For years, South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh looked his anguished clients in the eyes and promised to help them with their medical bills, their suffering or simply to survive. Then he stole some, if not all, of what he won for many of them.

On Tuesday, those folks are getting to look right back at Murdaugh, in a prison jumpsuit, and tell him whatever they want as the disgraced lawyer, also convicted of murder, is sentenced for a decade worth of thefts from clients and his law firm.

The courtroom drama will mark yet another step in the fall of a powerful and respected attorney whose family name dominated the legal scene in a small Hampton County for generations, and whose alleged crimes have been a perennial favorite of podcasts, books and online discussions.

State prosecutors and Murdaugh’s lawyers negotiated a 27-year prison sentence for the man who is already serving a life term without parole after a jury found him guilty of killing his wife, Maggie, with a rifle, and younger son, Paul, with a shotgun in June 2021.