By admin 
South Carolina Judge Debra McCaslin has picked Sumter County as the site for Alex Murdaugh’s new double-murder retrial.
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“After careful review of potential venues and courthouse facilities throughout the state, the court finds that Sumter County is an appropriate venue for the retrial of (Murdaugh),” McCaslin wrote in an eight-page order handed down late Tuesday afternoon.
“Sumter County provides an appropriate forum in which (Murdaugh) can receive a fair trial, while also offering the security measures, courtroom facilities, and technological capabilities necessary for the safe, orderly and efficient conduct of these proceedings,” McCaslin wrote.
Jury selection in Murdaugh’s retrial is scheduled to begin April 5.
McCaslin made her ruling after granting a motion by Murdaugh’s lead attorneys, Dick Harpootlian and Jim Griffin, to move the trial out of the five-county 14th Judicial Circuit because of the potential bias of jurors in that five-county region.
Murdaugh, 58, comes from an influential political and law enforcement family in one county — Hampton — in the 14th Judicial Circuit and the killings he is charged with committing happened in another county — Colleton — in that circuit.
In 2023, after a six-week trial, a Colleton County jury convicted Murdaugh of two counts of murder in the 2021 fatal shootings of his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul. Murdaugh was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences.
The conviction and sentences were overturned in May by the S.C. Supreme Court, which ruled that jury tampering by the former Colleton County clerk of court Becky Hill deprived Murdaugh of his constitutional right to a fair trial.
In her ruling, McCaslin said that she was moving the trial from Colleton on several grounds, including “community prejudice” arising from long-standing association of the Murdaugh family with people in the 14th Judicial Circuit and the “unprecedented breadth, substance and form of the publicity surrounding this prosecution.”
Ordinarily, criminal trials are held in the county where the crime is alleged to have taken place. Moving a trial completely outside the judicial circuit is a rare occurrence.
Extent of publicity
In stating the reasons for moving the trial, McCaslin wrote the “principle distinction” between publicity surrounding the Murdaugh case and other high profile cases is significant.
This case has generated books, podcasts, television series, documentaries, streaming programs and dramatizations. Unlike traditional news reporting, prospective jurors may have consumed more than 10 books, more than six podcast series, more than seven documentary and television productions, more than 20 documentary episodes and sustained social media attention,” McCaslin wrote.
“That exposure has continued for years and has never meaningfully subsided,” the judge wrote.
“The national reach of the coverage does not diminish the particular concern in Colleton County; to the contrary, the national media phenomenon repeatedly focused attention on events occurring in a relatively small South Carolina community and on a family whose legal and political history was already familiar to many residents of the 14th Circuit.
“The result is the convergence of national media saturation and local community familiarity, a combination that makes this different from one in which widespread national publicity a defendant with no pre-existing relationship to the local community.”
Read more Sumter County to be site for Alex Murdaugh’s new double murder trial
Bias in Colleton
McCaslin wrote that the Murdaugh family served as solicitors, or elected prosecutors, in the 14th Judicial Circuit for almost a century.
“Some residents may associate the family with respect and public service; others with privilege, influence, or resentment,” she wrote. “Either direction presents a concern because the constitutional inquiry concerns impartiality, not whether community bias favors one party over the other.”
Becky Hill’s tampering
Another major reason for moving Murdaugh’s second trial out of Colleton County has to do with the jury tampering by former Colleton County clerk of court Hill, McCaslin found. Tampering that was the key reason for the Supreme Court overturning Murdaugh’s murder convictions.
The jury tampering “generated a further enormous body of publicity that prospective Colleton County jurors may have encountered. Jurors are no longer being asked only whether they have opinions about whether (Murdaugh) committed murder, they may also hold opinions about whether their country’s judicial system unfairly convicted him, whether the clerk behaved corruptly, when the defense exploited a technicality, or whether the Supreme Court was correct to reverse the verdict,” McCaslin wrote.
“A retrial in the same county necessarily places the proceedings back in the institutional setting in which the constitutional violation occurred,” the judge wrote.
By moving the trial, “public confidence and juror impartiality are better protected by separating the retrial …. from the courthouse and local environment now inseparably associated with both the original conviction and its invalidation,” the judge wrote.
Murdaugh’s attorneys had suggested Charleston or Columbia as sites for Murdaugh’s retrial. Prosecutors from the State Attorney General’s office had expressed no preference and said they would leave the decision on where to try Murdaugh for the second time up to the judge.
Murdaugh’s jury will be drawn from Sumter county residents. Sumter County, population approximately 105,000, is considerable larger than Colleton County’s approximately 39,000 residents. Some 47 percent of Sumter County is Black, compared with 33 percent in Colleton County.
The Sumter County courthouse, located about 45 miles east of Columbia and 15 miles west of I-95, takes a little more than an hour to reach from downtown Columbia, depending on the traffic, road construction and time of day.
Other counties mentioned as possible sites for a Murdaugh retrial were Florence and Spartanburg.
Although his murder convictions were overturned, Murdaugh is still behind bars. He is serving a 27-year sentence in state prison after pleading guilty to multiple fraud charges.
When that sentence is over, he will be transferred to federal prison to finish serving a 40-sentence after pleading guilty to numerous federal fraud charges. Both sets of crimes involved multiple thefts of millions of dollars from clients for whom he had won large settlements. He also admitted stealing from his law firm.
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This is a breaking news story and will be updated.