Murdaugh Defense: What the Becky Hill Lawsuit Is Really After

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke.

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
Last piece of the conversation here, we couldn't talk about Alec without it anymore. Becky Hill, always connected to Alec going forward. She's obviously pled guilty, that's done. But Jim Griffin stood at the press conference five days after the Supreme Court ruling and asked one question, was she a lone wolf? The defense filed a federal lawsuit against Hill for $600,000 and that lawsuit lets them do something the murder case doesn't, force people to sit down, answer questions under oath and hand over documents. The retrial decides whether Alec Murdaugh is guilty. The lawsuit might tell us whether anyone helped put him away the first time. Bob Motta, defense attorney, is with myself and Robin Dreeke as we break all of this down. This is filed in federal court and you are the legal scholar in the room, Bob.
Why federal court, when everything else has been playing out at a state level, does this give them some sort of advantages in terms of subpoena power or depositions or what's the strategy on this filing?

**Bob Motta** (1:11)
You answered your own question. Yeah, it's subpoena power.

**Tony Brueski** (1:13)
Oh, okay. All that.

**Robin Dreeke** (1:14)
Yeah.

**Bob Motta** (1:14)
Move on. Next question. Yeah, subpoena power for sure.

**Robin Dreeke** (1:18)
Tony's getting so good at it.

**Bob Motta** (1:20)
Yeah, I mean, they filed a 1983 civil rights claim and essentially what you've got there is you're saying it was a government official who violated your constitutional rights or other color of state law, and that's what puts it in federal court. Then you've got the rules of the federal rules, civil procedure behind you, and really what it boils down to more than anything is access.
Because look at it like this, the criminal retrial gives the defense almost zero investigative reach right now, meaning they are going to be beholden to whatever is provided in discovery if there's anything new. You know what I mean? After trial one, everything that was provided in the criminal case, the state criminal case, theoretically they already have.
Once that trial ended, and I think that Pooch had said this, their ability to subpoena anything was gone. The civil case hands it back to them, so they could do depositions. Like we're seeing, and I know you're not really covering the Karen Reed debacle and the civil suit on that thing, but it's like I kept telling everybody going into that thing because most true crime people don't know much about civil cases. It's like a new thing for them, and I kept trying to tell people like the discovery process, the whole thing over there in civil cases.

**Tony Brueski** (2:47)
I was just thinking of that, actually, of the Karen Reed debacle because, okay, they're going to go and it was Becky Hill acting alone and trying to influence the jury. Who knows? I mean, it'll be interesting to see what they find out.
But at the end of the day, that really doesn't have a whole lot of bearing on the actual, is he guilty of murdering his family? It's more so, how was that trial fucked up? Who was involved in fucking up the first trial?
So, there's that room. But what you may glean out of that discovery through those depositions, and I'm assuming this is probably what they're doing, is any sort of police misconduct. There it is. Any sort of thing they can go and say, there was some shady police work going on here, and if it's shady over here, it's probably shady over there. Look at my client, Alex Murdaugh. He's wearing Karen Reed's wig today. Doesn't he beautiful? Isn't he beautiful?

**SPEAKER_1** (3:42)
Isn't he lovely?

**Bob Motta** (3:43)
Look at the distinguished gentleman. Look at him.

**Tony Brueski** (3:46)
Isn't he wonderful?
That's probably what's going to happen. I'd love to see him in the Karen Reed wig. But is that the strategy here? Let's get in there and let's make law enforcement. Let's make sled the enemy here for not doing a thorough investigation, not protecting the scene. No matter what side you are on in this case, it sucked.
It was shitty. It was not good. It was not good work. Was there good things? Was there some things competently? I'm sure there always is. Was there a lot that was and that were just obvious failures out of the gate?
Stunning amounts.

**Bob Motta** (4:26)
Yes.

**Tony Brueski** (4:27)
And when you're talking about murder, you can't have stunning amounts of failures in the investigative work and expect it to be a very firm case against the person you're accusing.