Just when you thought the Murdaugh circus couldn't get any more wild, the disgraced lawyer's defense team just dropped some absolute bombshell motions in Colleton County on Tuesday. It turns out the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) may have done the bare minimum when investigating the crime scene, leaving a massive piece of physical evidence completely untouched. Now, Dick Harpootlian and the rest of Murdaugh's legal squad are demanding a private lab step in and do the job SLED refused to finish.

According to the court filings, state investigators recovered DNA from underneath Maggie Murdaugh’s left-hand fingernails, cataloged as SLED Item No. 70. SLED's own testing confirmed the DNA belonged to an "unknown and unrelated male." But instead of actually trying to find out whose DNA it was, state investigators apparently threw up their hands and declared it a day. As the defense bluntly put it in their motion: "No further analysis was attempted."

Not content with the state's lazy police work, Murdaugh's team bypassed the bureaucratic gatekeepers and contacted Othram Inc., a heavy-hitting private forensic genetic genealogy company. If that name sounds familiar, it's because Othram is the exact same firm that cracked open the Bryan Kohberger case in Idaho using advanced DNA profiling. Othram told the defense they can run a highly advanced genetic analysis on Item No. 70, but it will require a prioritized rush order. The defense is asking the court to let them ship the sample to Othram immediately, with Murdaugh paying for the whole thing out of his own pocket.

But that’s not all. The defense is also trying to get the hell out of dodge, filing a motion to move any future trial completely outside South Carolina's 14th Judicial Circuit, which covers Allendale, Beaufort, Colleton, Hampton, and Jasper counties. The defense argued that the media circus surrounding Murdaugh has been "among the most heavily publicized criminal prosecutions in the history" of the state, complete with years of "saturating, sensational, and continuous media coverage" designed to poison the well.

Let’s be real: trying to get an unbiased jury in the 14th Circuit is a literal meme. For nearly a century, the Murdaugh name has been hardcoded into the local legal system, with family members serving as the regional solicitors for generations. The defense rightly argues that just moving the trial to a neighboring county within the same five-county circuit won't do squat to fix the local prejudice. The entire region is thoroughly saturated with the family's legacy and the media's relentless coverage.