Alex Murdaugh, the Blond and Blue-eyed Exponent of Anglo-American Law
How Alex Murdaugh’s dastardly crimes were borne of the persecutorial and aristocratic qualities of our jurisprudence.
By
David Gottfried
Alex Murdaugh, the liar and opioid fiend extraordinaire who killed his wife and son, was, until recently, considered a fine and upstanding member of the South Carolina Legal Aristocracy.
When I think of Southern Aristocrats, I am reminded of English aristocrats. Indeed, more than one actor, including Bette Davis, said that people from England, with stately English accents, are very good at playing the part of Southerners. We may think of England as a citadel of refinement and the South as rustic and uncouth. However, both old England and the American South have a lot in common: They are intensely hierarchical and bow low before royalty and riches. (Footnote 1)
English aristocrats had so much power, for so long, that they believed that their place in the sun had been ordained by God. For example, Barbara Tuchman, in “The Proud Tower,” notes that most of the titans of English politics, in the beginning of the 20th century, were the descendants of the titans of English politics in the 16th Century. Not only were the crowned heads of England ordained by Heredity; very often the members of the cabinet had the same positions as their ancestors did several hundred years before. Indeed, Lord Salisbury, the prime minister in England in 1900, was a lineal descendent of one of Queen Elizabeth the First’s Prime Ministers.
The American South inherited from England not only its aristocracy, but also its system of Law. This legal system was an elaborate maze of lies and machinations designed to laud and exalt the rich and penalize and persecute the poor. At the very same time, Anglo American jurisprudence purported to subscribe to the staunchest of ethical standards to camouflage what it really was: An engine designed to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich.
The ethical standards of Anglo-American law have, at their core, a glaring, fatal fault: The form and manners of an attorney are more important than whether he acts fairly or unfairly.
American attorneys subscribe to an ethical code which provides that an attorney must “avoid even the appearance of impropriety.”
In actual practice, the word “even” is excised and attorneys endeavor to “avoid the appearance of impropriety.” In other words, whether one effects good or evil is quite immaterial; the important thing is to appear to be ethically unblemished.
With his blond hair, and his preppy wardrobe, and his Southern cultivation of all the rules of gentlemanly conduct and etiquette befitting a self-satisfied squire, Alex Murdaugh never appeared to do anything improper. He was as dignified and urbane as Chamberlain deciding that Herr Hitler had the right to rule the Sudetenland. Alex Murdaugh was as humane as a British Judge who, upon announcing a sentence of death, always made sure to add the words, “May God have mercy on your soul.” And although I have never seen any of the legal papers Murdaugh authored, I have little doubt that they are weighted down with scads of unnecessary sentences, esoteric words rarely spoken since the 18th Century, and are as pompous and nettlesome as an English Jurist’s wig infested with Lice that have been accumulating since the days of the “fee tail male” (A rule, adhered to in ancient England, and in South Carolina until a few decades ago, that land could only be inherited by sons; daughters had to get married, or else.)
Of course, there is another vision of ethics, one that is immensely superior to that which guides Anglo American jurisprudence. It is the ethical admonition laid down by the French writer Andre Gide.
Andre Gide said:
One should do that which is right and just even when people think it is wrong.
Andre Gide, and people who suffered the Nazi occupation, knew that it is nobler to break the Fucking Law and hide the Jew from the Police. People who subscribe to Andre Gide’s conception of right and wrong know that it is better to free the slaves in Southern bondage than to adhere to the Law of Dixie. People who subscribe to this braver, bolder and more loving conception of ethics will fight the good fight and damn all your equivocations and your tortured, tiresome legal “logic.” If everyone does that that which he thinks is right, anarchy may be the ineluctable result. But anarchy is infinitely better than organized fascism.
Andre Gide’s ethical admonition proves that America’s conceptions of ethical jurisprudence – one should avoid even the appearance of impropriety – are the mumblings of trite and stupid small-minded people.
Anglo American jurisprudence erected a shabby system of ethics to bolster a persecutory world of lords and ladies consuming everything in sight.
I’ll offer two ancient examples and one very current example of the economic persecution endemic to our legal system:
The “Negative Pregnant”
This doctrine let the English and the American nobility, and people like Alex Murdaugh, rob the poor for centuries. This is how it worked:
1) Plaintiff aristocrat alleges that Subservient serf owed him 100 dollars.
2) Subservient Serf alleges: I do not owe 100 dollars
3) The Contemptible Court “Reasons” and Rules: The assertion, by the Serf, that he did not owe 100 dollars was pregnant with the admission that he owed 99 dollars and 99 cents. Verdict: Judgment in favor of the aristocrat in the sum of $99.99.
4) Practical Result: The serf doesn’t have $99.99 cents because he has been robbed by the rich since the day he was born. Not having any money to pay the lousy $99.99, he is thrown into penury, meaning that he will have to work for the master shoveling shit in the barn till the day he dies.
An 1892 case from Massachusetts:
An apartment house had burned down. The tenants were homeless. The landlord sued them for non-payment of rent. The tenants argued that they should not have to pay rent because the house had burned down. The Court, reeking with all the splenetic sadism of a Cleopatra or a Julius Ceasar, said that a rental of property was essentially a rental of land. After all, in medieval England, serfs paid rent to lords so they could farm the land. The Massachusetts Court said that since the land had not been destroyed by an earthquake or some other cataclysm of nature, the homeless tenants had to continue to pay rent. The Court was not impressed by the argument that the tenants, and their apartment building, were in an urban area in which no one farmed. The Court only cared about the precedents established in England centuries ago.
When an English Lord is able to collect rent from homeless tenants, he is apt to become phenomenally rich. After a time, the gold bullion he has amassed will glower like the feverishly hot Sinai Desert trying to block the escape of the Israelites from Pharoah’s onrushing chariots. When a rich man has all the diamonds of Pluto and all the weapons of Mars, he believes the stars have anointed him with the right to kill.
And so, the English Lords blithely let the Irish die in the potato famine. Similarly, Alex MurDough, scion of a family which ruled rural South Carolina like a medieval English lord, saw fit to kill his son and his wife, just as Tzar Ivan the Terrible, drunk with power, put a spike through the head of one of his sons.
The basic fiction of Corporation Law and its relationship to the Murdaugh case.
If you want to do something you really shouldn’t do, you establish an alter ego in the form of a corporation you control. When you commit a misdeed, you claim, “I didn’t do it, the corporation did that,” much like a Southern Belle will claim she did not put on too much rouge and don a miniskirt because “The Devil made me (her) do that.”
The corporation cannot go to prison; ergo a prison sentence is avoided. If the corporation is found guilty to the tune of one million dollars because of toxins that caused cancer, the money will be transferred out of the corporation and into the bank accounts of the owner of the corporation. (And the bank account of the owner of the corporation is insulated from liability because of the fiction —- the bald faced lie —that corporations and the people who own them are two different beings.) The doctrine of corporation law makes a guilty party vanish from the scene, much as Alex Murdaugh tried to vanish from the kennels where he killed his closest kin. Hence, this is why Murdaugh’s actions were derivative of the shabby sense of right and wrong that inheres in our legal system.
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Footnote 1:
Indeed, whereas British settlers to Massachusetts, in the beginning of the 17th century, had rebelled against monarchical and aristocratic privilege, Englishmen who settled in the Virginia colony, towards the middle of the 17th century, were in large measure noblemen who were refugees from Oliver Cromwell. In fact, the American North and the American South were settled by people from opposite ends of the English political spectrum. The American South can be called the new kingdom of the Tories.