‘He looked guilty to me’: Donald Trump hedges on whether Alex Murdaugh should have faced the death penalty for killing his wife and son but says ‘it looked bad’
- Alex Murdaugh was sentenced to life in prison for killing his wife and son
- Trump said he did not know whether the 52-year-old should be executed
- ‘It looked very bad to me. He looked guilty to me. I will say that,’ he added
Former President Donald Trump weighed in on the case of Alex Murdaugh 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, OK.
‘It looked very bad to me. He looked guilty to me. I will say that.’
A day earlier, Murdaugh was sentenced to life in prison for the 2021 murders of his wife Maggie, 52, and son Paul, 22.
The case qualified for the death penalty in South Carolina, but prosecutors opted not to pursue it.
Analysts suggested they may have wanted not to heap more scrutiny of their case, which was based on largely circumstantial evidence.
Alex Murdaugh was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences on Friday for the 2021 murders of his wife Maggie, 52 and youngest son Paul, 22
Former President Donald Trump said he didn’t want to get into the debate about whether Murdaugh should have faced a death sentence. ‘He looked guilty to me. I will say that,’ he said
But it has led to questions about whether Murdaugh may have enjoyed one last perk 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 short questio-and-answer session with a small number of journalists at the Conservative Political Action Conference just outside Washington, D.C.
‘I don’t know. I don’t want to get involved with that,’ he said before dismissing any suggestion that he may be soft on crime.
‘But a lot of people should face the death penalty … the people that are destroying our country with drugs,
‘If you gave the death penalty to drug dealers who bring in vast amount of drugs … that kill hundreds of people every year, those people should be given the death penalty and you wouldn’t have a drug problem.
‘That problem would disappear.’
He spoke as Murdaugh, 54, completed his first 24 hours in a state prison surrounded by the country’s most violent offenders.
He will not be on death row. Instead he will spend the next few weeks at the Kirkland Correctional Center while authorities conduct an evaluation to decide where he should spend his sentence.
Judge Clifton Newman gave a searing assessment of Murdaugh’s ‘duplicitous’; character
But in a searing sentencing Judge Clifton Newman described him as as a ‘monster’ who continued to lie even when the evidence was damning.
‘This case qualifies under our death penalty statue based on the statutory aggravating circumstances of two or more people being murdered by the defendant by one act or pursuant to one scheme or course of conduct,’ he said.
‘I don’t question at all the decision of the state not to pursue the death penalty.
‘But as I sit here in this courtroom and look around at the many portraits of judges and other court officials and reflect on the fact that over the past century, your family, including you, have been prosecuting people here in this courtroom and many have received the death penalty, probably for lesser conduct.’
Alex Murdaugh is led out of the courthouse to a waiting prison van to begin his life sentence
Murdaugh leaves the courthouse in a Colleton County Jail jumpsuit on Friday
A juror in Alex Murdaugh’s double homicide trial said he believed the legal scion’s slain son Paul helped solve his own murder after police found cell phone video placing Murdaugh at the crime scene minutes before the killings.
James, who is 22 years old, the same age Paul was when he was gunned down, along with his mother Maggie, told Fox News Digital that the jury prayed together before delivering the guilty verdict in the rural South Carolina courtroom on Thursday.
‘We prayed before we went in, we prayed before we came out to give 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, the jury took just less than three hours to deliver a guilty verdict. James revealed that initially, nine out of the 12 jurors voted guilty and three voted not guilty.
They continued to deliberate, discussing the evidence including the dog kennel video which James called a ‘crucial piece of evidence,’ before voting again.
This time, the vote was unanimous. Murdaugh was found guilty and sentenced the following day to two life sentences, which he will serve consecutively.
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