Alex Murdaugh retrial

Alex Murdaugh, once a prominent South Carolina lawyer, was convicted in 2023 of murdering his wife Maggie and son Paul at the family's Moselle property on June 7, 2021. The South Carolina Supreme Court later threw out that verdict after finding that the Colleton County clerk of court, Becky Hill, had tampered with the jury. He is to be tried again, and at that trial he is presumed innocent.

The retrial is set to begin on April 5, 2027. On August 14, 2026 Judge Debra McCaslin ruled that it cannot be held in Colleton County or anywhere in the 14th Judicial Circuit, citing media saturation and the rate at which prospective jurors there had to be disqualified; she also ruled that testimony from the first trial is admissible and that polygraph evidence is barred. On September 8 she set the venue: Sumter County. The next court appearance is November 13, 2026.

The defense is already contesting the evidence that mattered most the first time. Cellphone data built the prosecution's timeline in 2023: a video on Paul's phone placed Alex at the kennels minutes before the killings, after he had denied being there. On September 28 Murdaugh's lawyers filed a motion demanding the raw extraction files from the phones collected in the investigation, saying their expert needs the underlying data, not the reports, to examine metadata and possibly deleted material.

The case is filed under Grim. The first conviction has been set aside, no verdict stands, and Murdaugh is presumed innocent of the murders going into the retrial.