As y’all know, I’m one of maybe five people in South Carolina — and increasingly toward the end, the whole country (and even across the pond) — who were not totally absorbed in the Murdaugh trial.
But plenty of my friends — especially the ones who are lawyers — were, as were members of my family. Some watched the trial on telly from their law offices. Others actually went and sat there and watched it in person. (If you did that enough, they would let you get up and question a witness — I refer, of course, to Alan Wilson.) Most of them commented, many times, via social media.
As you see above, The Washington Post led with it this morning. So did The New York Times, at one point last night.
Even I was inspired to Tweet about it this morning:
And now, the madness is complete… https://t.co/QL4RNxrEIi
— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) March 3, 2023
O.J. said “One thing the jury must’ve seen is the guy’s a liar.” Yeah, O.J., I think a lot of people said that about a certain other trial back in the ’90s. (To be fair, I didn’t avidly follow that one, either, but as with this one, it was impossible not to know about it.)
Anyway, I thought I should provide a place for y’all to comment on this extended horror show. Have at it. Maybe I’ll join in…
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Journalists who had to COVER this trial had a similar reaction to Simpson weighing in…
I confess that way back in the day when I was a reporter (we’re talking more than 40 years ago), I loved covering a murder trial.
Not so much because I loved blood and suffering. It was more because I got to sit still and do ONE THING all day for a certain period. That was a break, back in the days when my job was to run around covering everything happening in a five-county area…
Throughout this, Jeffrey has exhibited a keen sense of the madness of the spectacle…
I’m with you. When my feed blew up last night with “Guilty!” I had to think for a moment before I realized what it meant.
A much more edifying, though not very flattering, observation about the locale of the trial came from one of those folks from across the pond, who wrote:
“I happened to be in South Carolina last week and it’s very beautiful, but woo, to an outsider, it’s intensely weird. White tour guides lead white tour groups around downtown Charleston, cheerfully pointing out where enslaved people were sold, before pulling up at the gift shop. Plantation houses, mindful of how times have changed, invite visitors to consider a single slave dwelling on their properties, while advertising the grounds as the “most beautiful gardens in America”. Use of the passive voice – these houses are “witness to history”, according to the marketing bumf, which is certainly one way of putting it – is rampant. Many of the people Alex Murdaugh is accused of defrauding were poor, Black clients seeking personal injury compensation through his family’s law firm.”