She’s a judge.

He’s a crook.

Not just any crook but South Carolina’s most notorious criminal, convicted of major financial crimes and facing a retrial in an infamous double-murder case.

She'll preside at that retrial.

But long before the name of Alex Murdaugh became a synonym for villainy, the paths of Judge Debra McCaslin and the accused killer crossed at the University of South Carolina School of Law where they were students. They no doubt knew each other, or at least knew of each other.

“Everybody knew who everybody was. It was a small law school, the only one in the state. You knew the people in the two classes ahead of you, and the two classes behind you,” said Columbia attorney Alex Postic, who was in the same law school class as Murdaugh and also knew McCaslin. (Back then, and for much of her career, McCaslin went by the name of Debbie Chapman, after her first husband.)

McCaslin was class of 1993. Murdaugh was right behind her, class of 1994.

She smoked cigarettes back then and friends say she still has a hoarseness in her voice from years of smoking. Murdaugh was a tall gangly fellow who was good at schmoozing.

They couldn’t be more different.

She grew up, one of six children, in a small rural community, and worked her way through college. She was the first in her family to go to law school. An early marriage before law school foundered because of her then husband’s “habitual drunkenness,” according to her biographical information she gave to a judicial screening commission. She is around 66.

Murdaugh had it easy: He was a fourth-generation member of a wealthy and powerful Lowcountry legal dynasty. While he was anointed by family to a lawyer’s life of big money and big cases and dealmaking, she hustled to make connections and by dint of hard work proved her chops in federal as well as state court, in appellate work and in the courtroom trial arena of He is 58.

No one knows what a judge is thinking, but it is possible that McCaslin has reflected, perhaps more than once, on how strange life is, where Murdaugh, her privileged former law school fellow student, has wound up before her charged with killing his wife, Maggie, and son Paul. That’s not to mention the dozens of financial crimes to which Murdaugh has pleaded guilty in, thefts totalling millions of dollars from clients, his law firm and even his family.

And should he be found guilty, she will pronounce his sentence.

Connections count

The intersection of the judge’s and the defendant’s lives is just one illustration of the semicozy nature of South Carolina’s legal universe — a world where everyone seems to have at most one or two degrees of separation from everyone else, either through family, social or legal or law school connections.

Another connection: McCaslin has a link to Dick Harpootlian, the most colorful of all Murdaugh’s five lawyers.

McCaslin met Harpootlian — a quick-with-a-quote former prosecutor, former state senator and Democratic operative — early in her career. She was impressed enough with him to regard him as a role model. Harpootlian was one of only three older lawyers who she put in that category.

“I can tell you he is a great trial lawyer,” McCaslin said about Harpootlian’s trial skills while being interviewed by the Judicial Merit Selection Commission in 2019 as she sought a state judge’s post for the first time. They worked together defending video poker owners, whose addictive machines that raked in millions of dollars were being seized by law enforcement.

Judges don’t usually talk with the media; McCaslin is not giving interviews.

In fact, the S.C. Supreme Court has basically ordered her not to speak to reporters. “Judge McCaslin will not participate in interviews or offer comment on any aspect of the case,” according to a high court directive.

Consequently, two interviews that McCaslin had with the Judicial Merit Selection Commission — one in 2019 and the other in 2025 — as her first six-year term was expiring — will likely be the source of much of what people know about McCaslin from her own lips between now and April 5, when Murdaugh’s retrial is scheduled to get underway. The commission screens judicial applicants.

At the 2019 screening hearing, McCaslin mentioned two other lawyers she met early on in her career she regarded as role models: Columbia attorneys Pete Strom and Leigh Leventis.

Strom taught her how to “quote a fee,” McCaslin said, describing a term for how defense lawyers use to decide how much money to charge a client, an assessment based on the difficulty of the case, the nature of the client and how much the client can afford to pay.

On agreeing to take a client, defense lawyers usually name a one-time upfront fee to carry them through trial or a guilty plea; consequently, an important skill for a lawyer is knowing what to charge in order to make a profit. Strom is known for charging ample fees that clients will accept.

Strom also taught her, by his example, to keep up with her law office’s expenses and to work hard, she said.

As for Leventis, he taught her to be kind to people and attend to details in relationships. “He taught me to dot my I’s, cross my T’s; if I see an officer, I need to ask about his children. I get along with both sides. I think I have a very good rapport with them,” she said.

Hell’s Angels and DUIs

In her 2019 appearance before the judicial selection panel, McCaslin stressed her experience as a defense lawyer.

“I can tell you I have tried so many cases. I’ve tried DUIs in a barn in Lancaster. I’ve argued cases in the 4th Circuit (Court of Appeals). I think I’ve had like 43 briefs I’ve written for the 4th Circuit over the past 26 years. I think I’ve argued there six times. I’ve done murder. I’ve done high profile cases. I represented a family court judge. I represented the Hells Angels. Oh, I did the church burning cases,” McCaslin told the panel.

