Defense Attorney in the Alex Murdaugh Trial Who Pulled Gun on Me Does Same To Prosecutors...Who Are Not Amused
More Mayhem in the Murdaugh Murder Trial
Forgive me for going down memory lane a second time this week, but some stories are too good not to get a second run.
Case in point the propensity of Dick Harpootlian, the State Senator and colorful lead defense attorney for South Carolina Lawyer, Alex Murdaugh, to whip out a gun in unusual circumstances. I’ve reported that he did exactly this eighteen months ago when I was sitting across from him on the side of his desk in his office in Columbia, SC, as I shall I remind you below.
He did it again Tuesday in court as the defense winds up in the double homicide trial that has riveted the country. He pointed a .300 Blackout at prosecutors and muttered “Tempting”. The court, other than prosecutors, exploded in laughter. Harpootlian then got on with explaining that he was demonstrating that Murdaugh could not have shot his wife and son because whoever did shoot them must have been taller, in order to hold the gun at the correct angle.
What Harpootlian is doing is as clever as it is darkly funny.
When he opened his desk drawer and took out a handgun in the middle of our interview, I was so shocked and bemused, that I almost forgot the question I’d just asked him, which was: How had the person whom Alex Murdaugh arranged to shoot him at close range, missed?
By pulling a gun and handing it to me and telling me: “If it’s so easy, you try” he was he was ridiculing the premise of my question…which, let’s face it, was not a ridiculous question. (Unfortunately, Curtis Eddie Smith, Murdaugh’s cousin who has said that he was hired by Murdaugh to make it look as if he killed him so that Murdaugh’s son, Buster could claim life insurance, has not yet testified in this trial, so I still don’t have the answer). Nor, according to prosecutors, is the claim that Murdaugh shot his wife and son, ridiculous either. But, via black comedy, Harpootlian is memorably sowing seeds of doubt. Jurors can easily forget a lot of the more mundane, convoluted details about money that we’ve heard in this trial. But they are not going to forget Harpootlian aiming a firearm at the prosecution table.
Like I said: clever.
As a reminder, here’s what I wrote a few weeks back, at the start of this trial, about Alex Murdaugh’s wily defense team.
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