Body language expert weighs in on Alex Murdaugh testimony

One of the features of Alec Murdoch's testimony, up until this point, you can't miss it, he talks a lot. He provides a lot of information, including information that he's not asked about. What did you make of how he approached that? Abby, and thanks for the shout out Sarah. A lot was happening here with his words. There's something called statement analysis. There are words that have hidden meaning behind them. And if we can start with this one, the strongest denial is always a no.

So if I said to you, Abby and Sarah, are you on heroin right now? And you respond, absolutely not. What kind of person do you think I'd be? I knew you were going to ask me these kinds of questions. Truthful people convey, liars try to convince, and we hear that with him constantly. And Sarah, absolutely not. Sarah, can I play a little bit of that just so that our audience can see? Sure. Mr. Murdoch, did you take this gun or any gun like it? And blow your son's brains out on June 7th or any day or any time? No, I did not.

Did you shoot a 300 blackout into her head causing her death? Mr. Griffin, I didn't shoot my wife or my son any time. Ever. Sarah, I interrupted you, but could please continue. So the biggest thing would have just been saying no, first of all, but he's like, no, I did not, and I've never done this. And he goes on to this, like I call it smoke screening saying a whole bunch of stuff. The clip, what I really wanted to pull, if you listen closely, he says things like unequivocally, absolutely not.

This is overselling. Again, truthful people convey, liars try to convince. So we have some hot spots here. He also says something later, and I don't know if you pulled the clip or not, but he says, what I can tell you is this with regard to the wife, did he call the wife to have her come home or did she come home on her own accord? He says, I can tell you this. Now Lance Armstrong, to sidebar here on a branch, Lance Armstrong came clean that he took steroids, went on Oprah, said he took steroids, but when he made a statement to the AP press, he said, I told Oprah to go wherever she wants and I'll be open, honest and candid. That's all I can tell you. When someone says something like, that's all I can tell you or I can tell you this, I'm going to tell you 100% of the time what it means.

It means there's something they're not telling you. So this right here to me is a smoking gun that there is more to the story. He's not sharing. And Ginny, I apologize. I called you, Sarah, earlier. It's okay. I meant to call you Ginny.

So, but Sarah, to you now, I mean, this issue of his addiction is so critical here. It is the explanation that he is given for his lies. You've said you would only put someone like Alec Murdock on the stand if the objective here was to humanize himself. Do you think he has done that with his discussion of his addiction, with even the emotion that he's shown on the stand? Abby, you know, yesterday I was hungry for more about his addiction. You know, I thought that he said, oh, well, you know, I lied because I was paranoid and the paranoia comes from the addiction, but it wasn't really digestible to me. And today, because Waters chose to go there, and I thought that was a big mistake, you cannot go down the road of addiction because it's not the same for everybody. The number of pills you take, the amount of money you spend, the withdrawals you experience, the functionality, I'm around a lot of attorneys who are just like Alec Murdock, who are functional, who are winning trials, but absolutely strung out on drugs, whatever the drug of choice might be.

So it's a mistake to try to question somebody's addiction, especially because it's not just him self-diagnosing himself. We have text messages with his family. We have text messages with the victims. We have other testimony that he was always fidgety, and that could have been when he was withdrawing. So it was a big mistake to go down that rabbit hole by the prosecution. I think he did humanize himself. I don't know if the jury's going to make the connection between addiction and the corner store of it.

Cornerstone of addiction, which is conning, lying, covering up, living a double life. Those are things that are common to someone who's an addict, and they become programmed to do that. That is just a fact. I just know because I've been around it personally and professionally. But I think that it was a mistake to go there because I think he explained himself very well. I think he humanized himself. With the second part of why I put a client up on the stand is to explain facts.

I think there are many instances where Waters doesn't really know what he's even wanting from Alec Murdoch. And then he's surprised by the answer, and then he gets really annoyed and really frustrated. And I'm told that jurors, some are rolling their eyes, which is to me a death knell. Janine, I want to go back to you before we wrap up here. Look, there's a lot about Alec Murdoch that makes him really quite a character on the stand. But you do have to put it into the context, as Sarah was saying, that he is an admitted addict. So when you look at things like the licking of the lips and the poking out his tongue, his mouth is dry, what is that signal to you from a body language perspective? And do you think jurors will attribute that, perhaps, to either lies or his addiction? Well, first of all, the drugs can, in fact, do that.

But you're really looking at when do these moments happen? When do these tongue protrusions come out? We see something very interesting when he pushes his tongue inside his mouth. They're called pacifiers. The higher the pacifier, the more stress and anxiety. In this high-level pacifier, pushing the tongue inside his cheek, you see it often. They even do this in actors and movies, and it indicates usually this smugness, this contemptuous, where it's demonstrating like, this is a joke, like I'm being contemptuous. But this is interesting. He's very charming.

You know, yesterday in the courtroom, they had a couple jurors crying at the same time. We have mirror neurons. If he cries, and we cry, that makes us like him because we experience it. I think the prosecuting attorney is going to have his hands full here with the jury. I always say the best way to detect deception is to not have the affect of the person you're looking at in analyzing, if they're crying, if they're screaming, if they're mad, if they're contemptuous, if they're disgusted. You have no affect. You will make a better decision on if this person's telling the truth.

The fact that two jurors were crying yesterday, two female jurors, is not good for the prosecuting attorney. Because it's going to be very hard to turn the tide on those two women to say, oh, no, you just were duped, my dear, because we have this innate, I said, you want to be right or do you want to be effective? Most of us want to be right. And the body language, he leaks a lot of disgust. And this is disgust. This disgust is repelling contaminated objects. It doesn't belong here. If anything, we should have sadness here, authentic sadness.

We should maybe have fear. Hey, who did it? If it wasn't him, who did it? Where is that? Where is that part of him? It's just not showing up. I'm going to let Sarah get in real quick before we go. Go ahead, Sarah. Yeah, just to Diane's point, there was, and I was saying, there's moments where it looks like Murdock is cross-examining the prosecutor. With respect to why you have never mentioned in all of these months that this was a lie, clear up your lie about being at the kennels, it was terrible when he said, I've been trying to get a meeting with you and you've refused to meet with me and my lawyers. It doesn't matter whether at that meeting he would actually come clean about the sly.

It matters, and it goes to that whole sloppy investigation, the totality of this, that they really singled him out. They decided he killed his wife and son. And it was like, we're not interested in talking to you anymore. You know, so that was a bad moment for the prosecution, in my opinion. Really fascinating analysis from both of you. Sarah Azari and Janine Driver, thank you both for joining us on this one.

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