Cellphone expert witness, Paul McManigal, a sergeant with the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office was called back in the original trial but now his testimony is a main factor in Murdaugh’s retrial. Murdaugh has always vehemently denied shooting to death his wife and youngest son.
Using an iPhone similar to Maggie's, McManigal conducted tests with the phone under near-laboratory conditions. Resulting data enabled him to conduct a detailed analysis of the backlight's operation in correlation to the movement of the phone.
The objective was to counter a defense expert's testimony that an iPhone's backlight activates in response to movement. The iPhone belonging to Maggie Murdaugh was retrieved from the side of the road, outside the property, and its backlight illuminated almost two minutes prior to the moment the GPS indicated Alex Murdaugh's SUV traversed that same stretch of road.
Defense attorney Phillip Barber asked in the first trial if McManigal took any notes or videotaped his experiments. “So, you’re alone in your office, throwing the phone around, taking no measurements, recording nothing over the weekend, and you come in here and testify as an expert as to what the phone would do?” Barber had said at the time of the first trial.
“Providing Murdaugh with the fair trial that every citizen of South Carolina would expect for himself is necessary to assure all that no one — powerful or humble, innocent or guilty, hated or beloved — is proscribed from due process and the equal protection of the law,” claims the appeal signed by Murdaugh’s, main lawyers at his trial, Jim Griffin and Dick Harpootlian.
Alex Murdaugh's attorneys are pursuing two overarching and very legal theories of a successful appeal. One is that the trial jury was improperly influenced into a guilty verdict by none other than the court clerk who was selling books at the time. The other is that crucial, and very damaging, evidence against Murdaugh was allowed into the record that had nothing to do with the crime for which he was being tried—that of murdering his wife and son.
Murdaugh's lawyers are saying that his murder convictions need to be overturned in part because "The public needs a lot more than just the social-media-fed ideas that you're guilty, which is what they seem to be fed!"
The defense lawyers said the judge should not have allowed evidence from an investigator who said he spent a weekend tossing an iPhone around his office to determine whether the screen, which comes on with a light touch, might not come on with a more violent motion. The expert witness kept no data and did not record his experiments.
The defense drew attention to the scant physical evidence linking Murdaugh to the crime. Even though he was in the house with two officers when they first discovered the aftermath of the murders, not a single hair or fiber from his wife or son was found on his person. Investigators never found the rifle that was used to kill Maggie and a shotgun whose blast could send blood and tissue all around the small room where Paul was found dead. Only minimal amounts of blood were found on Murdaugh's clothes, the same clothes he was wearing when he found the bodies. Is it possible that very little of the boys' or Maggie's blood went onto him?
Murdaugh's clothing bore only the faintest evidence of blood when he came into contact with the dead individuals, and a search of the premises turned up no other bloodstained garments.
Murdaugh's lawyers claimed that a state investigator's testimony about certain cartridges taken from the family's shooting range was inadmissible in court. They asserted that the investigator could not definitively connect the cartridges to a single firearm, even though the bullets had been marked as evidence. "Our expert clearly indicated that those weren't distinctive markings and therefore are of no value in relating a firearm to a person," one defense attorney said.
Moreover, the defense claimed that a blue raincoat found with a scant amount of gunshot residue shouldn't have been allowed as evidence. They backed this assertion up with a witness who stated he saw Murdaugh with a blue tarp, not a raincoat, during the time in question.
The prosecution's theory was that Murdaugh threw his wife's phone out of his moving car as he drove away from the crime scene. But data from his vehicle's computer showed that the phone was actually in use—its screen was lit up, for all intents and purposes, when it made contact with the ground—at the very moment Murdaugh was driving past the spot where the phone was found.
About half of the appeal involves Hill's actions. In January, Judge Jean Toal found it hard to believe Hill's assertion that she did not engage with jurors about the case during the trial. But, Toal decided, it was certainly not grounds for overturning the verdict. Hill's not-all-that-smart attempts at seeking some degree of publicity, most judges would conclude, did not have any direct effect on the jury or on the jury's reaching a decision.
No fewer than three jurors said that Hill urged them to pay close attention to Murdaugh's testimony during his defense. One of the jurors indicated to reporters that Hill's remarks suggested that they should see Murdaugh as likely guilty and definitely not trustworthy.
A court clerk from a nearby jurisdiction testified that Hill had shared with her the plan to write a book about Murdaugh's trial. The clerk said Hill had indicated that a guilty verdict for Murdaugh would make the book more marketable.
Following his guilty plea for stealing millions from his law firm and from settlements he obtained for clients in wrongful death and serious injury litigations, Murdaugh has received a 40-year sentence. As part of the plea agreement, Murdaugh agreed to give up his right to appeal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Alex_Murdaugh
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