The year just begun should be a great one for fans of reality courtroom dramas.
Today and tomorrow I hope to discuss five possible judicial spectacles of 2023, arranged in (increasing) order of political salience.
FIRST: the Murdaugh murder trial. Alex Murdaugh is a prominent member of the tort plaintiffs' bar (and a defense-oriented tort law reform group has called South Carolina a "judicial hellhole for defendants") -- the Murdaugh family has powerfully benefitted from a permissive attitude toward forum shopping by the bench in that state.
In February 2019 one of Alex's sons, Paul Murdaugh, recklessly piloting a boat, caused the death of his friend Mallory Beach. The Beach family, in a civil lawsuit, claimed that Alex and Paul's older brother, Buster, were negligent and responsible for the death of their daughter in providing Paul with alcohol prior to the accident.
Fortunately for the Beach family, the state has lots of other tort lawyers. The litigation resulted in discovery of Alex' financings, and THAT put Alex under great pressure. There were financial matters that he very much did not want to have to disclose.
A judge scheduled a hearing for June 10, 2021 over whether Murdaugh would be compelled to turn over sensitive information. Only three days before that scheduled hearing, Alex called police to report that he had discovered the dead bodies of his wife Maggie and his son Paul. Both had been shot numerous times. (Maggie had been poking into family financial matters for reasons independent of the Beach lawsuit. Paul of course was of necessity a critical witness in that lawsuit.)
Alex will stand trial this year on charges that he hired a trigger man to kill his wife and son in order to derail that lawsuit and defeat discovery -- from Beach family lawyers or from Maggie -- that might have uncovered instances of fraud and embezzlement on his part. Outside of South Carolina, this trial is of chiefly spectatorial interest. Even within the state, the political significance is slight, since the damage to interests protected for decades by Murdaugh family clout has already been done. We will pass on then to ...
SECOND, the trial of Robert Telles, a former Nevada public official, for the murder of Jeff German. German was a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He was investigating organized crime's penetration of state agencies. So the theory of motive that the prosecution will put forward is not a stretch: Telles wanted German silenced.
One procedural issue looms large in the run-up to this trial. The prosecution wants access to German's work in progress, such as to the notes he may have been keeping on electronic devices. The Review-Journal wants to block such access, arguing that both state and federal statutes limit prosecutorial access to such material.
How does one have a free press, they ask, if public officials can seize notes of a reporters' work in progress? One might well ask in response: how does one have a free press if public officials can get away with shooting reporters who write unfavorable pieces about them? It is all pretty much a lose-lose for the whole idea of such an institution.
THIRD, this year will see the fraud trial of Sam Bankman-Fried: the guy with the big hair in the above photograph. SBF founded and worked as the CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and of a trading firm, Alameda Research. As recently as October 2022, SBF had an estimated net worth of $10.5 billion. In one day (November 8) he lost 94% of that. He lost the remainder of it in the three days that followed.
On December 13, the US district court for the southern district of New York unsealed an indictment of SBF charging him with wire fraud, commodities fraud, money laundering, and campaign finance shenanigans.
On December 22, he was released on a $250 million bond with the condition that he reside at his parents' home in California.
The case has become a touchstone for beliefs about cryptocurrencies, the blockchain technology that drives them, and the whole idea of a billionaire-genius guru. SBF is no longer a billionaire, never appears to have been a genius, and likely isn't anyone's guru any longer, but that now-dismantled image will make for a fine trial. His lawyers will portray him as a naif who somehow found himself handling huge sums of other people's money and who didn't understand the responsibilities that entailed. Quite a comedown.
SBF was a big contributor to political campaigns. He was also associated with some Big Picture ideas on social and political philosophy (the guru stuff) called "effective altruism" and "long termism." Here is a link to some discussion of those ideas. Others will continue to press them while SBF hones his "I don't know anything about anything routine."
You may feel that in the second and third of these brief case descriptions I have been dancing around some of the central political issues of our day. But tomorrow I get right to the heart of them. For tomorrow I plan to discuss New York State's civil case against the Trump organization, and Dominion's defamation lawsuit against Fox News. Stay tuned.
In the Murdaugh case, how can a plaintiff seek discovery of a defendant's finances before winning the case? I can see that, after a plaintiff wins, he would be entitled to information about the defendant's assets, so that he can attach them if the defendant doesn't pay up. But before the plaintiff wins the case, surely he is not entitled to information about the defendant's assets in order to determine whether the defendant is worth suing. I doubt that that was the reason here, because a prominent plaintiffs' lawyer no doubt is worth suing. So what was the reason?
ReplyDeleteAnother question: Why wasn't Paul a defendant? Did the Beach family sue him separately?
I can't answer these questions. My guess is that South Carolina may have very broad discovery rules for torts, and that may be part of the reason it is considered such a "hellhole" for tort defendants. The plaintiffs' attorneys may have simply been using the broad discovery allowed not because they needed the information, but simply because they COULD. And it was likely an open secret in the South Carolina bar that Alex Murdaugh's finances could not take much investigating. So ... the discovery rules might have been a tempting tool for getting a nice quick settlement.
DeleteThe story, by the way, is even more gothic than my quick summary above indicates. Not long after the murder of Paul and Maggie Murdaugh, Alex was confronted by the other partners of his law firm. They had apparently discovered that the legitimate partnership share was not enough for him: he had been pilfering from the firm accounts. They secured his resignation from the firm. (As I say, it may have been an open secret in the bar that he was doing such things for some period before this, and the Beach family's tort attorneys may have been in on that secret.)
Only one day after THAT, Murdaugh call 911 and reported an attempt on his life. The first responders found a superficial bullet wound in his scalp. This was likely neither a murder nor a suicide attempt, but a staged plea for sympathy. A scholarly peer-reviewed journal known as PEOPLE magazine has been covering the story carefully. https://people.com/crime/alex-murdaugh-accused-of-misappropriating-money-from-family-law-firm-forced-to-resign/