Alex Murdaugh “didn’t intend to still be alive” after the September 2021 botched assisted-suicide plot on a South Carolina backroad, his lawyers said Wednesday. During a hearing without the jury, defense attorney Dick Harpootlian said Murdaugh “concocted” his own shooting shortly after his law firm confronted him for stealing millions for years and forced him to resign. “He didn’t do it to get some sort of sympathy,” Harpootlian argued on Tuesday. “He did it to be dead. That’s why he did it.” Prosecutors allege that Murdaugh staged the shooting so his only surviving son, Buster, could receive his $10 million insurance payout. Crieghton Waters, the main prosecutor in Murdaugh’s ongoing, double homicide trial, argued that jurors should hear about the plot because it shows the former lawyer’s “consciousness of guilt.” Ultimately, Judge Clifton Newman handed the defense a huge win when he ruled the roadside shooting evidence should not be presented to the jury, saying that it goes “beyond motive or is not evidence of motive, but more toward a common scheme or plan.”
