Who commits murder?
Who commits murder?
If you turn on the television or radio or pick up a newspaper, you will hear about someone who has committed a murder. Murder?! I mean, what kind of person deprives another of their life?
You can ask yourself that question but it is very hard to imagine killing another person, right? Nevertheless, it happens all the time. The news is filled with such stories. Let me ask you, what would it take for you to commit murder? I admit that I have been very angry at times. Nevertheless, I cannot think of a circumstance that would lead me to take the life of another person. Yet people murder one another all the time, sometimes for the most bizarre reasons. Many of us spent days glued to our screens, watching the trial of a man who allegedly murdered his wife and his son. Who does that? All of us have, at one time or another been furious with relatives who have really annoyed us but we don’t kill them. We may yell or scream or protest, but we don’t murder them. During the aforementioned trial a prominent attorney named Alex Murdaugh was convicted of two counts of murder. Like I said, we can get angry but not angry enough to murder another human being.
This guy Murdaugh seemingly had it all, or at least a lot of what we consider to be “all.” Here we saw a hero college football player making so much money that you could hardly count that high. He was respected by many. You can read his words in the newspaper. “As I tell you again, I respect this court but I am innocent. I would never, under any circumstances hurt my wife, Maggie and I would never, under any circumstances hurt my son, Paul. No matter how unlikely it is that we might believe ourselves capable of committing murder, almost none of us would actually deprive someone of their life. Yet, with some regularity we see it happen.
Murdaugh comes from a long line of prosecutors who have been responsible for getting a lot of bad people off the street. Can you imagine what it would feel like, being someone ostensibly on the right side of the law and knowing that you killed someone? This, after you and members of your distinguished family assured that murderers were imprisoned and sometimes put to death. Murdaugh has insisted on his innocence and some of us following the story can’t help but put ourselves in his place. We have seen too many movies and read too many accounts of innocent people being falsely convicted so that when we see denials by Murdaugh and others who are protesting their innocence, there is sometimes a sense that they may in fact be telling the truth. Hey, I am in the camp of those who believe that he did it, that he murdered his family. I have been told that by the newspapers I read every morning and I tend to go along with the journalists just as you do, but with some regularity it turns out that justice has been perverted. So just think about the possibility if it turning out that Murdaugh didn’t do it and that many years from now, we read in this newspaper that he was in fact innocent.
Organizations like the Innocence Project have shown us that there have been many, many people wrongfully convicted of horrific crimes. Some of the innocent ones have been exonerated. Those are the “lucky” ones. Others have been put to death. This is not simple stuff. We can only hope that the now convicted Murdaugh actually did commit these crimes. If that turns out to not be true, it would truly be a travesty.
