Nearly three years after the South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh was sentenced to life in prison for the murders of his wife and son, his lawyers will argue to the state’s top court on Wednesday that his murder convictions should be tossed out.
The South Carolina Supreme Court’s five justices will hear arguments from Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers on issues that the defense says are serious enough to warrant a new trial.
It is a long-shot effort that has been strengthened by revelations about the unethical behavior of a court clerk — who resigned in disgrace and was convicted of perjury — and the trial judge’s decision to allow testimony about Mr. Murdaugh’s embezzlement into his murder trial.
It represents one of the last options for recourse for Mr. Murdaugh’s high-powered legal team. If the court does not order a new trial, Mr. Murdaugh would be forced to seek review in the federal courts.
Mr. Murdaugh, 58, has admitted to stealing millions of dollars from former clients and his law firm, but he has insisted — tearfully testifying at his trial — that he did not kill his wife and son. Even if the murder convictions were thrown out, he would continue to be imprisoned on a 40-year sentence for the financial crimes.
But his lawyer, Dick Harpootlian, said that the appeal is about more than vacating the life sentence.
“He insists that he did not kill his wife and child, and he wants the world to know that,” Mr. Harpootlian said. “And the way that you get that is a new trial.”
The courtroom in Columbia, S.C., is expected to be packed with news media, police officers, lawyers and members of the public who have closely followed the case, but Mr. Murdaugh will not be in attendance.
The saga of the “Murdaugh murders,” as they have come to be known in the true crime community, reached its apex in 2023, when Mr. Murdaugh was convicted of fatally shooting his wife, Maggie, 52, and oldest son, Paul, 22, on the family’s hunting estate in a rural patch of South Carolina known as the Lowcountry.
The case drew enormous attention almost immediately after the murders took place, in June 2021. The Murdaugh family has a long history in the region, having run 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 double murder went unsolved for more than a year, but questions about Mr. Murdaugh continued to mount. Family members said he did not seem interested in the search for his wife and son’s killer, and his family’s law firm eventually forced him to resign after determining that he had stolen from the firm, one of several issues that led to his disbarment.
Mr. Murdaugh then hatched a bizarre plot in which he asked a distant cousin to shoot him in the head on the side of a road in what he claimed at the time was an attempt to collect life insurance money for his surviving son as his life was unraveling. He survived.
No clear motive for the murders emerged, though prosecutors contended during his trial that he had shot his wife and son to earn sympathy from those around him and halt the growing inquiries into his questionable financial dealings.
Jurors who sat through the nearly six-week trial deliberated for less than three hours before convicting him on two counts of murder and two related gun charges.
Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers have long maintained that the trial judge, Clifton Newman, should not have allowed evidence about Mr. Murdaugh’s myriad financial crimes, saying in court documents filed with the current appeal that their only connection to the murder case was through the prosecution’s “illogical, implausible” theory about Mr. Murdaugh’s motive. Testimony about those financial crimes, Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers argue, unfairly prejudiced the jury.
They also argue that Judge Newman made other errors, including by allowing what the lawyers described as inaccurate or poorly corroborated testimony by two police officers, and by letting prosecutors introduce into evidence four guns found at the Murdaugh home — none of which were shown to be the murder weapon.
Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers are also basing their petition for a new trial on the behavior of a court clerk, Becky Hill, who managed the jury.
Some jurors later said that Ms. Hill had made comments to them about the case, with one saying that her remarks — telling some of the jurors that they should watch Mr. Murdaugh closely — had influenced her decision to find Mr. Murdaugh guilty. Most of the 12 jurors who decided the case said they did not remember Ms. Hill discussing the case, while two said that they had heard a comment or two from her about the case but that the comments had not affected their decision.
Judge Jean Toal heard testimony from the jurors and Ms. Hill in January 2024 and said that while it appeared that Ms. Hill had indeed made “fleeting and foolish” comments during the trial, they were not problematic enough to require a new trial. Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers have said that Judge Toal applied the wrong legal standard and should have overturned the verdict.
Ms. Hill has denied tampering with the jury and was never criminally charged with doing so. She did plead guilty in December to four other crimes, the most serious of which was perjury, for lying about showing crime scene photographs to reporters that were supposed to be sealed from the public.
The state attorney general’s office, arguing against a new trial, noted that nine jurors had told a judge hearing Mr. Murdaugh’s initial challenge that they had not heard Ms. Hill make any comments and had based their verdict on the evidence and testimony presented at trial.
“The state is not arguing that Hill’s comments were appropriate. They were not,” the state wrote in a brief signed by the attorney general, Alan Wilson, who is now running for governor in South Carolina as a Republican. But it argued they were not prejudicial in a way that would warrant a new trial.
The state also defended the trial judge’s decision to allow evidence of Mr. Murdaugh’s financial crimes, arguing that while jurors might not have been allowed to consider it to judge his character, they could have legally weighed it as evidence of a possible motive.
And it said the judge was correct in allowing the guns found on the property to be admitted, noting that prosecutors had never claimed that they were used in the murders; rather, they were evidence of the widespread availability of firearms at the Murdaugh property, which was a hunting estate.
“The verdict in this case was the product of six intense weeks of trial,” the state said. “There was superb advocacy on both sides. An eminent trial judge presided over the proceedings. No rational juror could have received the evidence in this case and concluded Appellant was not guilty.”
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports for The Times on national stories across the United States with a focus on criminal justice.
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