Why Is Alex Murdaugh's Defense Team So Quiet About the Judge Who Now Controls His Fate?

**Tony Brueski** (0:00)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
South Carolina. It just handed the biggest criminal retrial in the state's history to a judge that most people have never heard of, which is to be expected. Her name is Debra McCaslin, and within hours of the announcement, the people who follow this case closely noticed something buried in her past. Now, I'm not here to make this into a Oh, my gosh, this is horrible because it's not what we're going to. We're going to do an episode of Meet the Judge. Basically, we're going to talk about her all history, the pros, the cons, the this, the that. So you have a good grounding on who this human being is.
Unbiased, straightforward, let you decide. So that's what you're looking for, not the this take, that take, like this is, here's the full take, here's the full picture. So you can make your own decisions and your own feelings and all that, and not just what I feel or they feel or that. It's quite honestly, in my opinion, there's not a lot to feel here. This actually doesn't feel all that bad. It really depends, regardless of what you believe or whose side you're on. Let me explain why. That's my hot take on it, if you will. But I'd love to get your thoughts in the comment section as we work our way through. The Substack and YouTube are the best places to do it. The links are in the descriptions. So do drop it there and press subscribe. OK, so within hours of this announcement coming down, in fact, we were doing an interview with attorney Eric Bland, actually, as this information came down. And we got his live reaction. You'll be able to see that here on the channel next week as we air our conversation with Eric. Within hours of the announcement, people are noticing something interesting. Years ago, sitting in front of state lawmakers at her own judicial confirmation hearing, McCaslin talked about lawyers who made an impression on her life. She named three. One of them was Dick Harpootlian.
The man now sitting at Alex Murdaugh's defense table as his lead attorney and has been the whole way. And it wasn't just a polite compliment from the witness chair. She actually rented office space from the man. She worked cases alongside him. And now she's the one person in South Carolina who decides how much room Harpootlian gets to operate in. Every motion, every objection, every fight over evidence that will determine whether Alex Murdaugh spends the rest of his life in prison or walks away from the murder charges entirely. Stay with me, because that relationship goes deeper than a confirmation hearing soundbited. And we're going to walk through exactly how deep.
There's also one decision sitting on this woman's desk that almost nobody is talking about. Not the death penalty question either. Not where the trial happens. One ruling that could decide this whole retrial before a single juror raises a hand. And we're going to get to that too.
First, how we got here. On June 8th, Chief Justice John Kitterich signed an order giving Judge Debra McCaslin executive jurisdiction over everything connected to the Murdaugh murder indictments. The retrial itself, every pretrial motion, jury selection, all of it, one judge, total control. That order came less than a month after the South Carolina Supreme Court unanimously threw out Murdaugh's murder convictions on May 13th. And the court gave two reasons. The first, Becky Hill. The Colleton County Clerk of Court. The justices found had interfered with the jury. A woman who separately has since pled guilty to misconduct in office, obstruction of justice and perjury over her other conduct around this case. The second was the mountain of financial crimes evidence prosecutors paraded in front of the jury. And it was a parade. They literally, they had floats. They were really quite impressive. They came down, went around the courtroom, they threw out pennies to children like, this is Murdaugh's money that he's stolen children, take the pennies. Okay, that didn't happen.
But it was a lot of financial talk.
Might as well have had a float.
More on that mountain in a minute. Judge Clifton Newman, who ran the first trial and became a celebrity in his own right, he is gone from the case. The Supreme Court needs a new hand on the wheel. They chose a woman from Lexington County who has been on the bench for six years, spent 25 years before that as a defense attorney in private practice and wrote on her own judicial questionnaire that she's not a fan of social media and very rarely looks at it. They gave the most watched case in America to the judge who doesn't watch social media. What are they thinking? Oh my goodness, I'm totally fine. Totally fine with that. That's good. So who is she? Let's start with this. Debra McCaslin's life story is almost kind of a photographic negative of Alex Murdaugh's. Murdaugh was born, as you know, into the Lowcountry Legal Dynasty that ran the local prosecutor's office for the better half of a century. His grandfather's portrait hung in the courthouse where he was tried. They actually had to move it out of like while the trial was going on. It's like maybe we should take the family portraits down considering it's like the grandson is being tried right now or great grandson. The law wasn't a career for her family. It was for her family as it was with Alec. Alec, it was pretty much an inheritance. You're born, you're now an attorney. It's kind of how it were. They're out. Did he pass the bar?