Attorneys for convicted murderer and financial fraudster Alex Murdaugh are asking the S.C. Supreme Court to review a judge’s decision last winter that nixed Murdaugh’s bid to get a new trial on his murder charges based on alleged jury tampering by Colleton County Clerk of Court Becky Hill.
It is not known how quickly the Supreme Court will rule. The S.C. Attorney General’s office, which prosecuted Murdaugh’s murder case, has the right to reply to the motion.
A spokesman for S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson declined comment Wednesday, saying their response will be in the formal reply they will file with the state Supreme Court.
Murdaugh’s lawyers are seeking a new trial in what they describe as “the most high-profile trial in the history of South Carolina.”
Although other South Carolina murders, such as those committed by Dylann Roof and Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins, attracted widespread attention, those killers came from society’s lower strata, Murdaugh’s lawyers said in their motion. Roof in 2015 killed nine Black parishioners at a Charleston church, while Gaskins confessed to killing at least 15 people, except his last victim for whom he was convicted of murdering after a lengthy 1983 trial.
On the contrary, Murdaugh is the “fourth-generation son of one of the state’s most prominent legal families,” Murdaugh’s lawyers wrote.
“For many South Carolinians, the interest comes from a strong desire to see justice served to a well-connected man who has only recently acknowledged lies and abuses of power that long went unchecked,” Murdaugh’s lawyers wrote, quoting a 2023 article in the Los Angeles Times.
In a January public hearing, circuit Judge Jean Toal heard allegations of jury tampering by Hill, but ruled that any evidence of jury tampering was harmless and not sufficient enough to show that jurors were improperly swayed. Toal also found that there was “overwhelming” evidence of Murdaugh’s guilt. Toal, a respected jurist, is a retired chief justice of the S.C. Supreme Court.
In their motion, Murdaugh’s attorneys argued that not only was Hill’s jury tampering improper, and that at least one juror had been swayed, but also that Toal’s decision was contrary to a landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Remmer vs. United States . That decision held that any contact with jurors touching on the merits of a case is serious and grounds for a mistrial.
But during January’s hearing, Toal said that a 2020 S.C. Supreme Court decision, State v. Green, directed state courts to ignore the jury tampering standard set by the Remmer case.
During the hearing, three jurors testified they heard Hill talking about the case.
One juror said he heard Hill tell jurors — before Murdaugh took the witness stand to testify in his own defense — “to watch his body language.” That remark did not affect his verdict, he said.
A second juror testified she heard Hill say it was rare for a defendant to testify in a criminal case. The remark had no influence on her verdict, she said.
A third juror said she heard Hill say to “watch Murdaugh’s actions and to watch him carefully.”
Elaborating, the third juror testified, “To me, it made it seem like he was already guilty.” It did influence her decision to find Murdaugh guilty of the two murder charges, she said.
Murdaugh, 56, once a prominent South Carolina lawyer and member of a powerful legal dynasty, was convicted in March 2023 by a Colleton County jury of murdering his wife, Maggie, and son Paul at their rural estate in June 2021. The trial lasted six weeks. The jury heard from more than 70 witnesses and deliberated a little more than an hour before finding Murdaugh guilty.
He is now serving two consecutive life sentences at the S.C. Department of Corrections.
After the trial, Murdaugh’s attorneys — Dick Harpootlian, Jim Griffin, Phil Barber and Margaret Fox — interviewed jurors and filed motions alleging Hill had improperly influenced jurors to deliver a quick guilty verdict because Hill was trying to hype sales of a book she published a few months after the trial called “Behind the Doors of Justice.”
Hill used her position as clerk of court to gather insider information about the trial, the attorneys alleged. Clerks of court supervise the care and feeding of jurors during trials and are in close contact with them.
Hill’s book was withdrawn from publication last winter after it was discovered that she plagiarized key sections from a draft of a story by a veteran BBC reporter. Hill later resigned from her office and now faces numerous ethics charges that she misused her office for personal gain.
Before the book was withdrawn, Hill and her co-author, Neil Gordon, made more than $100,000 from its sales, she said when testifying at the January hearing. Gordon had nothing to do with the plagiarism and, in fact, exposed the literary theft to the news media when he learned of it.
Murdaugh’s attorneys said it’s not only the law that demands a new trial for their client. Rather, “common sense says that when an elected state official goes into the jury room during a murder trial to advocate for a guilty verdict because she wants to make money selling books about the guilty verdict, the result should be a mistrial,” they wrote.
During the January hearing, a fellow clerk of court, Rhonda McElveen of Barnwell County, testified that she heard Hill on several occasions say that she wanted a guilty verdict to pump up sales of her book.
“She said we might want to write a book because she needed a lake house, and I needed to retire, and from that, further conversation was that a guilty verdict would help sell books,” McElveen testified at the hearing.
Toal ruled that McElveen’s testimony was credible and that Hill, who had denied she was trying to promote book sales, was not to be believed.
The jury tampering matter is just one avenue of appeal for Murdaugh’s murder sentences and convictions. A separate appeal raising other issues in the murder case is expected to be filed in the S.C. Court of Appeals later this summer.
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