South Carolina’s highest court has thrown out Alex Murdaugh’s murder verdict, vacated his two life sentences and ordered a new trial after finding that the clerk of court’s conduct tainted the jury process. The ruling wipes away the conviction that sent him to prison for killing his wife, Maggie, and their son, Paul, at Moselle on March 2, 2023.
The case is back in motion now because the court concluded that the verdict could not stand once Becky Hill’s conduct was weighed against what jurors said happened inside the courthouse. In its view, the interference was not a side issue. It went to the integrity of the trial itself, and that is why the conviction fell earlier this month.
Jurors said Hill told them not to be fooled by Murdaugh when he took the stand. One juror recalled her saying, “Y’all are going to hear things that will throw you all off,” and, “Don’t let this distract you or mislead you.” Others said she urged them to “watch his body language,” “look at his actions” and “look at his movements.” Juror Z went further, writing in an affidavit that she had questions about Mr. Murdaugh’s guilt but that Hill “made it seem like he was already guilty” and that she “felt influenced to find Mr. Murdaugh guilty by reason of Ms. Hill’s remarks, before I entered the jury room.”
That finding landed with added force because Jean H. Toal, who presided over a post-trial hearing two years ago, had already said Hill was not completely credible. Even so, Toal declined Murdaugh’s motion for a retrial then, deciding Hill’s interferences had not affected the verdict. The new ruling draws the opposite line. It says the misconduct was serious enough to undo the result, and it describes Hill’s effort to undermine the jury process as unprecedented in South Carolina.
Murdaugh remains incarcerated at McCormick Correctional Institution on financial crimes that were not vacated, so the ruling does not put him free. But it does reopen one of the state’s most closely watched criminal cases and leaves prosecutors to decide how to try the murder counts again without the verdict that once looked final. Hill was later disciplined with charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and misconduct, but prosecutors did not charge her with jury tampering, a gap that now hangs over the next phase of the case.
The legal battle that began after the deaths of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh has shifted again, and this time the conviction itself is gone. What remains is a new trial, a defendant already serving time on other crimes, and a question that now matters more than it did before: how quickly the state can put the case back in front of a jury that has not already been touched by this one.
