Alex Murdaugh gets another chance to argue jury tampering invalidated his murder trial
Disgraced attorney and convicted killer Alex Murdaugh will have another opportunity to plead his case for a new trial, after the South Carolina Supreme Court agreed to review his appeal of an earlier decision that denied that request.
In an order filed Tuesday, South Carolina's highest court granted a motion, sought by Murdaugh's attorneys, which asked the justices to take up his appeal after the lower court rejected it. The order gave Murdaugh's legal team 30 days from the filing date to serve and submit an initial brief to the court. A 47-page brief was filed before the end of the day. However, there wasn't a timeline explicitly laid out for any of the proceedings that could follow.
Murdaugh, 56, was convicted in 2023 of murdering his wife, Maggie, and his youngest son, Paul, in what has become a notorious American crime story and attracted a ton of media coverage. A judge sentenced him following the jury's verdict to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, which he's been serving along with a separate 27-year sentence for financial crimes.
In the latter case, the former South Carolina lawyer confessed to stealing millions of dollars from his clients while dealing with what he described as an opioid addition. But he has maintained that he is not guilty of the brutal double murder.
After his conviction in the fraud case, Murdaugh and his attorneys revisited the earlier murder trial and presented an appeal for a new one based on allegations of jury tampering that, they argued, influenced the jury's final vote.
They've claimed that former Colleton County Clerk of Court Rebecca Hill, who was involved in Murdaugh's murder trial, violated ethics codes and prejudiced jurors in various ways that allegedly presumed his guilt in his family member's killings. They also accused her of allowing personal motives to influence her professional conduct — for example, the attorneys claimed that Hill permitted a photograph of Murdaugh inside of a holding cell to be taken because she wanted to promote the book that she co-authored on his trial.
When they brought the appeal to court in January, Judge Jean Toal, formerly chief justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court, found Hill may have been "attracted by the siren call of celebrity" and "allowed public attention of the moment to overcome her duty." But Toal said in the ruling, rejecting the appeal, that she didn't believe any of Hill's actions swayed the jury's decision in a way that would have changed their guilty verdict.
Hill later resigned.