South Carolina’s top court on Wednesday undid the murder convictions against Alex Murdaugh, the lawyer a jury had found guilty of murdering his wife and one of his sons in a trial that captivated the country.
In a unanimous opinion, the State Supreme Court said that “shocking jury interference” by a court clerk who oversaw jurors during the 2023 trial meant that Mr. Murdaugh’s convictions and life sentence must be overturned.
Mr. Murdaugh, 57, will remain in prison because he is also serving decades-long prison sentences after pleading guilty to stealing millions of dollars from his law firm and his former clients. While he has admitted to embezzlement, he has long maintained — including during testimony at his trial — that he did not kill his wife, Maggie, 52, and their younger son, Paul, 22.
The South Carolina attorney general’s office, which prosecuted the case, will retry Mr. Murdaugh for the killings.
Wednesday’s surprise reversal of Mr. Murdaugh’s murder convictions followed nearly five years of whirlwind drama that began in one of South Carolina’s least populous counties and grew to capture global attention. In the end, the trial — one of the highest profile in the state — was upended by a small-town clerk who could not resist injecting herself into the spectacle.
Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers hailed the decision on Wednesday. “Alex has said from Day 1 that he did not kill his wife and son,” the lawyers, Dick Harpootlian and Jim Griffin, said in a statement. “We look forward to a new trial conducted consistent with the Constitution.”
The Murdaugh murders, as they came to be known, took place in June 2021 on the Murdaugh family’s hunting estate, in a rural part of South Carolina’s Lowcountry.
The case, which went unsolved for more than a year before Mr. Murdaugh was arrested, drew enormous attention in part because of his family’s storied history in the region. The Murdaugh family ran a prosecutor’s office and a prominent law firm there for decades, and Paul Murdaugh at the time of his death had been facing charges of drunkenly crashing a boat, killing a teenage passenger.
The nearly six-week trial ended in March 2023. Among the central evidence at trial was a video taken by Mr. Murdaugh’s late son showing that Mr. Murdaugh was with his wife and son at the hunting estate’s dog kennels shortly before the two were killed there. Before the video emerged, Mr. Murdaugh had denied being at the kennels until later that night, when, he said, he discovered their bodies and called 911.
Jurors deliberated for less than three hours before finding him guilty. Prosecutors had described the murders as a desperate bid by Mr. Murdaugh to gain sympathy as his lies about drug use and theft were on the verge of being exposed.
But soon after his conviction, his legal team began to argue that the conduct of the Colleton County clerk of court, Becky Hill, who was in charge of logistics and other tasks relating to the jurors, had tainted the trial.
In testimony, some of the jurors said that Ms. Hill had made comments about Mr. Murdaugh’s testimony at trial, including that they should not be “fooled” by him and to watch his body language.
Ms. Hill, who had read the guilty verdicts when Mr. Murdaugh was convicted, later resigned from her job. In December, she was sentenced to probation after pleading guilty to misusing public funds and using her government job for personal gain by promoting her book about the trial.
In Wednesday’s ruling, the state’s five Supreme Court justices said that Ms. Hill had “placed her fingers on the scales of justice,” denying Mr. Murdaugh the right to a fair trial.
Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers had also argued that the trial judge, Clifton Newman, erred in allowing testimony about Mr. Murdaugh’s financial crimes in the murder trial.
While the State Supreme Court focused on Ms. Hill’s behavior in its ruling, the justices also wrote that Judge Newman “should have limited” the evidence that jurors heard about Mr. Murdaugh’s financial crimes.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports on stories across the United States, including natural disasters, protests, unsolved mysteries, high-profile criminal cases and more.
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