Kouri and Alex - Turning Points in Two Criminal Convictions

Añadido: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]Corey Richens and Alec Murdoch. One criminal case comes to an end, the other gets maybe a new beginning.

[00:00:08]May it please the audience. I'm Rich Showenstein. Welcome back to So Sue Me.

[00:00:13]I know, I know, I know. I keep saying this is a podcast about civil litigation and then I talk about criminal cases, but with cases like this, I can't avoid it. Big developments in these two and I just wanted to talk about it for a few minutes. as I come back. I was on trial myself, which has come to a conclusion.

[00:00:33]I can't say anything about it other than we're all very happy. Let's move on to some people who are less happy. So, yesterday out in Park City, Utah, we got the sentencing for Corey Richens. And if you're not familiar with this case, this is a woman who was accused of killing her husband by poisoning him with fentinol. actually having tried once to do it in a sandwich, having failed and having then done it a second time successfully in killing him. And to make this case even more salacious, allegedly after that, she had a children's book about grief ghostritten, but she put herself out as the author, went on TV with her children to talk about the passing of her husband and their dad and how horrible it was and how griefstricken they were all were. And then it turns out she is accused of poisoning him with fentanyl.

[00:01:34]And she was convicted by a jury in three hours. I think less than three hours.

[00:01:41]Even though the case was entirely circumstantial, it was so overwhelming that she was very quickly convicted. And yesterday they had one of these sentencing hearings. So you know the drill on these sentencing hearings.

[00:01:53]They're they they don't really move the judge. Typically, the judge knows what he or she is going to do when they walk into that hearing based on the conviction, based on the charges, based on the evidence, based on a sentencing report that they get. They're not really moved usually by what happens, but a sentencing hearing is an opportunity for the victims to speak and get some cathartic relief hopefully in court.

[00:02:20]It's their opportunity to confront the defendant, which they can't really do during a trial, but they can do it in a sentencing hearing. They're sort of free to say anything. It's also an opportunity for the defendant to speak if they have anything they want the court to consider if they have anything to say. And traditionally a defendant has an opportunity to show some contritess, to show some regret, to show some remorse, to apologize for what they have done, and to promise to lead a better life, and to make a plea to the court to have some mercy on them as they go forward. And so here you have a young mother who could have come to the court, apologized for what she had done, owned up to what she had done, and asked the court to give her an opportunity to be set free. But that's not what she got.

[00:03:21]Instead, we got the many faces of Corey Richens. Here she is looking a little concerned.

[00:03:32]Here she is looking surprised.

[00:03:35]Here she is looking a little bored, taking a nap. I don't really know what she's doing here, but it's not a good look.

[00:03:44]And now we get surprised look on the left and what I will call resting boooo face on the right. And she was a face making machine during this hearing.

[00:04:00]not helpful to her endeavor at all, making it about her, taking the focus away from the victims and just unbelievable faces.

[00:04:11]And then she got up there and she made her own comments.

[00:04:16]And I'm not going to play them because I don't want to really give them any oxygen. I'm just going to summarize.

[00:04:24]The kindest thing I can say about the remarks Corey Richens gave in court yesterday is that they were batshit crazy.

[00:04:33]She ranted about how the process was unfair. She said she's innocent. She vowed to her children she would return to them. She vowed to her children that this would all be fixed. They were going to appeal. The justice system would prevail. even if she has been treated so horribly unfairly. She said that it was unfair that the jury only took three hours to deliberate and that shows they got the wrong result which you know 12 people came to a trial independently from all walks of life listened to the evidence and all agreed con to convict on each and every count in under three hours. And I don't know if you know how rare that is, but in a case like this, which is a multi-week trial with a lot of evidence, that's really rare. That is a jury that was convinced what had happened here and thought the decision was easy. It doesn't mean Corey Richens didn't get due process. She got every bit of due process during the trial. She had lawyers. She had an opportunity to cross-examine. She had an opportunity to put on evidence. She got all of her rights and a jury of her peers and they said she's guilty. And what she did at her sentencing hearing yesterday was super foolish. Now, I don't think it matters. I think she was going to get sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, which is what she got in any event because poisoning your husband with fentanyl after unsuccessfully have trying to do it once and then having it all to be about money, all to be about insurance money and financial gain. It's horrible.

[00:06:22]Nobody was going to let her out of prison. But she got up and instead of suggesting any remorse whatsoever, instead of owning this at all, she played the victim.

[00:06:35]And if you're going to do that, you shouldn't bother. Like, at the sentencing hearing, you shouldn't stand up unless you're going to apologize.

[00:06:47]If you don't have something consiliatory to say at a sentencing hearing and you're the defendant, you should zip it.

[00:06:54]I know she wanted to address her children. She used the sentencing hearing as an opportunity to do that. I doubt they're listening, but she could have written him a letter. There was no reason to do that. There was no way that was going to help her. If the judge was thinking of letting her out on parole at some point, he probably would have changed his mind after that performance.

[00:07:16]So, that was absolutely counterproductive, absolutely crazy, absolutely confirms everything you thought about this woman and the jury thought about this woman and now she can go away life in prison.

[00:07:30]I don't know of any valid grounds for appeal that she has. Never say never because I've seen weirder things happen, but I don't think she's getting out of that jail. I think she's there for life and it sounds like she deserves to be.

[00:07:44]And that brings us to this guy, Alec Murdoch, spelled Alex Ax, but I guess it's Alec down in South Carolina, or at least it is for him. And he got some really good news this week, which is that an appellet court in South Carolina has thrown out his murder convictions. He was convicted of having murdered his wife and one of his sons uh after a trial a couple years ago. It was a very big prominent trial. Again, it was a largely circumstantial case, but this is a former lawyer who first of all was in deep with financial shenanigans, drug use, and a lot of personal problems.