McCaslin also told the panel her favorite judge was U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie, a respected jurist now approaching 80 and still on the bench. Last year, Currie received national publicity when she threw out criminal cases brought by President Donald Trump’s Justice Department against two of Trump’s political foes.

“She’s smart as a whip,” McCaslin said of Currie. “She’s even-keeled. I think she’s made me a better lawyer today. She’s always courteous and treats you with respect. Just a great judge. And I can promise you my preparedness and knowledge, half the battle, I learned that from her.

How McCaslin got into law

At the hearing, Strom — then a member of the Judicial Merit Selection Commission — told a story about how McCaslin got her start.

After high school she was working in the Red and White grocery store in Chapin outside Columbia as a 17-year-old cashier. In walks the late U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond, then out campaigning and likely in his 70s. Almost immediately, Thurmond — famous for creating and maintaining political networks — recognized that McCaslin had a spark of talent.

“He offered her a job in Charleston. And she moved to Charleston, worked full time and went to the College of Charleston,” Strom said. In her job, she worked with federal judges — Thurmond being a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee — and the judges decided that she needed to go to law school, Strom said at the hearing.

“Those judges raised the money for her books. I remember somebody else bought her a computer,” Strom said.

The judges made sure that lawyers they knew hired McCaslin to work as a law clerk, said Strom, explaining he was one of those lawyers who got a call requesting he hire McCaslin as a clerk while she was in law school.

Leventis, the Columbia lawyer who gave McCaslin her first job after law school in the 1990s, offers a clue as to what big-time politicians and judges saw in her and how she turned out as a lawyer.

“She was always moving. I hate to use the word ‘hustled’ — but she worked hard. She was never a nine-to-five lawyer. And she had tons of personality. She’s always happy, always enthusiastic. You feel good around her. When she started practicing law, she had confidence but not arrogance. And she was comfortable in any situation with all elements of society,” Leventis said.

Also, said Leventis: “She doesn’t like to leave anything undone.”

‘You can sit down now, Mr. Murdaugh’

Leventis said McCaslin’s firm but understated way of doing things was on display at the first Murdaugh pretrial hearing on June 22 at the Lexington County courthouse, a hearing broadcast by Court TV. Although many court hearings start late (the joke is, “When does court start? When the judge gets here”), this hearing started almost exactly when McCaslin said it would — at 10 a.m.

During the hourlong hearing in a windowless fourth floor courtroom, McCaslin set a trial date of April 5. She did a lot of listening to the defense and prosecution. And she deferred decisions on matters such as where the trial would be held and what to do about DNA evidence the defense says it needs.

Only once did she speak to Murdaugh.

Toward the end of the hearing, Harpootlian had Murdaugh stand to show the judge how many chains he was wearing. “This guy’s not a serial killer,” Harpootlian told McCaslin as he argued that if video and photographic images of Murdaugh in chains and jump suit were widely circulated, that would prejudice potential jurors.

After 15 seconds of Murdaugh standing, McCaslin said in a low voice as Harpootlian talked on, “You can sit down now, Mr. Murdaugh.”

Murdaugh sat.

McCaslin also revealed that she had contacted the warden of the high security state prison where Murdaugh is being held to gather information pertaining to letting him have access to a laptop computer holding tens of thousands of pages of evidence and transcripts from the first trial. The S.C. Supreme Court overturned Murdaugh’s double-murder conviction in May, saying that improper jury tampering by a clerk of court had denied him a fair trial.

McCaslin also brought a checklist of items she wanted to air and ticked them off methodically. A dozen or so burly officers from the state prison and local law enforcement were stationed around the courtroom.

“She was in control, it was her courtroom, but she was respectful, kind and nice to everybody. She gave everybody a chance to say what they wanted to say, and at the end of the day, she told everybody what was going to happen. She was in control, but not with an iron hand,” said Leventis, who watched the hearing on Court TV.

The ‘client whisperer’

Jim May, a former federal prosecutor, said McCaslin was known for having a great way with difficult clients. Federal Judge Joe Anderson would assign McCaslin as a court-appointed attorney to problem defendants who had gone through several lawyers, May said

“She could connect with difficult clients better than anyone else,” said May, now in private practice in Columbia. “She had the ability to get through when other lawyers could not. A lot of clients have issues with government-paid lawyers because the clients think the lawyers are just a shill for the government,” May said. “Her clients really trusted her.”

An ability to get along with hard to manage clients earned her the nickname “client whisperer,” McCaslin told her 2019 judicial panel.

At that hearing, McCaslin summed herself up this way: “I hope I’m judge material. I’d like to think I am. I do think I am. You know, what else would you want other than somebody who would sit and listen to you, who at least knows the law, can research. But I think listening to most people is probably the most important thing. And treating them with respect. And I can do that.”

In the Spotlight

Murdaugh Judge Debra McCaslin: a bona fide member of SC’s close-knit legal tribe

Get one year of unlimited digital access for $159.99

#ReadLocal