Alex Murdaugh, heart, is led out of Colleton County Courthouse by sheriff’s deputies after being convicted Thursday, in Walterboro, S.C. Murdaugh was discovered responsible on two counts of homicide within the taking pictures deaths in June 2021 of his spouse and son.

Chris Carlson/AP

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Chris Carlson/AP

Alex Murdaugh, heart, is led out of Colleton County Courthouse by sheriff’s deputies after being convicted Thursday, in Walterboro, S.C. Murdaugh was discovered responsible on two counts of homicide within the taking pictures deaths in June 2021 of his spouse and son.

Chris Carlson/AP

Judge Clifton Newman will sentence disgraced South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh on homicide and different expenses Friday, lower than 24 hours after a jury discovered Murdaugh guilty in the 2021 murders of his wife and son.

Murdaugh faces a sentence of 30 years to life in jail for every homicide conviction. Prosecutors have mentioned they might search a punishment of life in jail with out parole for Murdaugh.

The court docket session will start at 9:30 a.m. ET. Newman will render his sentence after sufferer impression statements are taken into consideration.

The jury reached its verdict in a short time

After a trial that spanned 28 days, it took a Colleton County jury only some hours to agree unanimously that Murdaugh is responsible of two counts of homicide and two counts of utilizing a weapon in the course of the fee of a violent crime.

Jurors discovered Murdaugh, 54, responsible of utilizing a shotgun to kill his son Paul, 22, and utilizing a rifle to kill his spouse, Maggie, 52, on the night time of June 7, 2021, on the household’s Moselle looking property, in a rural space about 60 miles inland from Charleston, S.C.

The sentencing closes a six-week-long trial that charted Murdaugh’s fall from grace. Murdaugh, who was born into energy and privilege because the scion of a outstanding household of attorneys and prosecutors, has been disbarred. He additionally faces dozens of different felony expenses over monetary crimes — a few of which he admitted to throughout his homicide trial.

His protection workforce — and Murdaugh himself, when he took the stand in his personal protection — insisted he was harmless, depicting him as a caring father and husband who succumbed to a extreme opiate dependancy that led him to empty his financial institution accounts, rack up debt and steal cash from his legislation agency.

Prosecutors mentioned Murdaugh killed his spouse and son to serve his personal ends, after siphoning hundreds of thousands of {dollars} away from his colleagues and purchasers. He was going through a monetary reckoning, they mentioned, that additionally included his legal responsibility in a court docket case over a deadly 2019 boating accident by which Paul, then 19, was mentioned to be driving.

The case turned on circumstantial proof, and lies

Murdaugh admitted to lying to investigators about his alibi — blaming his shifting model of occasions on paranoia stemming from his dependancy — however he maintained that he didn’t kill his spouse and son.

During the trial, jurors heard testimony from victims of Murdaugh’s monetary schemes and colleagues at his former legislation agency. They additionally realized particulars about what he described as an try to stage his personal loss of life, the 2019 boating accident, and a housekeeper who died at Moselle in 2018.

Prosecutors by no means produced the 2 homicide weapons used to kill Maggie and Paul, and there have been no eyewitnesses. But the prosecution proved that from his earliest interactions with first responders on the night time of the murders, Murdaugh lied to investigators.

Murdaugh mentioned repeatedly that he did not go along with his spouse and son to the canine kennels the place they have been shot and killed, saying that he stayed in the home, and took a nap earlier than leaving to see his ailing mom.

But after witnesses recognized Murdaugh’s voice in a cellphone video taken by Paul on the kennel round 8:45 p.m. – minutes earlier than investigators mentioned the taking pictures began — Murdaugh’s alibi fell aside. He then made the extraordinary choice to testify on his personal behalf, saying that whereas he had lied to police, he did not shoot his spouse and son.

“I lied about being down there. And I’m so sorry that I did,” he mentioned.

“This defendant has fooled everyone — everyone who thought they were close to him,” prosecutor Creighton Waters advised the jury in his closing argument. “He fooled Maggie and Paul, too, and they paid for it with their lives. Don’t let him fool you, too.”