The legal war over Alex Murdaughs shape with defense attorney Dick Harpootlian hinting at possible new evidence and lead prosecutor Creighton Waters signaling an impending fight over whether the disgraced lawyer can get a fair jury in South Carolina.
In separate interviews with Fox News Digital, Dick Harpootlian, Murdaughs longtime defense attorney, and Creighton Waters, the lead prosecutor who secured the original guilty verdicts, previewed different visions for the upcoming retrial.
The interviews came days after the South Carolina Supreme Court unanimously reversed Murdaughs convictions in the killings of his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul, ruling that Colleton County Clerk of Court Rebecca “Becky” Hill improperly influenced jurors during the six-week trial.
Now both sides are showdown.
Harpootlian said the defense plans to seek a venue change, attorney-led jury questioning and potentially sequestration of jurors.
“We now have the ability to get people’s social media, their Instagrams, all of that,” he said. “And we’ll scour that before they ever get a chance to appear.”
He argued that jurors in the original trial had effectively been conditioned to distrust Murdaugh before he testified.
“They’d already been pre-conditioned,” Harpootlian said, referring to testimony that Hill encouraged jurors not to believe Murdaugh.
Waters contended that widespread public familiarity with high-profile has become unavoidable.
“The genie is out of the bottle,” Waters said. “We’re not going to be able to go back with that.”
He argued that publicity alone cannot disqualify prospective jurors.
“If it were otherwise, anytime you have a sensational case, then the defendant would just get away with it because of the fact that, well, okay, we can’t find anybody who hasn’t heard about this,” Waters said.
Instead, he said, the depends on jurors ability to follow their oath and decide cases based solely on evidence presented in court.
“We depend on our citizens to do what their oath requires them, put aside things that they might have read in the media or in a podcast or whatever, and base their evidence and their decisions solely on the evidence that’s presented in the courtroom,” Waters said.
When asked if Murdaugh will take the stand again in his retrial, Harpootlian said: “That’ll be a game day decision. We need to see how the case develops.”
Harpootlian said during the initial trial, Murdaugh decided to take the stand and testify under oath.
“The decision to take the stand is his. He’s a lawyer, and he has defended criminal cases and prosecuted them. So he understands [the process],” Harpootlian said. “But we reviewed everything with him and gave him our recommendations.”
Harpootlian signaled that the defense strategy may look dramatically different this time around.
“Well get subpoena power for the second trial, and we can begin to put records together to help either refute or support what weve heard,” Harpootlian said.
Harpootlian repeatedly attacked prosecutors for spending enormous amounts of time focusing on Murdaughs financial crimes.
He argued prosecutors intentionally portrayed Murdaugh as morally reprehensible before jurors fully evaluated the murder evidence itself.
“So, by the time we got to the real evidence, [the jury] wasn’t interested in hearing it because he was such a horrible, evil man, and a liar. So that was about assassination of character. It wasn’t about motive.”
WATCH: Lead prosecutor in Murdaugh case says ‘genie is out of the bottle’ in retrial
The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that prosecutors could still use some financial-crime evidence at retrial because it was relevant to motive but criticized prosecutors for spending roughly 12.5 hours presenting inflammatory details with limited value.
Waters defended the original strategy, saying that both Ju
