Anyone come to mind? How about Alex Murdaugh. As I wrote when his trial began: “I don’t know whether he killed his wife and son, and will wait for the jury to decide. I do know that if he did, he deserves the death penalty under South Carolina law. But even if convicted of the horrendous double murders, he won’t get it, as the state is not seeking it.” Instead, the state sought life in prison without parole for Murdaugh, offering no explanation as to why. And that was that. But in taking the death penalty off the table in the Murdaugh case, the state reinforced the suspicions some citizens have about privilege in the judicial system, undercutting faith in the fairness of that system. Be it White privilege, wealth privilege, name privilege, fame privilege, power privilege, attorney privilege or whatever privilege people may assign to it, the decision to let Alex Murdaugh off the hook for the death penalty lends credence to the idea that there are different systems of justice for different groups of people. That is especially true in that the murders of Paul and Maggie Murdaugh were so grotesquely violent. As The Post and Courier reported from the trial: “A shotgun blast had blown Paul’s head apart, and his brain lay by his feet. Maggie had a hole in her head as well, from a close-range, execution-style rifle shot. Both were laying facedown in large pools of blood and other matter.” After a long and exhaustive investigation, Alex Murdaugh had been charged by the state with firing those shots and killing those people, his own wife and son. But while convicted of those crimes, he had also been deemed exempt from the death penalty by the state.