SC prosecutors deny holding Murdaugh evidence, say defense trying to ‘color the public view’
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Alex Murdaugh Coverage
The Murdaugh family saga has dominated the news after another shooting, a resignation and criminal accusations — with Alex Murdaugh at the center of it all. Here are the latest updates on Alex Murdaugh.
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The South Carolina Attorney General’s office strongly refuted allegations late Wednesday that it has kept crucial evidence from the defense that prosecutors plan to use to show Alex Murdaugh murdered his wife and youngest son in June 2021.
That includes, the office said, a polygraph taken by Eddie “Curtis” Smith, a distant cousin of Murdaugh’s who sits in jail on drug-related charges, that defense attorneys Dick Harpootlian and Jim Griffin say he failed when asked whether he was involved in the murders of Maggie and Paul the night of June 7, 2021.
“The State has nothing to hide and is not hiding anything as it relates to Curtis Eddie Smith,” prosecutors said.
In a 14-page filing that at times was scathing in it characterizations of defense lawyers, prosecutors repeatedly accused the defense of “prejudicing the public” by making “inflammatory” demands of prosecutors that the defense knew could not be granted or were unrealistic.
Prosecutors and defense lawyers are expected to clash over their dueling motions Thursday at the Florence County courthouse in a hearing before state Judge Clifton Newman.
Defense mentions of Smith’s polygraph test, revealed in a motion filed last week by Harpootlian and Griffin, “seem more designed to attempt to attempt to color the public view of the case by highlighting a previously provided polygraph result — which Defendant and his counsel certainly have to know is generally inadmissible in evidence because polygraphs do not meet the standard for reliability for a criminal trial,” the prosecutors’ motion said.
The prosecution’s motion answers each of the defense attorneys’ allegations, including that prosecutors have failed to turn over evidence — from forensics to cellphone data — or be open in what evidence it has.
“The State ... even has provided discovery far in excess of what is technically required by rule,” the motion said.
As of Oct. 19, the prosecutors’ motion said the state has turned more than “206 GB of information, incorporating hundreds of individual files and documents representing thousands of pages.” They added that does not “even include an additional 470 GB of information provided to the defense on an external hard drive.”
On multiple occasions, prosecutors said, the state has quickly responded to defense lawyers and “identified where certain evidence was in the extensive discovery provided that the defense thought it had not received but in fact had.”
Creighton Waters, a prosecutor in the state Attorney General’s Office, is the lead prosecutor on the case.
Murdaugh was indicted on murder charges last July, roughly 13 months after his wife and son were found shot to death on the family’s vast 1,700-acre property in Colleton County, known as Moselle.
Murdaugh, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges, is the only suspect identified in the case by prosecutors.
“The overwhelming weight of the evidence to be put forth at trial will show Defendant Alex Murdaugh ... murdered his wife in son with malice aforethought,” the prosecution’s motion says.
Senior editor Maayan Schechter contributed to this report.
This story was originally published October 20, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "SC prosecutors deny holding Murdaugh evidence, say defense trying to ‘color the public view’."
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