The South Carolina Supreme Court on Wednesday threw out Alex Murdaugh’s murder convictions for the deaths of his wife and son, ruling that the trial court clerk’s comments to jurors about his testimony robbed him of the right to an impartial jury. In a unanimous, unsigned 27-page opinion, the justices said Colleton County Clerk of Court Becky Hill “placed her fingers on the scales of justice” by suggesting jurors not be “fooled” or “convinced” by Murdaugh’s defense — conduct they said “egregiously attacked Murdaugh’s credibility” and denied him a fair trial.
Prosecutors immediately vowed to retry Murdaugh, who was found guilty in 2023 of killing his wife Maggie and younger son Paul outside their rural home in 2021. State Attorney General Alan Wilson said his office would seek a new trial “preferably sometime in 2026” and that no one is above the law, while his chief prosecutor Creighton Waters told a news conference, “You don’t hit a home run if you’re afraid to strike out.” The defense, meanwhile, welcomed the ruling. “Alex has said from day one that he did not kill his wife and son. We look forward to a new trial,” attorneys Dick Harpootlian and Jim Griffin said in a joint statement.
Hill’s comments came to light after several jurors reported that during the trial she told them to watch Murdaugh’s body language when he testified and not be fooled or confused by his answers. The Supreme Court wrote that by urging the panel “not to be fooled or convinced by Murdaugh’s defense, Hill essentially implored the jurors to find him guilty, the ultimate issue in the case.” The justices added that her remarks insinuated something suspicious about his decision to testify. “Our justice system provides — indeed demands — that every person is entitled to a fair trial,” the opinion stated.
The court traced Hill’s motivation to “the siren call of celebrity,” noting she had written a book about the trial titled Behind the Doors of Justice: The Murdaugh Murders that was later pulled from publication after plagiarism allegations. “As her book’s title suggests, it turns out Hill was quite busy behind the doors of justice, thwarting the integrity of the justice system she was sworn to protect and uphold,” the justices wrote. Hill pleaded guilty in December to lying about what she said and did during the trial, including showing graphic crime scene photos to several media members. Her attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
The high court also placed new limits on the evidence a retrial would hear. It held that extensive testimony about Murdaugh’s thefts from clients — many of them vulnerable or disabled — should largely be excluded because it could unfairly prejudice jurors who should be focused solely on whether he killed his family. Waters, the prosecutor, said he did not regret introducing that evidence in the first trial because if the jury had acquitted Murdaugh, the state could not try him again.
Murdaugh, 57, will remain imprisoned regardless of the murder retrial. He pleaded guilty to stealing roughly $12 million from clients and is currently serving a 40-year federal sentence concurrently with a 27-year state sentence for his financial crimes. His defense has consistently pointed to the lack of physical evidence tying him to the killings: no DNA or blood was found on Murdaugh or his clothes, and the powerful weapons used in the shootings were never recovered. Prosecutors, however, built their case around a video recovered from Paul Murdaugh’s phone, recorded minutes before the young man stopped using his device, in which Alex Murdaugh’s voice can be heard — contradicting his claim to investigators that he had not seen his wife and son for about an hour before the killings.
Attorney General Wilson, who is running as a Republican for South Carolina’s open governor’s seat this year, said politics would not influence his office’s prosecution. “The decision on whether to nor to purse this case is not going to be built on who the next occupant of my office” is, Wilson said. “It’s going to be built on should we seek justice or not.”