Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips said the South Carolina Supreme Court delivered a “slap-down” to prosecutors and county officials after unanimously overturning Alex Murdaugh’s double murder conviction over jury tampering concerns.
Speaking just minutes after the news broke Wednesday on The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, Phillips said the unanimous ruling signaled the justices believed the defense arguments were overwhelmingly persuasive.
“All of them believed that what the defense said was not only true, but…really true that there was no really gray area in this, that they looked at it and said, these guys are spot on with their arguments,” Phillips explained.
Phillips described the ruling as a “slap-down” to the prosecution and broader county government apparatus, though he noted the clerk of court was not directly controlled by prosecutors.
The court ruled that former Colleton County Clerk of Court Rebecca Hill improperly influenced jurors during Murdaugh’s 2023 murder trial by making comments the justices described as “breathtaking and disgraceful.”
Phillips explained why courts are highly protective of juries in major criminal trials.
“One of the things that’s really important in a criminal trial is you can’t have people getting messages to juries,” Phillips said. “That’s why in a lot of high-profile cases, you’ll have a jury sequestered, where they can’t have access to the media. They can’t have random people coming up and talking to them about a case.”
He added that court personnel are often tasked with shielding jurors from outside influence during proceedings.
“In every case when you have jurors who are out and about when the trial’s going on, they’re always guarded by some court personnel because this is the kind of scenario you wanna prevent, some rogue actor from walking up to somebody and saying ‘Oh, hey, convict the guy,’ and influencing the jury,” Phillips said.
Phillips also pointed to another critical issue raised in the appeal, which was the prosecution’s use of Murdaugh’s unrelated financial crimes during the murder trial.
“In most criminal cases, you cannot introduce evidence of other crimes. That’s called propensity evidence,” Phillips said. “Basically- He’s a bad guy. He’s done a lot of other bad stuff so he must have done this.”
Phillips explained that evidence of unrelated crimes can sometimes be allowed for limited purposes, such as establishing motive or impeaching credibility, but warned courts closely scrutinize whether its prejudicial impact outweighs its value.
“The test under the rules of evidence is what they call the probative value of the evidence must outweigh its prejudicial effect,” Phillips said. “When you’re talking about a major murder case like this it’s hard to see any way to get that in at all, and obviously the South Carolina Supreme Court agreed.”
Phillips also suggested Hill could face additional legal jeopardy following the court’s decision.
“Will there be sanctions against her? I’m thinking an indictment,” Phillips said. “If I was a prosecutor and I lost that big case, I wouldn’t want to indict her on the front end because that would validate everything that the defense was saying. But now that the Supreme Court’s come down and basically agreed with everything the defense said, I would indict her.”
Phillips noted the ruling remanded the case back to the trial court for a possible retrial rather than dismissing the charges outright. However, he said language in the opinion appeared to question the strength of the prosecution’s evidence.
“There was a comment in the decision apparently about the sufficiency of the evidence,” Phillips said. “In plain non-lawyer English means is there actually enough evidence there to convict somebody of a crime?”
Phillips added that appellate courts can dismiss cases entirely if evidence is deemed insufficient, though that did not occur in Murdaugh’s case.
“But in this case, they didn’t dismiss it. They remanded it, but there is an observation about how weak…the direct evidence is,” he said.
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https://t.co/s8EECjnShl— Michael Patrick Leahy (@michaelpleahy) May 13, 2026
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X.
