According to Charleston, South Carolina ABC affiliate WCIV, Alex Murdaugh, who is already serving two life sentences for the murders of his wife and child, received a 40-year prison sentence on Monday for financial crimes.
In September, Murdaugh, 55, pleaded guilty to 22 federal crimes, including bank fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering, for taking millions of dollars from his South Carolina law practice.
“I’ve never seen this type of conduct, a massive fraud over many years,” U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel stated at the sentencing hearing, according to WCIV.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Murdaugh engaged in numerous fraud schemes over the course of more than a decade, including transferring settlement money intended for the personal injury firm’s clients into his personal bank accounts.
He admitted to his financial misdeeds, claiming that he was suffering from an opioid addiction that had been ongoing for years.
In a press conference outside the courthouse, U.S. Attorney Adair F. Boroughs stated that Monday’s punishment “was about obtaining justice for the financial victims of Alex Murdaugh.”
“These victims are not just names listed in a court filing,” she went on to say. “They are real people who trusted an attorney at the most difficult times of their lives—when they had lost loved ones, when they were severely injured—and they were betrayed in those vulnerable moments.”
In June 2021, the firm’s CFO confronted Murdaugh about a significant amount of missing company money, leading to the discovery of his wife, Maggie, and 22-year-old son, Paul, dead with gunshot wounds at the family’s hunting lodge.
Last March, authorities convicted Murdaugh of double murder and sentenced him to two consecutive life sentences without parole. He has never admitted to the killings, which authorities claim he carried out to divert attention away from financial misconduct that he believed was about to be discovered.
He also pleaded guilty to state fraud counts and received a 27-year jail sentence.
Federal prosecutors earlier requested Murdaugh receive an additional 17 to 22 years in prison for his financial crimes in a sentencing memorandum.
He “spent most of his career deceiving everyone in his personal and professional circles, unburdened by his own conscience,” according to the letter.
“The scope and pervasiveness of Murdaugh’s deceit are staggering,” it goes on to say. “He ranks among the most prolific crooks this state has ever seen. When the house of cards began to collapse, Murdaugh murdered his wife and children.”
Gergel chose to sentence Murdaugh even harsher than prosecutors recommended because he wanted to steal from “the most needy, vulnerable people” who sought his personal injury firm’s assistance.
“They placed all their problems and all their hopes on Mr. Murdaugh, and it was from those people he abused and stole,” Gergel went on to say. “It is a difficult set of actions to understand.”
WCIV also ordered him to pay $8,762,731.88 in restitution on Monday.
Murdaugh apologized to the victims of his scam during his sentence hearing, expressing feelings of “guilt, sorrow, shame, embarrassment, and humiliation.”
“There’s not enough time, and I don’t possess a sufficient vocabulary to adequately portray to you in words the magnitude of how I feel about the things I did,” Murdaugh said in an interview.
Murdaugh’s counsel said last week that he failed a polygraph exam in breach of his plea agreement, which mandates him not to lie.
The defense attorneys argued for his release from those terms, accusing the FBI agent who administered the polygraph of tainting the results by asking strange questions and “confessing” that he had just examined Natalee Holloway killer Joran Van der Sloot.
