After Supreme Court win, Murdaugh attorneys in no hurry to return to trial
The attorneys for Alex Murdaugh are celebrating a sweeping victory in the S.C. Supreme Court that wiped away their client’s conviction of murdering his wife and son. But they’re not in a hurry to get the case back before a jury.
Despite calls by S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson to retry Murdaugh on murder charges before the year is out, defense attorney Dick Harpootlian said the logistical issues will likely delay a retrial in the case for much longer.
“No way this gets to trial this year,” Harpootlian told The State in an interview. “We have no judge assigned yet, the venue issue still needs to be worked out. We’re basically halfway through the year already. It’s never going to happen.”
The attorney indicated Wilson, a candidate for governor, wants to rush the trial for political reasons. “The primary is four weeks away,” Harpootlian said. “So it’s political. It’s not based on the law or any reasonable logistical strategy.”
Wilson said at a press conference Wednesday he would “like to be involved” in the retrial, but recognized many actions related to the case could fall to the next attorney general. “It’s the job of the office to pursue this case. It’s not built on who the occupant is,” Wilson said.
Harpootlian said a retrial is more likely to take place toward the middle of next year, and indicated Murdaugh’s defense would try to move any trial out of Colleton County, where the actions of former county clerk of court Becky Hill “was illegally lobbying (the jurors), telling them (Murdaugh) wasn’t credible, that they can’t believe him.”
On Wednesday, the five justices of the state Supreme Court unanimously agreed with that assessment, finding that Hill “placed her fingers on the scales of justice, thereby denying Murdaugh his right to a fair trial by an impartial jury.” The ruling throws out Murdaugh’s 2023 conviction of murdering his wife, Maggie, and son Paul and means the charges have to be brought again in a new trial.
Harpootlian said he and co-counsel Jim Griffin had no inkling of misconduct during the trial itself, and it was only when they spoke to a juror afterward that they got wind of what Hill was saying behind the scenes. That sent the two “city boys,” as Harpootlian called them, on trips down the back roads of Colleton County to find other jurors and corroborating evidence against Hill.
“One lady told me, ‘if you’re not off my steps in two seconds, I’m calling the police and you’re going to jail,’” Harpootlian remembers. “But many of them were very nice and honest, not knowing that they were corroborating some of the issues we were told about from other jurors ... When we got one of the jurors, she was cooking collards on a Sunday afternoon before she left for Walmart for her shift, and she said some things about what Becky had said three months earlier.”
The attorneys had been awaiting the court’s decision for weeks, and Harpootlian said they sprung into action as soon as the order came down. The defense knows they need to push their client’s story and the issues surrounding the first trial into a national media spotlight that has followed and documented every aspect of Murdaugh’s story for years.
Both Griffin and Harpootlian were in New York for a series of network TV hits Thursday, and a phone interview with The State was cut short as the legal team went through security at Rockefeller Center for an appearance on NBC’s Today Show.
Griffin said a retrial gives the defense certain advantages. “You’ll have witnesses from the first trial and a transcript of what they said,” Griffin said. “So if they shade their testimony at all and try to be consistent, you can use that to cross-examine them.”
A new trial will also allow more things “to come to light, which we’re not ready to share,” Griffin said.
He couldn’t say whether a second trial would feature the most consequential witness from the first — Murdaugh himself, who testified for hours about his actions the day his wife and son were killed. Griffin said any appearance by Murdaugh on the witness stand a second time would be a “gameday decision.”
The Supreme Court decision also ensures a second trial will focus less on Murdaugh’s theft of millions of dollars from his clients and law partners. The justices agreed those crimes provided prosecutors with a plausible motive for the killings but said the amount of testimony in the first trial risked prejudicing the jury against Murdaugh.
“In the form it came in, it painted him as a monster before we even got to murder case,” Harpootlian said. “I think the jury was predisposed against him with (Hill’s) lobbying and prejudicial evidence.”
Griffin spoke by phone Wednesday with Murdaugh, who read the Supreme Court decision from a maximum security prison.
“He’s in disbelief, because every legal ruling has gone against him, in civil cases, in criminal cases,” Griffin said. “He said he got the order, he read the order, and he was still having a hard time believing it’s true. He’s very grateful to no longer be convicted of murdering his wife and son, which he did not do.”
Murdaugh will remain in prison during any retrial, serving a separate sentence for his financial crimes. But his lawyers this week shared that sense of relief, after three years of working assiduously to overturn one of the most notorious cases in South Carolina legal history.
“We were very gratified,” Harpootlian said. “One thing this decision says is that the rule of law is alive and well in South Carolina, even if it’s on life support elsewhere.”
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