Alex Murdaugh was convicted of murdering his wife and son. Courtesy | Facebook

Alex Murdaugh is almost certainly a guilty man. But we can never be too certain whether he is guilty beyond the determination of the jury, which spent less than three hours deliberating his sentence. 

Murdaugh, a wealthy lawyer from South Carolina, was sentenced to life in prison without parole for murdering his wife and son on March 3. 

He never had a strong case. There was no other person with the means, the motive, or the proximity to kill his wife or son. The alibi that he was staying at his parents’ house was false, which he admitted. For an experienced lawyer, his excuse for this faux alibi was a confusing combination of opioid dependency and trepidation over becoming an early suspect. 

According to a member of law enforcement on the podium, when presented with a picture of the deceased, Murdaugh said of his son, “I did him so bad.” The backdrop? Scores of lawsuits for financial embezzlement, an abusive son, a suicide plot, and two mysterious deaths—one a slip-and-fall by his housekeeper, another man left dead with a head wound near Murdaugh’s estate. 

But the prosecution’s main evidence was a bunch of 1’s and 0’s. The human element is missing. Evidently, this had no real bearing on the minds of the jurors and the reliability of the verdict itself, but the jury should have realized this shortcoming. Less than three hours of deliberations is not enough time to do so. 

Murdaugh’s alibi was deconstructed with the help of cell phone data. According to his own phone, immediately after his wife and son were killed, Murdaugh took flight, recording 283 steps in four minutes. An Alex Murdaugh-like voice was heard on a video taken on his son’s phone right before the murder. How often do we hear a friend or relative say something when they never said anything at all? Our minds can play games with us, and so can our phones. 

General Motors revealed GPS tracking data from Murdaugh’s Chevy. He reached speeds of 74 mph on the open road shortly after the time of death, so he was in a hurry. After he returned to his estate an hour later, he took approximately 19 seconds between parking and calling 911. The prosecution hammered this point home: is it possible to leave the car, walk to the scene, examine the bodies, recover from shock, and call 911 in such little time? It is not often, however, that a GPS system becomes the leading witness in a murder trial. Can we expect it to swear on the Bible? 

Controversial criminal cases that secure a national spotlight seem endowed with their own kind of pomp and ceremony. For Derek Chauvin, it was bodycam footage replayed ad nauseum, national riots, and suspicions of jury intimidation. For Kyle Rittenhouse, it was the trauma of re-lived self-defense and the prosecution’s mishandling of an exhibit firearm. Given the lack of physical evidence, Murdaugh’s case needed more pencil-chewing and more nail-biting. Extra drama can be unhealthy to our national fabric. 

This is no personal complaint that one of another disgraced country lawyer’s mishaps didn’t turn into a “12 Angry Men” reprise. Nonetheless, the fact of the matter remains: should computer data, a pinch of common sense, and endless equivocations by the prosecution be enough to engineer a life sentence in less than three hours? We cannot put too much faith in technology to drive our passions home.