Convicted SC killer Alex Murdaugh files appeal of double murder conviction
A long-awaited appeal for convicted double murderer Alex Murdaugh was filed Tuesday in the South Carolina Supreme Court.
In the 132-plus page brief, Murdaugh’s lawyers lay out two main prongs of attack they say should be grounds for granting Murdaugh a new trial:
First, they allege that former Colleton County clerk of court Becky Hill, a state official, improperly swayed one or more jurors to vote to find Murdaugh guilty. Hill’s intrusion “infected the trial with unfairness” and denied Murdaugh his right to a fair trial by an impartial jury, they argue.
Second, they allege that the extensive information about Murdaugh’s financial crimes that state Judge Clifton Newman allowed the jury to hear about from 10 witnesses unfairly prejudiced the jury against Murdaugh (Murdaugh had not pleaded guilty to the crimes at that point). Those 10 witnesses testified “over a span of six days” about various Murdaugh financial crimes that involved 19 victims and $9 million, the brief said.
Allowing financial evidence into the trial that reflected badly on Murdaugh’s character violated longstanding norms that in a criminal case, the jury should only be “presented with evidence relevant to the charged crimes,” the brief said.
During the trial, prosecutors were allowed to call witnesses — including victims of Murdaugh’s financial crimes who knew nothing about the murder — to testify about millions of dollars in thefts from his clients and his law firm.
Those witnesses included lawyer Chris Wilson, once Murdaugh’s best friend, who testified how Murdaugh had betrayed him and cheated him out of $192,000. Murdaugh law firm chief financial officer Jeanne Seckinger told how Murdaugh had lied to her about the whereabouts of missing money he should have turned into the the law firm. Tony Satterfield, son of the late Gloria Satterfield, gave evidence about how Murdaugh had concocted a scheme to divert $4 million in insurance proceeds from Satterfield’s rightful heirs to himself and another lawyer.
In short, long before the jury began deliberating whether Murdaugh had committed murder, jurors learned that Murdaugh was a sophisticated criminal without a conscience who would easily lie while he stole from those who trusted him most, whether they were his longtime law partners, his family or his clients, many of whom were hapless souls who needed the money he won for them in legal settlements. The jury did not only hear the incriminating testimony, Murdaugh took the stand and admitted to the jury he’d been long-practicing liar and thief with a trail of victims, but he insisted he did not kill his wife and son.
“The State was improperly permitted to introduce evidence of Murdaugh’s alleged financial crimes solely to impugn his character to bolster its otherwise weak case,” Murdaugh’s attorneys wrote.
The brief attacked decisions by two judges: Judge Newman, who oversaw Murdaugh’s murder trial, and Judge Jean Toal, a former S.C. Supreme Court chief justice, who oversaw a hearing where the jury tampering allegations were aired. Both Newman and Toal are widely respected, and it may be a heavy lift to ask the Supreme Court to overturn their decisions.
The filing is the latest move in a case that shocked and riveted South Carolina and the world with its unexpected twists and fatal blend of violence, family dysfunction, big money, small towns and white collar crime.
In places, the brief also launched a broad attack on much of the forensic evidence presented at trial, which Murdaugh’s attorneys said was improperly admitted and “failed to link Alex to Maggie and Paul’s murder.”
Investigators failed to take basic steps, like collecting fingerprints from parts of the murder scene or properly securing Maggie’s cellphone and allowing location data to be overwritten, Murdaugh’s attorneys allege.
They also argue that prosecutors connected Murdaugh to the killings through unreliable and flawed forensic evidence, including the ballistic analysis used to match the family’s guns to the murder weapons and the testimony of a sheriff’s deputy who performed unproven experiments on Maggie’s cellphone, tossing it repeatedly to see if the screen turned on.
The brief was submitted to the State Supreme Court nearly two years after the five-week Murdaugh murder trial, which began in January 2023 and ended in early March of that year. Murdaugh was sentenced to life in prison for shooting and killing his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul.
The trial was followed by millions on television, social media and mainstream media. It has spawned more than half a dozen books and numerous documentaries and podcasts.
The delay in filing the appeal caused in part by the time it took to prepare a 6,000-page transcript of the six-week trial and by an appeal Murdaugh’s lawyers made to the S.C. Court of Appeals on the alleged jury tampering issue.
The delay was also due in part to a pause put on the normal appeals process while Murdaugh’s attorneys attempted to win him a new trial following bombshell allegations that Becky Hill, the clerk of court who served on his trial, tampered with the jury. That attempt failed.
Normally, appeals in non-death penalty murder cases are first heard by the Court of Appeals. But in this case, Murdaugh’s attorneys sought and received permission from the Supreme Court to appeal directly to the high court.
The State Attorney General’s office now has 30 days to file a reply. However, due to the holidays, and the complexity of the issues, the Supreme Court will probably grant an extension if prosecutors request one.
Murdaugh was convicted in March 2023 of murdering his wife and son in what prosecutors argued was a cold-blooded attempt to distract suspicion from the looming threat of public disclosure that the attorney had stolen millions of dollars from his clients and his family’s 110-year-old law firm. His trial and conviction was a stunning downfall for a fourth-generation member of a prominent South Carolina legal and political family. Prosecutors contended Murdaugh was a special kind of killer — “a family annihilator,” a person who turns to murder when threatened with exposure of his double life.
The murders took place on June 7, 2021, at the dog kennels on the 1,700-acre Murdaugh family estate, called Moselle, just after nightfall, in rural Colleton County. Maggie was killed with an assault rifle; Paul, by a shotgun. No weapons were ever recovered.
Murdaugh, 56, who is serving two life sentences without parole for murder in a S.C. prison, claims he is innocent and that someone else did the killing.
