Don’t trust your soul to no backwoods southern lawyer…
I’ll admit, I’m absolutely obsessed with the Alex Murdaugh case. His trial captivated the country back in 2023 when the (now-former) lawyer was convicted for killing his wife, Maggie Murdaugh, and son, Paul Murdaugh.
If you’re not familiar with the case, Murdaugh was a powerful attorney in the South Carolina lowcountry whose family had a long history of serving as judges and prosecutors. But things began to unravel for the family when Paul Murdaugh was involved in a boat wreck in which he was accused of driving the boat late at night while intoxicated.
The accident killed one of Paul’s friends, 19-year old Mallory Beach, and Paul was ultimately charged with three felonies including boating under the influence causing death. And the family of Beach also filed a lawsuit against both Paul and Alex Murdaugh, among others.
According to prosecutors, the lawsuit posed an existential threat to Alex Murdaugh’s power because it threatened to expose his financial fraud: Murdaugh admitted and ultimately plead guilty to stealing millions of dollars from his law firm, which he would blame on an addiction to pain pills.
But as the lawsuit and criminal case against Paul were moving forward, the younger Murdaugh and his mother Maggie were murdered at their South Carolina hunting estate. According to Alex, he found their bodies near the dog kennels on the property after returning home from visiting his elderly mother, and he told police he believed the murders were the result of someone coming after Paul for the boat wreck.
Police began to get suspicious of Murdaugh, though, and eventually he was arrested and charged with the murders of his wife and son. And at trial, prosecutors introduced a bombshell recording made by Paul Murdaugh at the dog kennels shortly before his murder that featured Alex’s voice, proving that he was at the scene just before the murders – after telling police he had never been at the kennels.
Well Murdaugh was eventually found guilty and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, but immediately after the verdict questions began to arise about whether the Clerk of Court, Becky Hill, had improperly influenced the jury.
Hill had released a book on the trial shortly after it wrapped, and jurors testified that she spoke to them about the case as the trial was going on. At least one juror testified that Hill had influenced their decision, and ultimately Murdaugh’s attorneys moved for a new trial based on jury tampering from the clerk.
Ultimately, Becky Hill pled guilty to four charges, including obstruction of justice, perjury, and misconduct in office. And today, the South Carolina Supreme Court overturned Murdaugh’s murder convictions and ordered a new trial for the disgraced attorney.
In their ruling, the court found that Hill “egregiously attacked Murdaugh’s credibility” by telling the jury that his testimony could not be trusted:
“The State’s case rested largely on circumstantial evidence, and Murdaugh’s credibility was a key component of his defense. Hill’s repeated comments challenging Murdaugh’s credibility directly undermined that defense. Hill’s egregious, improper jury interference went to the heart of the case and unquestionably was intended to push the jury to a guilty verdict.”
The state Supreme Court also found that that trial judge should have limited the evidence of Murdaugh’s financial crimes that was presented by the state.
With his convictions overturned, the question now becomes whether the state will choose to re-try Murdaugh on the murder charges. He’s currently serving a 40-year federal sentence for the financial crimes, meaning there’s not much of a chance that the 57-year old gets out of prison anyway. The state could choose to offer him a plea deal to a lesser charge to secure a conviction on the murders and avoid a lengthy and costly re-trial, though Murdaugh has remained adamant that he’s innocent of the murders so who knows whether he would take a plea deal or not.
All in all, it’s pretty clear that this was the correct decision from the South Carolina Supreme Court, though it makes it all the more infuriating that Hill, as the court put it, “placed her fingers on the scales of justice, thereby denying Murdaugh his right to a fair trial by an impartial jury.”
Will we be getting a do-over of South Carolina’s “trial of the century?” I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
