Next up in Murdaugh scandal: What about obstruction of justice? | Opinion

Here’s what needs to come next in the Murdaugh saga.

The public sector needs to come clean.

Yes, we all want to know what Alex Murdaugh did with the money. Where is the $8 million to $10 million the disbarred Hampton attorney is accused of stealing over a number of years? He admitted to stealing in his recent six-week murder trial, which took a jury all of 45 minutes to find him guilty of killing his wife and son.

And everyone wants him to be held accountable for taking money from poor, unsuspecting clients before he was fired by his family’s powerful law firm and disbarred by the South Carolina Supreme Court.

But we first need answers on our public system of criminal justice – a system that will long outlast the Murdaughs.

What did a state grand jury find in its investigation of what took place four years ago when a Murdaugh boat crashed into a bridge piling at Parris Island, killing 19-year-old Mallory Beach and opening the Murdaugh mystique for the whole world to see?

That mystique, fueled by 86 years of a Murdaugh acting as the solicitor in a rural five-county area in the lower reaches of South Carolina, has been shown to be rancid.

The grand jury was to look at obstruction of justice after the boat crash, which could get to the core of the feeling that some people enjoy a different set of justice than the rest of us.

State Attorney General Alan Wilson and State Law Enforcement Division Chief Mark Keel need to tell the public what will be done about:

▪ The actions of Alex Murdaugh and his late father, Randolph Murdaugh III, on the night Mallory Beach was killed.

According to court documents, Alex Murdaugh and his father dashed to the Beaufort Memorial Hospital emergency room that night and started trying to pin the crash on a boat passenger other than his son, the late Paul Murdaugh. Paul was subsequently charged with being the boat driver but never faced trial before he was murdered.

Columbia attorney Joe McCulloch, who is representing that boat passenger, told me that the state grand jury is still looking into it, to the best of his knowledge.

What have they found?

What does it means when Alex Murdaugh tells a boat passenger in the emergency room that he can take care of him.