The South Carolina Supreme Court has agreed to hear a plea from the lawyers representing convicted murderer Alex Murdaugh, the South Carolina lawyer convicted of shooting his wife and son to death in June of 2021.
The Murdaugh trial has been one of the most sensational of the century. It has all the elements of true crime drama. Alex Murdaugh was the latest in long line of district attorneys in the Low Country region of South Carolina going back 85 years. The family was wealthy and respected, seen almost as local royalty.
The state Supreme Court will hear arguments from Murdaugh’s lawyers, who claim that a clerk in Colleton County where Murdaugh’s trial was held may have illegally interfered in a way that persuaded the jury to convict.
Murdaugh’s attorneys said clerk of the court Becky Hill explicitly told juries “not to be fooled” by Murdaugh. If true, this is a blatant violation of court rules and would be considered jury tampering. The Murdaugh camp said Hill was motivated to break the rules because she wanted a guilty verdict because it would make the book she was planning to write about the case sell more briskly.
In addition, say Murdaugh’s lawyers, Hill would traipse into the jury room regularly, polling jurors about whether they thought Alex Murdaugh was guilty or innocent. Shockingly, they claim, Hill also had one on one conversations with jurors about evidence presented in the courtroom.
This win for Murdaugh’s team comes after having been denied by a lower court. In January, Judge Jean Toal rejected Murdaugh’s claims that he had been a victim of “unprecedented jury tampering.” Now that the state Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case, Murdaugh may be granted the retrial he feels entitled to if the court agrees with his argument.
Murdaugh’s murder trial took six weeks, and prosecutors say he shot his wife and son with two different guns near the spot on the family’s sprawling estate where they kenneled their dogs. The jury gave him two life sentences with no possibility of parole at the conclusion of the 2023 trial.
