(DON THOMPSON / iNFOnews.ca)

OPINION

Ask a dozen people what justice means, and you might hear a dozen different answers. Equity, fairness, objectivity, impartiality, righteousness...each definition sounds - more or less - correct.

Sometimes though justice seems simply too hard to define…or perhaps more precisely…too hard to explain. Naively, I once believed everyone was capable of knowing whether something was just, or not.

I am older and maybe wiser now…witness too often to travesties of justice over the years. Often it’s easier to spot injustice rather than that which is just. After all, we can see injustices at work…at home…almost everywhere.

There’s harm whenever injustice occurs…no matter where. But maybe it hurts most when it happens in a courtroom…in criminal or civil matters…in matters of life and death.

This past March in Islandton, SC, justice finally played out in a double-murder conviction of a fourth-generation lawyer - Richard “Alex” Murdaugh - who for years lived as though laws and justice were for others.

It is understatement to call Islandton a small town…its residents can easily fit on the deck surrounding my pool. The entire county - about 3,000 square kilometres - has a population of just 38,000 people.

A member of the Murdaugh family has held the Circuit Solicitor post for the state’s 14th judicial district - a five-county area - since 1920. The Murdaughs prosecuted law breakers for nearly a century. Folks throughout the five counties referred to their district as “Murdaugh Country”…and the family enjoyed its privileged position for decades.

But for the past four years, Alex Murdaugh and other members of his family have been the subject of investigations involving corruption, fraud, witness intimidation, grand theft, drug and alcohol charges, wrongful death and murder…crimes the Murdaughs long prosecuted.

Turns out Alex Murdaugh was guilty of crimes…but most of his life he was certainly guilty of believing he was the smartest guy in the room. He was not.

Murdaugh needed lots of money…to live a luxurious lifestyle, gamble, spoil his family and fund family drug and alcohol addictions. His compensation as a partner in the family law firm…Peters Murdaugh Parker Eltzroth & Detrick…was about $1.25 million a year.

But he stole another $8 million from the law firm over nine years…embezzling money from clients he was supposed to represent.

In addition to Murdaugh’s fraud and embezzlement, state law enforcement officials discovered too many people who knew him…ended up dead. Gloria Satterfield, Murdaugh's housekeeper, died mysteriously from a fall on his property in 2018.

Her surviving two sons were awarded a settlement of $3.5 million, but by 2021 they had received nothing. Murdaugh stole it. As of today, Murdaugh has been charged on more than 120 counts…everything from fraud, embezzlement and tax evasion to money laundering, the purchase and distribution of illicit narcotics, obstruction of justice and, murder…not once, but multiple times.

Things began to unwind for Murdaugh in February 2019, when his younger son, Paul Murdaugh, was charged with three felonies following the death of his teenage friend, Mallory Beach, when he was drunk and piloting a boat. His various financial crimes surfaced during that investigation.

Alex Murdaugh’s solution to his mounting legal troubles was to murder both his wife, Maggie, and his son, Paul, two years later. Profiting from the misfortunes of strangers had paid handsomely in the past…and Murdaugh apparently figured he could do the same with family…even if it meant killing them.

Alex Murdaugh is led outside the Colleton County Courthouse by sheriff's deputies after being convicted of two counts of murder Thursday, March 2, 2023, in Walterboro, S.C., in the June 7, 2021, shooting deaths of Murdaugh's wife and son.

Image Credit: (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

A Google search of the Murdaugh murders provides scores of in-depth articles that read like fiction…a bizarre novel of how one man - one family - cheated justice…for awhile.

Murdaugh is serving two consecutive life terms in a South Carolina prison for the murders of his wife and son…with another 50 years tacked on for other crimes. It took the jury just three hours to return his convictions.

As the civil lawsuits over the 2019 boat crash that killed Mallory Beach neared, Murdaugh, his former law firm and the convenience store that knowingly sold son Paul beer that left him with a blood-alcohol level three times the legal limit, settled with the Beach family for the teenager’s wrongful death…$15 million.

Of course, money doesn’t bring back a lost child. But it is justice, by most any definition.

— Don Thompson, an American awaiting Canadian citizenship, lives in Vernon and in Florida. In a career that spans more than 40 years, Don has been a working journalist, a speechwriter and the CEO of an advertising and public relations firm. A passionate and compassionate man, he loves the written word as much as fine dinners with great wines.

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