The emotional testimony from victims who had been duped by the disgraced lawyer came before a judge accepted a deal sentencing Murdaugh to 27 years in prison for stealing about $12 million.
For years, South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh looked his anguished clients in the eyes and promised to help them with their medical bills, their suffering or simply to survive. Then he stole some, if not all, of what he won for many of them.
Those clients got to look Murdaugh in the eye Tuesday and tell him how he had destroyed their trust, as the disgraced lawyer was sentenced to 27 years in prison for stealing about $12 million.
“I’m not crying for what he stole from me. I’m crying for what he did to everybody,” said Jordan Jinks, a friend of Murdaugh’s since childhood.
The courtroom drama marked yet another step in the fall of a powerful and respected attorney whose family name dominated the legal scene in a small Hampton County for generations, and whose alleged crimes have been a perennial topic of true crime podcasts and online chat groups.
In court in an orange prison jumpsuit, Murdaugh listened as the victims recounted how the man with a commanding presence and seductive Southern charm had duped them.
Jinks went to Murdaugh after incurring hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills for a neck injury he got when someone rear-ended his car. Jinks paid the bills in advance, having been assured by Murdaugh that he would obtain a settlement to pay him back. Murdaugh got the money, but kept it himself, financially ruining his friend.
“The money you stole from me, I would have gave it to you,” Jinks said. “Why bro? Why?”
State prosecutors and defense lawyers negotiated the 27-year prison sentence for Murdaugh, who is already serving a life term without parole after a jury found him guilty of killing his wife, Maggie, with a rifle, and younger son, Paul, with a shotgun in June 2021. Judge Clifton Newman, who also presided over the murder trial, accepted it.
Murdaugh adamantly denies killing his family members. His lawyers are seeking a new trial, citing allegations that the court clerk tampered with the jury.
