South Carolina court orders new Alex Murdaugh murder trial after juror misconduct

The South Carolina Supreme Court has thrown out Alex Murdaugh’s murder convictions and ordered a new trial, saying former Colleton County Clerk of Court Mary Rebecca “Becky” Hill improperly influenced jurors and denied him a fair proceeding. The unanimous ruling put the focus on institutional trust, finding that Hill’s conduct happened outside the presence and knowledge of the trial judge and both sides’ lawyers.

Murdaugh was convicted on March 2, 2023, after a six-week trial that ended with jurors deliberating for about three hours before returning guilty verdicts in the killings of his wife, Margaret “Maggie” Murdaugh, 52, and son, Paul Murdaugh, 22. Their bodies were found on June 7, 2021, near the dog kennels at the family’s hunting estate in Colleton County, South Carolina, a crime scene that turned the case into a national obsession and fed documentaries and podcasts.

The high court said Hill’s conduct crossed a constitutional line. In language that sharpened the rebuke, the justices said she “egregiously attacked Murdaugh’s credibility” and “placed her fingers on the scales of justice.” Defense lawyers relied on juror affidavits saying Hill warned jurors not to be “fooled” or “misled” by the defense, a claim the court found serious enough to undo the verdicts.

The ruling also faulted the way the murder trial handled evidence from Murdaugh’s separate financial-crimes case. The justices said the trial judge went too far in allowing that evidence in, raising additional concerns that the murder trial had been exposed to material that could have affected the fairness of the proceedings. Murdaugh later pleaded guilty to stealing around $12 million from clients and is serving a 40-year federal sentence and a 27-year state sentence.

The reversal does not free him. South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said prosecutors will seek to retry Murdaugh as soon as possible, and Murdaugh remains imprisoned on the financial-crime sentences. The case had already passed through an earlier challenge when Judge Jean Toal denied his request for a new murder trial in 2024, making the Supreme Court’s ruling a major turn in one of South Carolina’s most closely watched criminal cases.

Becky Hill later pleaded guilty in December 2025 to misconduct-related charges tied to her handling of sealed exhibits and false statements, and the planned title of her book, Behind the Doors of Justice: The Murdaugh Murders, was pulled amid plagiarism allegations. For the justice system, the decision leaves a stark lesson: in a case this charged, appellate safeguards are not a footnote but the mechanism that keeps a verdict from standing when the process itself is compromised.