One of the features of Alex
Murdaugh's testimony.
Up until this point, you can't miss it.
He talks a lot.
He provides
a lot of information,
including information
that he's not asked about.
What did you make of
how he approached that
Abbey?
And thanks for the shout out, Sarah.
A lot
was happening here with his words
there's something called statement
analysis.
There are words
that have hidden meaning behind them.
And if we can start with this one,
the strongest denial is always a no.
So if I said to you, Abby and Sarah,
are you on heroin right now?
And you respond. Absolutely not.
What kind of person do you think I'd be?
I knew
you were going to ask me
these kinds of questions.
Truthful people convey
liars, try to convince.
And we hear that with him, considering.
Absolutely not.
Sara, can I play a little bit of that
just so that our audience can see? Sure.
Mr. Murdoch,
did you take this gun or any gun like it
and blow your son brains out on June 7th
or any day or any time?
No, I did not.
Did you shoot a 300 blackout
into her head, causing her death?
Mr. Griffin, I didn't
shoot my wife or my son any time,
ever.
Sarah, I interrupted you,
but please continue.
So the biggest thing would have just
been saying no, first of all.
But he's like, no, I did not,
and I've never done this.
And he goes on to this
like I call it smoke
screening, saying all, but just stop
the clip.
What I really want to pull,
if you listen closely,
he says things like unequivocally,
absolutely. Not.
This is overselling.
Again, truthful people convey liars,
try to convince.
So we have some hot spots here.
He also says something later
and I don't know
if you pulled the clip or not,
but it's
he says,
What I can tell you
is this with regard to the wife,
did he call the wife to have her
come home
or did she come home on our own accord?
He says, I can tell you this now.
Lance Armstrong,
a sidebar here in a branch.
Lance Armstrong came clean
that he took steroids.
Went on Oprah, said he took steroids.
But when he made
a statement to the AP press,
he said,
I told Oprah to go wherever she wants
and I'll be open, honest and candid.
That's all I can tell you
when someone says something like,
that's all I can tell you
or I can tell you this,
I'm going to tell you
100% of the time what it means.
It means there's something
they're not telling you.
So this right here to me
is a smoking gun.
That there is more to the story
he's not sharing.
And Janine, I apologize.
I called you Sarah earlier
that I meant to call you Janine.
So but Sarah, to you
now, I mean,
this issue of his addiction
is so critical here.
It is the explanation
that he has given for his lies.
You said you would only put someone
like Alec Murdoch on the stand
if the objective here
was to humanize himself.
Do you think he has done that
with his discussion of his addiction?
And with even the emotion
that he's shown on the stand?
Abby, you know, yesterday
I was hungry for more about his addiction
you know, I thought that he said, oh, well,
you know, I lied because I was paranoid.
And the paranoia
comes from the addiction,
but it wasn't really digestible to me.
And today,
because Waters chose to go there,
and I thought that was a big mistake.
You cannot go down the road of addiction
because it's not the same for everybody.
The number of pills
you take, the amount of money
you spend, the withdrawals
you experience, the functionality.
I'm around a lot of attorneys
who are just like Alec Murdoch,
who are functional,
who are winning trials
but absolutely strung out on drugs,
whatever the drug of choice might be.
So it's a mistake
to try to question somebody's addiction,
especially because it's not just him
self-diagnosing himself.
We have text messages with his family.
We have text messages with the victims.
We have other testimony
that he was always fidgety.
And, you know,
that could have been
when he was withdrawing.
So it was a big mistake
to go down that rabbit
hole by the prosecution.
I think he did humanize himself.
I don't know if the jury
is going to make the connection
between addiction
and the cornerstone of it,
this cornerstone of addiction,
which is
conning, lying, covering up,
you know, living a double life
Those are things that are common
to a to someone who's an addict
and they become programed to do that.
Now, that is that is just a fact.
I just know because I've been around it
personally and professionally.
But, you know,
I think that it was a mistake to go there
because I think he explained himself
very well.
I think he humanized himself
with the second part of why
put a client up on the stand
is, you know, to explain facts.
I think there are many instances
where Waters doesn't really know
what he's even wanting from Alec Murdoch,
and then he's surprised by the answer.
And then he gets really annoyed
and really frustrated.
And I'm told the jurors
some are rolling their eyes
which is to me, a death knell.
Janine, I want to go back to you
before we wrap up here. Look,
there's a lot about Alec
Murdoch
that makes him
really quite a character on the stand.
But you do have to put it into
the context,
as Sara was saying,
that he is an admitted addict.
So when you look at things
like the licking of the lips
and the poking out his tongue,
you know, his mouth is dry.
What does that signal to you
from a body language perspective?
And do you think jurors will attribute
that perhaps
to either lies or his addiction?
Well, first of all,
the drugs can in fact, do that.
But you're really looking at
when do these moments happen?
When do these tongue protrusions
come out?
We see something very interesting
when he pushes his tongue
inside his mouth.
They're called pacifiers.
The higher
the pacifier,
the more stress and anxiety.
And this high level pacifier
pushing the tongue inside his cheek.
You see it often.
They even do this actors and movies.
And it indicates
usually this smugness,
this content contentedness
where it's demonstrating like
this is a joke,
like I'm being contemptuous.
But this is interesting.
He's very charming.
You know, yesterday in the courtroom,
they had a couple of jurors crying.
At the same time,
we have a mirror neurons.
If he cries
and we cry,
that makes us like him
because we experience it.
I think the
the prosecuting attorney
is going to have his hands full here
with the jury.
I would always say
the best way to detect
deception is to not have
the aspect of the person
you're looking at in analyzing
if they're crying, if they're screaming,
if they're mad, if
they're contemptuous,
if they're disgusted, you have no affect.
You will make a better decision.
On if this person's telling the truth.
The fact that two jurors
were crying yesterday
to female jurors
is not good
for the prosecuting attorney
because it's going to be very hard
to turn the tide
on those two women to say, oh, no,
you just were duped, my dear,
because we have this innate.
I said,
you want to be right
or do you want to be effective?
Most of us want to be right.
And the body language,
he leaks a lot of disgust.
And this is discussed.
This disgust is repelling
contaminated objects.
It doesn't belong here.
If anything, we should have sadness here.
Authentic sadness.
We should maybe have fear.
Hey, who did it?
If it wasn't him, who did it?
Where is that?
Where is that part of him?
It's just not showing up.
I'm going to let Sara
get in real quick before we go.
Go ahead, Sara.
Yeah, just to just to Diane's point,
you know, there was that,
and I was saying there's moments
where it looks like
Murdoch is cross-examining the prosecutor
with respect to why you
why you have never mentioned
in all of these months that,
you know, this was a lie and clear up your lie
about being at the kennels.
You know,
it was terrible when he said
you I've been trying
to get a meeting with you
and you have refused to meet with me
and my lawyers.
It doesn't matter
whether at that meeting
he would actually come clean
about this lie.
It matters.
And it goes to that
whole sloppy investigation
and the totality of this
that they really singled him out
they decided he killed his wife and son
and it was like,
we're not interested in talking to you
anymore,
you know, so
that that was a bad moment
for the prosecution, in my opinion.
Really, fascinating analysis
from both of you.
Sara Azari and
Janine Driver,
thank you both for
joining us on this one.