Alex Murdaugh Could Get New Murder Trial After Major Development

Alex Murdaugh could get a new trial on murder charges after the South Carolina Supreme Court agreed to hear his jury tampering appeal.

The court could overturn a judge’s decision in January not to grant him a new trial — his legal team made that request in late 2023 because of allegations that former Colleton County Clerk Becky Hill prejudiced the jury. Murdaugh was convicted in March of last year in the 2021 murders of his wife, Maggie, and youngest son, Paul.

The disgraced South Carolina attorney was sentenced to life in prison for the killings. But his legal team believes Hill’s alleged interference in the case warrants a new trial.

They claim Hill asked jurors not to believe Murdaugh’s testimony and other defense evidence, while pressuring the jury to reach a quick verdict because a conviction would help boost sales of his self-published book about the trial. Hill vehemently denies the allegations.

Hill apologized in December after her book’s co-author accused her of plagiarism. She resigned from the Colleton County Courthouse earlier this year.

In January, former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Jean Toal ruled against Murdaugh’s request for a new trial, despite a juror testifying at an evidentiary hearing that Hill’s comments influenced her opinion of the case. While Toal disagreed with Murdaugh’s legal team that the jury was biased, she criticized Hill as someone who was “lured by the siren call of celebrity.”

Murdaugh’s attorneys wrote in their request for review by the state Supreme Court that the “legal principle of paramount importance is whether it is presumptively prejudicial for a state official to secretly argue for a guilty verdict through ex parte contact with jurors during trial, or whether a defendant, having proven that the contact occurred, must also somehow prove that the verdict would have been different in a hypothetical trial in which the surreptitious plea had not occurred,” according to CNN.

In an order signed Tuesday, the South Carolina Supreme Court justices agreed to hear the appeal.

In addition to his life sentence for murder, Murdaugh was also sentenced in November to 27 years in prison for state fraud and an additional 40 years in April for federal fraud.