[00:08:35]And you often hear in the Alec Murdoch case talk about his financial crimes. I I I actually hate that term. He was a lawyer. He robbed from his clients. He would get money for his clients and he would steal it. Including like a client who was a quadriplegic who got money because of an accident and needed the money to pay for his medical care and Alec Murdoch stole it. So if you want to call that a financial crime, I guess you can. But it's a crime against clients.

[00:09:09]It's a crime against people. Some of his clients were children. You know, he robbed from minors. He robbed from other clients. I don't think that's just financial crime. I think that is a fundamental crime against humanity. I mean, he's a lawyer, so obviously he had to be disbarred because it's completely outrageous and unethical behavior, but it's also criminal fraud. And I think that goes far beyond being a financial crime. So, he's got these convictions.

[00:09:42]He's going to spend the rest of his life in jail probably no matter what. Uh he's, you know, getting older and he's got a lot of jail time. I forget what the numbers are, but he had been convicted of murdering his wife and one of his sons. And then it came out that the court clerk in the case, Becky Hill, had had inappropriate contact with the jurors. The the allegations are that she made comments to the jurors at various times during the trial suggesting that he was guilty, suggesting that there was certain evidence they didn't need to listen to and altogether pushing them towards a guilty verdict. I think the allegation is that she planned to write a book. She was hoping that she could achieve some sort of personal fame, having been the court clerk at this big trial that was receiving nationwide coverage. She was going to sell a book.

[00:10:43]She was going to go on the TV. She thought that this was her launching pad and she made it about her. But what she really needed for that was a guilty verdict. And the allegations are that she had inappropriate contact with the jury. Now, there's an awful lot in the case to suggest that the jury probably would have convicted him even without her contact. The evidence was pretty overwhelming. I've heard at least one juror say that she didn't really have that much contact with them. It's unclear if she actually changed anybody's mind, but I think the appellet court did the right thing here. You cannot have a court clerk interacting with the jury in that way. That is forbidden. That is a never. You cannot have the court clerk making any kind of comment to the jury about the case, about the witnesses, about the evidence, about what the outcome should be. That is antithetical to the system. Court clerks and other judicial officers have to take care of the jury. They have to get them from A to B. They have to make sure they have water. They have to make sure they have lunch. They have to make sure they're there on time. They have to take care of the jurors of issues.

[00:12:01]Sometimes during a trial, you might have a juror with a medical appointment. You might have to deal with some scheduling stuff. There's a lot of things that are really important for the clerks and the security offers to take care of with the jury, but they can never ever ever speak to them about the case. And when it happens, and it seems apparent here that it happened at least on some level, you can't let the conviction stand.

[00:12:28]That's hard to take. This trial took many weeks. This is time of the judge.

[00:12:35]This is time of the lawyers. This is time of the jury. You know, 12 people plus alternates who came away from their regular life for weeks to do this trial.

[00:12:47]did their job, rendered a decision, and now all of that is blown up because some blunderhead court clerk thought she could become famous from a trial.

[00:12:59]Absolutely absurd, absolutely ridiculous. But I don't think the appellet court had any choice as this appeal started to form a while ago. And it's a long appeal process. It's been now months that the appeal was briefed and argued before the court. Now we have a result. I started more and more to think that this might happen because of the seriousness of the issue. So now they have a decision to make in South Carolina. Are they going to retry Alec Murdo for these crimes? I suspect they will. And what is that going to look like? And you could have this whole case again. This was a big deal down in South Carolina. A lot of focus, a lot of attention on that area of the country.

[00:13:43]sort of a small town setting where the Murdoch family apparently had a great deal of power for many generations.

[00:13:51]And it was alleged that that gave him a lot of privilege even as he did his law career. And then of course the allegations of his misdeeds and ultimately the allegation that he killed his wife and son and tried to make it look like they were murdered by someone else in order to garner sympathy, in order to get him out of trouble. he was having legally on his own. It's a pretty complicated case. I I thought that the I I wasn't surprised he was convicted the first time. I thought the evidence was pretty strong. His lawyers are real good. They're very good, experienced criminal defense lawyers uh down in South Carolina and they do a good job and they do effective cross-examination and stuff like that. But the prosecution had a theory of the case and a lot of obvious criminal conduct by this defendant that would lead him on a path to murder. So we're going to see that again. So there you have two cases that are going the opposite directions. For Corey Richens, I think it's over. She's in jail. She can try to lodge an appeal, but it's not going anywhere. For Alec Murdo, now his murder convictions are scrapped. that is off his record and they can retry him uh if they want to and I again I imagine they will and we will get to see that go down again.

[00:15:15]Amazing that a lot of these cases end up getting retrieded because there's a hung jury. We saw that with Karen Reed because there's a reversal. We're seeing that with Harvey Weinstein who's at the end of his third trial and now another reversal. So, we're going to see a retrial probably of Alec Murdoch. Very hard to get through the process, get a conviction, sustain it, sustain it on appeal. It is no joke trying to get a conviction in these high-profile cases.

[00:15:47]All right, there you have it. Uh, a little bit of action in the criminal litigation field. So, I'm putting together another one of these panel situations. As you've seen in the past few weeks, I've been doing something I call LawF Fair the game where I bring in a few guest legal analysts. We go over a few cases. We have a lot of back and forth. I've really enjoyed it. I'm going to try to put another one of those out next week, assuming that my schedule permits it. I am a full-time practicing civil litigation trial lawyer. So, I'm not one of these guys who's going to necessarily put out something on YouTube every two days or even every week. And I apologize if that's a little herkyjerky and a little hard to follow, but I got to keep my day job. All right, so we will see you soon, one way or another.

[00:16:43]For now, we are adjourned.