,” she said. “They convict on evidence that was in the courtroom placing Murdaugh at the scene of a double murder at the time it was committed by his own cell phone, his nav system. His own undoing placed him there.”
But, she said, it’s not surprising that Buster Murdaugh feels the way he says he does.
“I tried a lot of cases where adult children do not believe their parent killed someone, especially their mom or their dad,” she said. “They don’t want to believe it. They cannot take it in.”
Murdaugh still awaits trial on more than 100 financial fraud charges and several civil lawsuits.
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[Featured image: Fox News screenshot]
