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Lawyers for Alex Murdaugh are due in court on Friday to ask that the original murder indictments against him, for the killings of his wife and son, be thrown out. They now argue that the chief investigator in the case lied to the grand jury. The South Carolina Supreme Court has already thrown out Murdaugh's convictions and his life sentence, ruling that a court clerk improperly influenced jurors against him during his 2023 trial.
That decision means Murdaugh faces a retrial on the murder charges. Judge Debra McCaslin will consider the request to dismiss the indictments at Friday's pretrial hearing. Even if the long-shot request is granted, it may not stop, or even postpone, an April retrial for the disgraced lawyer.
Prosecutors can seek another set of grand jury indictments as soon as next month, and defense attorneys said they won't stop them. But a ruling for Murdaugh would be another rebuke of the chief investigator, State Law Enforcement Division agent David Owen. A judge last year threw out a different murder case Owen was involved in.
The dead woman's mother had told the agent about a suicide threat her daughter made days before she died, and Owen never relayed it to…