Jury Tampering?
In the appeal, Murdaugh’s attorneys have revived their arguments about Hill tampering with the jury, stating that the hearing judge, Toal, made a serious mistake when she determined that Hill’s actions did not prejudice the outcome of the trial. Hill was accused of telling members of the jury to closely watch Murdaugh’s actions and body language while he testified in his own defense.
“It felt like she [Hill] made it seem like he [Murdaugh] was already guilty,” testified one juror, given the alias Juror Z, at a hearing on Hill’s actions held before before Toal in January.
Juror Z was one of three jurors who said they heard Hill making statements about Murdaugh but the only juror to say that it prejudiced her verdict.
Hill, who gained a small measure of celebrity during the trial, was accused of encouraging the jury to doubt Murdaugh’s testimony, pressuring the jury to reach a quick verdict and working to ensure a juror who had indicated that she was not convinced of Murdaugh’s guilt be dismissed.
Her goal, Murdaugh’s attorneys argued, was to ensure Murdaugh’s conviction in order to drive sales of a book she planned to write about the trial so that she could make enough money to retire and buy a lake house, according to one witness.
In August 2023, Hill published the book, “Behind the Doors of Justice,” which offered an insider’s look at the trial, a position in which she oversaw the jury and had confidential conversations with the judge. But the book also contained claims that she was certain of Murdaugh’s guilt from the start and it angered some members of the jury, who refuted some of her claims. While Hill said she made roughly $100,000 from sales of the book, it was later withdrawn from publication after she admitted plagiarizing passages from a BBC’s reporter’s article.
While Hill denied the charges against her, Toal found that the clerk of court was “attracted by the siren call of celebrity” and “not completely credible.”
But Toal declined to grant Murdaugh a new trial.
In her ruling, Toal opted to use a legal standard drawn from a South Carolina case titled State v. Green, which held that held that there was no presumption that Hill’s actions prejudiced the jury and it was the defendant’s obligation to prove otherwise.
But in their motion, as in court in January, Murdaugh’s attorneys attacked the court’s use of this Green case. The trial court “abused its discretion,” Murdaugh’s attorneys said, in applying an “erroneous standard of its own invention” over a standard drawn from a U.S,. Supreme Cout case known as Remmer v. United States, which holds that as an officer of the state Hill’s actions are assumed to be harmful to the defendant and that prosecutors are required to prove otherwise.
“Secret advocacy for a guilty verdict in the jury room during a criminal trial by a state official is a structural error in the trial that cannot be harmless,” Murdaugh’s attorney’s wrote.
In March, Hill resigned from her position as the elected clerk of court and has been facing ethics and criminal investigations into jury tampering and allegations that she abused her position for financial gain.
Sloppy police work?
From the outset of the murders, investigators focused attention on only one suspect – Alex – despite other evidence indicating there were other, unidentified suspects, the brief argued.
That other evidence included: Maggie had DNA from an unidentified person under her fingertips, and the S.C. Law Enforcement Division did not submit this to a national DNA database. Neither did SLED attempt to lift fingerprint evidence from the door area where Paul was killed. And SLED failed to conduct methodical searches of the Moselle house or his mother’s house, where Alex was the night of the crime, the brief asserted.
“Most significantly, SLED allowed the location data from Maggie’s cell phone to be overwritten after SLED recovered the phone. Maggie’s phone was found approximately one-half mile from the Moselle property about 15 feet off the shoulder of the road in a wooded area. Whoever tossed the phone to this location was evidently present when Maggie was murdered and took the phone from her dead body,” the brief said.
Crucial location data from Maggie’s cell phone was lost because SLED failed to put the phone in a Faraday bag – a container that blocks a cell phone’s GPS signals, the brief said.
Thus, when SLED finally extracted data from Maggie’s phone, eight days after it was recovered, the location data from the night of the murders had been overwritten and erased because it only went back six days, the brief said.
Maggie’s cell phone
Prosecutors were also improperly allowed to introduce “evidence of a nonscientific experiment performed by an unqualified Charleston County deputy,” Paul McManigal, the brief said.
McManigal, one of the last witnesses for the prosecution, testified he had deliberately shaken and thrown a phone similar to Maggie’s cell phone to compare its illumination action with the kind of jolt a phone being thrown out of a car on the night of the murders might have received, the brief said.
Prosecutors contended McManigal’s testimony bolstered their theory of the case: that Alex could have thrown Maggie’s phone out his car window without the phone’s screen light turning on. The phone was later discovered by the side of a rural road outside Moselle.
The deputy’s experiment was intended to rebut the defense’s argument that a detailed timeline of events that night showing that the movements of Alex’s car were not consistent with activity on Maggie’s phone, which showed that the phone screen did not activate at the time that Murdaugh drove past the location where it was found. The inconsistent times would have made it impossible for Murdaugh to throw the phone from his moving car, the defense contended.
But not only was McManigal’s “experiment” unscientific, he didn’t keep a record, defense lawyers asserted.
“If the State sincerely wanted to know whether the screen of an iPhone would come on if the phone is thrown from a moving car, the State could have asked someone knowledgeable at Apple,” the brief said.
“Sgt. McManigal’s testimony was extremely prejudicial, and its erroneous admission was therefore reversible error,” the brief said.
Collectively, the judge’s decision to admit substandard evidence violated Murdaugh’s right to due process of law and rendered his defense less persuasive than it otherwise might have been, the brief said.
Defense lawyers on Murdaugh’s brief include Dick Harpootlian, Jim Griffin, Phil Barber, Andrew Hand and Maggie Fox.
This story was originally published December 10, 2024 at 4:37 PM.