Did Alex Murdaugh's Retrial Judge Once Rent Office Space From His Defense Lawyer?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This is The Big Breakdown, a long look back at some of the biggest stories we're covering for you at the Hidden Killers Podcast and True Crime Today. This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Dre.

**Tony Brueski** (0:17)
Let's go over to another case. Alex Murdaugh is getting a new trial, and now we know who's running the courtroom. Her name is Judge Debra McCaslin. And the second she was announced, people started digging into her past. Who is she? What's the deal here? She's a judge with a reputation for being tough, fair and impossible to rattle. But there's one thing that she said years ago under oath, that is people asking whether Alex Murdaugh just caught the break of a lifetime. Tony Eric Faddis is with us to help break all this down, and we're going to get into the story here of the new judge in the case. Eric, it broke the other day that Judge McCaslin is a new one on here. I was actually on an interview at the moment with Eric Bland talking about the case when that all came down, got his reaction to it.
What's your reaction to this judge? Now that we've had a little bit of time to learn about her past.

**Eric Faddis** (1:19)
I'll tell you, Tony, on every case, every single case where we're going to file a lawsuit and every criminal case that I'm considering taking, one of the main questions is who's going to be the judge or who could the judge be? Because those folks can have such an influence over the proceedings, over what happens in the case.
And then there are some civil cases where we say, oh gosh, we've got this judge, so we've got to consider these arguments. We've got to consider these angles. We've got a different judge, so we've got to refrain from this type of advocacy and those things. And so really can make a tremendous difference. And I'll be interested to see how much of a contrast this new judge is with the last judge.

**Robin Dre** (2:05)
So one of the things I had read when I took a look at this one was that, yeah, she made those comments about the defense attorney those years ago. But she did so, like Tony said, under oath and is actually part of her confirmation hearing. How common has you seen it that this actually pops up with judges having made positive statements about teachers, mentors, and guides in their past? And have you seen it impact negatively or positively? In other words, have you seen a bias from it from any other judge in your past?

**Eric Faddis** (2:35)
Really, what I've seen, Robin, is this being having a sort of a height magnification at the federal level, including during, like you said, statements made during the confirmation of federal judges.
You know, by whom they were appointed, by which political party. And then you look at the case, if there are political potentially implications in the case, you know, like a case against a Congress person or a case involving political corruption, those kinds of things. Oftentimes, there will be motions to disqualify, or motions to try to recuse a judge because, hey, this judge has expressed a bias in favor of Republicans and the defendants are a Republican or something, or, you know, just whatever. So those, that's kind of where I've seen it come up, including in this heightened political lawfare scenario, we found ourselves in the past, you know, four to eight years.

**Robin Dre** (3:30)
Do you see prosecution trying to maybe make that attempt on this one, saying that she should be recused from it because of those statements, or is it so common that they'll probably just wave it and just move on?

**Eric Faddis** (3:39)
Prosecutors are less inclined to go down that road, in part because you're sort of questioning the judge's professionalism when you make such a request, and especially if the judge is like, no, I'm not going to recuse. Now, they just might have pretty bad taste in their mouth with respect to that prosecutor.

**Robin Dre** (3:56)
You thought you're going to use not much of that financial stuff before, you want to see it now.

**Tony Brueski** (4:00)
Yeah, I mean, you could get that. You really could. I mean, you could really poison the waters early on and put a bad taste into her mouth. I mean, people are people at the end of the day. She's not a robot. She really has a good track record of being fair.
That's great. I mean, looking at this, I'm looking at it. I don't have anything that I've looked at where I'm going, hmm, huge red flags. And having talked the other day with Eric Gland, it was interesting to hear from someone who has some skin in the game here, who is invested in that ecosystem with the very players of this show, if you will. Even he was saying, good choice. She's a good judge. She's a good choice. But that being so, just playing devil's advocate, because I think it's important to do so, the advantage here is going to be to the Murdaugh team for this judge. Because at the end of the day, if the verdict comes back not guilty, the state can't go retry it. The state can't go and say, the judge made a statement years ago about Dick Harpootlian made an impression on her life.