State prosecutors call Murdaugh legal team’s jury tampering charges ‘conspiracy theory’
South Carolina state prosecutors have launched a ferocious legal attack on Alex Murdaugh’s legal team’s allegations that Colleton County Clerk of Court Becky Hill engaged in jury tampering in the trial that in March found Murdaugh guilty of a double-murder.
“Never does the law permit highly motivated convicts to put their own jury on trial,” said a Tuesday filing in Colleton County state court signed by S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson and state prosecutors Creighton Waters, Don Zelenka and Johnny James.
Murdaugh has a “calculating, manipulative psyche,” the filing said.
The filing says agents from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division interviewed nine of the 12 jurors who deliberated on the Murdaugh murder case and found him guilty. Three of the jurors declined to be interviewed, the filing said.
“None of the jurors who were willingly interviewed with SLED reported feeling any pressure or influence to reach their verdict,” the filing said.
SLED also interviewed various Colleton County court staff in a position to have heard any improper comments, and none said they witnessed any improper “external influence on the jury.”
“Altogether, the allegations raised in the affidavits provided by Murdaugh can be explained as a combination of simple mistakes and, unfortunately, a non-credible affiant,” the prosecutors’ filing said.
“The greater weight of anticipated juror and court staff testimony is that Clerk Hill made no materially improper statements. ... Any evidentiary hearing (a hearing with witnesses) will only reaffirm that validity of his convictions for the murders of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh,” the filing said.
“Furthermore, even if Clerk Hill made any improper comments to the jury, the State has found no juror that will aver that anything Clerk Hill said or did influenced their verdict,” the filing said.
Murdaugh and his legal team are seeking a hearing to air allegations of jury tampering as a first step in winning a new trial.
Murdaugh, 55, was found guilty March 2 after a six-week jury trial in Colleton County. The jury deliberated less than three hours before finding Murdaugh guilty of killing his wife Maggie, 52, and son Paul, 22, at their family estate in rural Colleton County. There were no eyewitnesses to the shooting, and the murder weapons — Maggie was killed with an assault-type rifle, Paul, with a shotgun — have never been found.
Murdaugh, a disbarred lawyer and convicted embezzler who stole some $9 million from fellow lawyers and clients, is now serving two consecutive life sentences in state prison. Although admitting the thefts, he contends he is innocent of the murders.
The state’s 25-page response to the jury tampering allegations rejects the Murdaugh legal team’s bid for a new trial and calls one of the jury tampering allegations “a sweeping conspiracy theory about wholly irrelevant Facebook posts.”
Other Murdaugh allegations about jury tampering rely only one juror’s affidavit, the affidavit of another juror who was removed from the jury panel for “dishonestly concealing” improper communications, and two hearsay affidavits by a Murdaugh legal team paralegal, the prosecutors’ filing says.
Other highlights from Tuesday’s filing:
▪ A three-page affidavit from Colleton County Clerk of Court in which she denies every one of the approximately two dozen allegations of jury tampering against her. “I did not tell jurors ‘not to be fooled’ by the evidence presented by Alex Murdaugh’s lawyers,” she said in the affidavit.
▪ Assertions by prosecutors that if there is a hearing and jurors are questioned, a judge should do the questioning of the jurors and not lawyers. State Judge Clifton Newman presided over the case, but Murdaugh’s lawyers have asked the State Supreme Court to remove Newman from any future jury tampering hearing, alleging that Newman has a conflict since he was a witness to incidents in the jury tampering matter.
▪ It is not clear at this point whether Hill will have to take the witness stand and answer questions. But on no account should jurors be exposed to questioning by lawyers, the prosecutors wrote in their filing. “Needless exposure of jurors” to such questioning can only discourage “citizens from willingly participating in this duty.”
▪ Although most jurors interviewed by SLED said they did not hear Hill make any remarks to jurors about evidence, one juror said Hill said “watch Murdaugh’s body language,” another juror said Hill told jurors to watch body language in general, and another juror said Hill gave jurors a warning about “graphic material.” Another juror said it was prosecutor Creighton Waters who made a comment about body language.
▪ Judge Newman repeatedly cautioned jurors about their duty to make their verdict only from in-court evidence and not from anywhere else.
Murdaugh attorney Jim Griffin said Tuesday, “We have received the state’s filing and are reviewing it and will be submitting our response in a future court filing.”
This story was originally published November 7, 2023 at 12:00 PM.