Alex Murdaugh, the fallen South Carolina attorney whose legal downfall became a national true crime obsession, is set to appear in court Monday for a pretrial hearing as prosecutors and defense lawyers work toward a potential murder retrial.
Last month, the South Carolina Supreme Court threw out Murdaugh’s murder convictions and life sentence. Monday’s court session is expected to be relatively brief in legal terms, with the main agenda items being deadlines for exchanging evidence and scheduling future hearings and a possible retrial date.
The hearing is drawing enormous media attention, with dozens of outlets — ranging from international news agencies to local TV stations to true crime podcasters — descending on the Lexington County courthouse to document every moment involving the once-prominent Southern lawyer.
For many observers, Monday also offers a rare public glimpse at how the now-58-year-old Murdaugh has been changed by prison life. He continues to serve time in a South Carolina facility, where he is simultaneously working through a 40-year federal sentence and a 27-year state sentence tied to his financial crimes — charges stemming from his guilty plea to stealing roughly $12 million from clients and his family’s law firm.
Before the hearing officially begins at 10 a.m. Monday, the court may also take up a request from Murdaugh’s defense team. His attorneys are asking the judge to allow him to appear in civilian clothing rather than a prison jumpsuit and to have his restraints removed during hearings and throughout any future retrial.
As his legal team put it in their written request: “Mr. Murdaugh’s convictions for non-violent, white-collar crimes in no way justify presenting him to the jury pool as a shackled prisoner in a prison jumpsuit via video cameras at televised pretrial hearings.”
Defense attorneys have also submitted additional pretrial motions, including one requesting that DNA found beneath his wife’s fingernails — which investigators said came from an unknown, unrelated man — be sent to a private laboratory for independent testing.
Murdaugh’s legal team is also seeking to provide him with a laptop without internet access in prison so he can review evidence without requiring everything to be printed. They are additionally pushing to move the next trial out of Colleton County, where both the killings took place and the first trial was held.
Murdaugh has consistently denied killing his wife, Maggie, and their younger son, Paul, whose bodies he said he discovered outside their home in 2021. While he has acknowledged being a thief, an insurance fraudster, a liar, and a poor attorney, he has firmly maintained his innocence in the murders.
A jury found him guilty of two counts of murder in 2023 and sentenced him to life without the possibility of parole.
However, during that trial, several jurors reported that the Colleton County clerk of court — who was assigned to manage the evidence and oversee the jury — told them to pay close attention to Murdaugh’s body language when he testified and warned them not to be misled by what he said.
The state Supreme Court determined that guidance amounted to an implicit suggestion that Murdaugh was guilty, which led to the overturning of his convictions.
The justices also raised concerns about the extensive testimony during the murder trial regarding Murdaugh’s financial crimes. While some background is appropriate, they said detailed accounts of how he stole from vulnerable or disabled clients could have unfairly swayed jurors who were supposed to focus solely on whether he committed the killings.
