Alex Murdaugh’s defense team to speak about murder conviction appeal

COLLETON COUNTY, S.C. — The defense team for disgraced former South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh will hold a news conference Tuesday about their plans to appeal his murder conviction.

Murdaugh was found guilty in March of murdering his wife, Maggie, and youngest son, Paul, in a 2021 shooting. Both were shot multiple times.

Murdaugh is currently serving a life sentence in prison.

His lawyers already filed a notice saying they plan to challenge his guilty verdict. Attorney Jim Griffin said his team will be looking for bias in potential jurors.

“Appeals are extraordinarily difficult to win,” said trial attorney Danielle Cohen Higgins. “The question that I’m sure the counsel for Alex Murdaugh and this appeal is going to argue is there’s no way that this small town in South Carolina where this family had such a prominent name -- there wasn’t a person in the area that didn’t know the Murdaugh name.”

Murdaugh’s other son Buster, said he doesn’t think his dad killed his mother and brother.

Murdaugh has lost his phone privileges and his prison tablet computer last month after his lawyer recorded him reading his journal entries on a call for a documentary about his case, South Carolina Corrections Department officials said.

Prison policy prohibits inmates from talking to the media without permission because the agency “believes that victims of crime should not have to see or hear the person who victimized them or their family member on the news,” state prisons spokeswoman Chrysti Shain said in a statement.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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