COLUMBIA, S.C. — The South Carolina Supreme Court will consider convicted killer Alex Murdaugh's appeal of a decision earlier this year to deny him a new murder trial on allegations of jury tampering.
The court issued an order Tuesday stating they would take up the issue, granting a motion that his attorneys had made to them. The justices then gave Murdaugh 30 days to file his initial brief to the court. It's unclear when oral arguments might be heard.
Murdaugh was convicted in March of 2023 of shooting to death his wife, Maggie Murdaugh, and his adult son, Paul Murdaugh, at the family's rural estate in Colleton County in June of 2021. He was given two life sentences for the highly-publicized crime.
But months after the trial ended, Murdaugh's defense attorneys came forward to say they had evidence that there was jury tampering by the then Colleton County Clerk of Court Becky Hill, who was working the trial. The lawyers claims jurors told them Hill told them not to trust Murdaugh, They claimed she also pressured jurors to reach a quick verdict.
Those allegations ultimately led to a hearing last January presided over by Jean Toal, the former Chief Justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court. Toal had each juror come and speak to her one by one during the proceeding and asked them questions about their verdict. One member of jury testified that Hill made the comments and it indicated to her she thought Murdaugh was guilty. But the 11 other jurors said they based their guilty verdicts only on the testimony, evidence and law presented at trial, and just one mentioned hearing anything similar. She also interviewed Hill.
Toal admitted that she felt that Hill was not "completely credible" but that after reviewing the full transcript of the six-week trial, she couldn’t overturn the verdict based “on the strength of some fleeting and foolish comments by a publicity-seeking clerk of court.”
Utlimately, Toal went with a standard that said that Hill's comments had to have led to a juror changing their verdict to be considered as jury tampering. But in their arguments, the defense argued that if they proved the jury was tampered with, it shouldn't matter whether a juror openly said their verdict changed, because even subtle influence could have kept Murdaugh from getting a fair trial.
Hill later resigned her job as the clerk. She faces two open investigations by the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division: one of the probes involves alleged interactions she may have had with the jury in Murdaugh's trial, while the other involves allegations she used her position for personal gain.