Why Do The “Rules” Keep Changing Around Alex Murdaugh’s New Trial?

Former Chief Justice Jean Toal sat individual jurors down and asked them whether Becky Hill's comments changed their votes. The South Carolina Supreme Court said she had no right to do that. Rule 606(b) protects the privacy of jury deliberations — you can ask whether external contact happened, but you cannot ask jurors how they voted or why. Toal crossed that line, and the Supreme Court corrected it by overruling one of its own prior decisions that had allowed broader inquiry.

Defense attorney Eric Faddis walks through the legal mechanics of the reversal with Tony Brueski. The court adopted the Fourth Circuit's Cheek test as binding law in South Carolina. Once the defense demonstrated that Hill's comments were more than innocuous — telling jurors not to be fooled by the defense, to watch Murdaugh's body language, that deliberations shouldn't take long — prejudice was presumed automatically. The burden shifted to the State to prove no reasonable possibility the verdict was influenced. The State couldn't do it. Hill pled guilty to perjury in December 2025 and the court found she was driven by a book deal.

But the ruling does more than reverse. It restructures the retrial. The prosecution spent twelve and a half hours on financial crimes the first time. The court flagged specific testimony as having zero probative value on motive and ordered any retrial to limit that evidence to material directly supporting the exposure timeline — the CFO confrontation the morning of the killings, the hearing three days later. The emotional weight that helped convict Murdaugh in the first trial is now subject to exclusion.

Faddis addresses which unresolved evidentiary issues — the firearm analysis, the raincoat, the gunshot residue, the iPhone demonstration — give the defense its strongest ground at retrial.

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