Richard Alexander Murdaugh, the disbarred South Carolina attorney found guilty in 2023 of murdering his wife and son, won his bid Wednesday to overturn his conviction and get a new trial over comments the county clerk made to jurors.
The Colleton County clerk “egregiously attacked Murdaugh’s credibility and his defense, thus triggering the presumption of prejudice, which the State was unable to rebut,” the South Carolina Supreme Court said in a per curiam opinion.
“Our justice system provides—indeed demands—that every person is entitled to a fair trial, which includes an impartial jury untainted by external forces bent on influencing the jury toward a biased verdict,” the justices said.
Murdaugh’s trial garnered national media attention, and was the subject of a Netflix documentary and several true crime podcasts. He was sentenced to life in prison in March 2023. He will not be released from jail while awaiting a new trial: Murdaugh is serving a 40-year sentence for financial crimes, including insurance fraud.
Clerk’s Comments
Murdaugh alleged roughly six months after his trial that Colleton County Clerk of Court Rebecca Hill made comments to jurors that influenced their guilty verdict.
Murdaugh said Hill told the jury before he testified “not to be fooled” by the evidence presented by Murdaugh’s counsel and to watch his body language. Murdaugh also accused Hill of pressuring jurors to return a quick guilty verdict and misrepresenting information to the trial court when trying to remove a juror Hill believed favored the defense.
The post-trial court found that although Hill made improper comments to the jurors the day Murdaugh testified and that her denial wasn’t credible, the court determined none of the comments affected any juror’s verdict and denied Murdaugh’s bid for a new trial. The comments were limited and only heard by a few jurors, and the trial court’s extensive instructions cured any impact from the comments, the post-trial court said.
But “prejudice is presumed from Hill’s comments,” and while that presumption is rebuttable, the state failed to overcome it, the state’s Supreme Court said. By urging the jurors not to be fooled by Murdaugh’s defense, she “essentially implored the jurors to find him guilty.”
There’s no reason to find Hill didn’t make all of the comments the jurors said she did, the high court said. Testimony and affidavits from the jurors about Hill’s comments are consistent, and are also “strikingly similar” to comments Hill made to other staff members and the media while away from the jury. Her attempt to insert herself in the jury’s deliberations was also “in line with her stated desire for a guilty verdict to sell more copies of the book she planned to write,” the justices said.
Although the state produced considerable evidence, its case “rested largely on circumstantial evidence, and Murdaugh’s credibility was a key component of his defense.” Hill’s comments challenging his credibility “directly undermined that defense,” and her interference with the jury “went to the heart of the case and unquestionably was intended to push the jury to a guilty verdict,” the court said.
Richard A. Harpootlian PA and Griffin Humphries LLC represent Murdaugh.
Photo: Alex Murdaugh in 2023. (Joshua Boucher/The State/Tribune News Service/Getty Images)
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