Murdaugh attorneys head to SC Supreme Court in quest to overturn murder convictions

COLUMBIA — Murdaugh mania will return to South Carolina when its most famous inmate asks the state Supreme Court on Feb. 11 to overturn his convictions for murdering his wife and son.

Three years ago, former Lowcountry lawyer Alex Murdaugh was convicted of gunning down his loved ones on the family’s farm in rural Colleton County on June 7, 2021. His six-week state murder trial in early 2023 was big news and drew a large television audience. Many were astounded by the depth of Murdaugh’s criminality and the quirks of the sleepy, secluded and swampy S.C. backcountry in which they occurred.

Murdaugh testified in his own defense during the trial. He denied shooting Maggie Murdaugh, 52, and Paul Murdaugh, 22, beside dog kennels on their 1,700-acre property, but jurors found his claims incredible and inconsistent. Prior to the trial, Murdaugh repeatedly denied being at Moselle near the time of the murders, only to change his story when he took the stand.

What’s more, video evidence presented at trial by prosecutors indicated Murdaugh was with his wife and son shortly before they were killed. Murdaugh’s believability was further diminished by his admission of being a drug addict and prolific thief who stole millions of dollars over years from a multitude of victims, including clients, his law firm and others. His victims included especially vulnerable people, including a paraplegic and minors who survived car wrecks and looked to Murdaugh for legal help.

Trial-watchers and a large part of the general public became mesmerized by the spectacular implosion of Murdaugh, a seemingly successful litigator who was born into a legal dynasty in Hampton County. Murdaugh was part of the fourth generation to work for his storied family law firm, a small-town operation that made big profits by suing large corporations. His great-grandfather, grandfather and father also served as the top prosecutor of a five-county Lowcountry circuit for 86 consecutive years, from 1920 to 2006.

Yet Murdaugh squandered this heritage and privilege, stealing huge sums of money again and again from legal clients in schemes that involved some of his friends, including a lawyer and banker who are both now in prison. Following his son Paul’s involvement in a drunken late-night boat crash in Beaufort in 2019 that claimed the life of a 19-year-old woman, Alex Murdaugh’s life began to unravel and his schemes, at least some of them, came to light. The Murdaugh saga has proved so deep, dark and twisting that it has spawned the publication of books, podcasts, television shows and movies.

At 9:30 a.m. on Feb. 11, the S.C. Supreme Court will consider whether to order another episode of the real-life drama, so to speak, by mandating a murder retrial.

There will be no witnesses called at the hearing and no new evidence will be introduced, but Murdaugh’s attorneys will appear in person to argue before justices that their client received an unfair trial and his murder convictions should be overturned.

In filings to the court, they have concentrated on two major complaints: that a former court official, Colleton County Clerk of Court Becky Hill, improperly influenced the jury during the trial; and that the trial judge improperly allowed certain evidence and testimony to be presented, including information concerning Murdaugh’s many financial crimes and firearms that were not alleged to be the murder weapons.

“This case was built on investigative failures, fabricated evidence, and jury tampering. The State ignored exonerating evidence, misrepresented forensic findings, and relied on inflammatory but irrelevant financial evidence to distract from the absence of proof that Alex committed these murders,” said a Nov. 6 legal filing by Murdaugh’s legal team, which includes lead lawyers Dick Harpootlian and Jim Griffin.

Prosecutors within the S.C. Attorney General’s office are expected to rebut these claims. In their own legal filings, prosecutors have downplayed the effect of Hill’s alleged statements to jurors.

“The jury convicted (Murdaugh) because he was obviously guilty,” said part of a filing by the attorney general’s office, which includes lead Murdaugh prosecutor Creighton Waters.

Joe McCulloch, a frequent legal commentator and a lawyer in Columbia, represents four people involved in the Murdaugh saga, including two jurors from the murder trial. He said he believes the Supreme Court should grant a new trial based on his knowledge and the arguments made by the defense.

He mentioned, for example, how the prosecution was allowed to introduce a variety of Murdaugh family firearms into evidence during the double-murder trial even though neither of the suspected murder weapons — a shotgun and a semi-automatic rifle — were definitively recovered. During the trial, these other weapons, which were very similar or identical to the suspected weapons, were used frequently in demonstrations by prosecutors and defense lawyers, or their witnesses, and arguably made an impression on jurors.

“They were props, and props belong in movies,” said McCulloch, who added that the weapons were allowed in the jury room during deliberations. “After six weeks they didn’t put a sticker on them that said, ‘These are not murder weapons.’ ”

McCulloch, who is also an adjunct professor at the Joseph F. Rice School of Law at the University of South Carolina, expected Murdaugh’s lawyers to aggressively argue that Hill improperly influenced jurors by making comments casting doubt on the veracity of Murdaugh’s testimony, among other communications.

In December, Hill pleaded guilty in Colleton County to charges of obstruction of justice and perjury for showing photographs contained in a sealed court exhibit to a reporter during the trial and lying about it. She also pleaded guilty to two counts of misconduct in office for improperly taking bonuses and using her position to promote a book she wrote about the trial.

Hill, however, was never charged with jury tampering for her comments to jurors, a group she supervised for the six-week trial and interacted with frequently.

A conviction for jury tampering would have likely bolstered Murdaugh’s chance of making a successful appeal.

McCulloch doesn’t believe Hill was investigated as fully as she could have been by state police and prosecutors. “There was less than a 110 percent, enthusiastic effort to investigate the jury tampering allegations,” he said.

Yet Eric Bland, another Columbia lawyer deeply entwined in the Murdaugh cases, believes Murdaugh received a fair trial and that the state Supreme Court will be disinclined to rule his way.

Bland thought the varied evidence and testimony allowed into trial would survive review. The effect of Hill’s communications with jurors, however, could be another matter.

“That’s a closer call. It arguably touches on Alex’s 6th Amendment rights” to a fair trial, said Bland, who represents seven of Murdaugh’s financial victims and six jurors from Murdaugh’s murder trial.

Bland said that even if the state Supreme Court declines to overturn the verdict, Murdaugh could eventually find success appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, where justices might consider other case law than the standard so far applied in Murdaugh’s case in South Carolina.

Whatever occurs, said Bland, in some ways the issue is moot; even without a murder conviction, Murdaugh, 56, is already slated to serve at least 70 years in state and federal prisons for crimes beyond murder.