Alex Murdaugh alleges misconduct by county clerk of courts seeks new trial

When Alex Murdaugh, the once-influential South Carolina lawyer, was convicted in March of murdering his wife and younger son, the verdict was widely seen as a rebuke of corruption in a legal system that Mr. Murdaugh had bent to his benefit for years.

Now, Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers say that he is a victim of a corrupt judicial process, and are seeking a new trial and an F.B.I. investigation, reported The New York Times. In an explosive court filing on Tuesday, they claim that the clerk of court had a series of inappropriate conversations with jurors and committed other misconduct during his trial.

Among the claims are that the clerk, Rebecca Hill, told jurors not to be “fooled by” Mr. Murdaugh’s tearful testimony; that she had private conversations with the jury forewoman, including one in a courthouse restroom; and that she fabricated a story about a Facebook post by another juror’s ex-husband in an effort to have that juror removed.

Ms. Hill did not respond to several requests for comment.

The state attorney general, Alan Wilson, said he was reviewing Mr. Murdaugh’s motion and would respond “through the legal process.”

One juror said in an affidavit filed with the motion that at the beginning of deliberations, Ms. Hill told jurors that “this shouldn’t take us long.” Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers said that Ms. Hill told the six smokers on the jury that they could not take a smoke break until after they reached a verdict.

The trial lasted nearly six weeks, but the jury deliberated for only three hours on March 2 before convicting Mr. Murdaugh, the scion of a legal family in the state’s Lowcountry region, of two counts of murder. The judge hearing the case sentenced him the next day to life in prison. Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers promised an appeal.

The lawyers have also asked the U.S. attorney in South Carolina to have the F.B.I. investigate whether Ms. Hill violated Mr. Murdaugh’s constitutional rights by depriving him of a trial by an impartial jury.

“The clerk of court is the person that makes sure the jury gets their food,” Dick Harpootlian, one of Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers, said at a news conference on Tuesday. “They’re not someone that ever should talk to them about the case. I’ve never had it happen.”

Rebecca Hill, right, the Colleton County, S.C., clerk of court, swore in a witness in February during Mr. Murdaugh’s trial. Credit...Pool photo by Andrew J. Whitaker

Since the verdict was handed up, Ms. Hill has kept an unusually high profile for a court official. Immediately after she read the verdict aloud in the courtroom — which was shown live on television — she stood on the second-floor balcony of the courthouse with her dog as prosecutors held a news conference below.

A few days later, when the lead prosecutor on the case, Creighton Waters, posted a video on Twitter, now known as X, of himself playing the guitar, Ms. Hill replied with three heart emojis and the comment, “Your biggest fan in Colleton County!”

In July, Ms. Hill and a co-author, Neil Gordon, published a book of her firsthand account of the trial, a move that raised eyebrows among some legal observers. Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers said that after Ms. Hill published the book and began promoting it, they heard from some jurors who felt uncomfortable about her behavior.

Some passages in Ms. Hill and Mr. Gordon’s book are cited in the motion filed by Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers, who argue that Ms. Hill may have pushed jurors toward a conviction in order to get herself a book deal and appearances in the media. One passage from the book says that while she was chaperoning jurors on a visit to the crime scene as part of the trial, she and the jurors and law enforcement officers who were present “had an epiphany and shared our thoughts with our eyes.”

 “At that moment,” she wrote, “many of us standing there knew. I knew and they knew that Alex was guilty.”

Bruce A. Green, a law professor at Fordham University who specializes in criminal law and ethics, said he had never before heard of a clerk of court publishing a book about a trial in which she was involved. Professor Green said that the actions alleged in Mr. Murdaugh’s motion would not have been appropriate, and would probably lead to a factual inquiry by a judge.

“If it really happened, it would really be improper,” he said.

He noted that jurors were not supposed to discuss a case even with one another before formal deliberations began, let alone discuss it with a clerk. “It’s a pretty incendiary allegation,” he said.

Mr. Murdaugh, who gave two days of dramatic testimony during his trial, has maintained that he is innocent of the fatal shootings of his younger son, Paul, and wife, Maggie, who were killed in June 2021.

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Texas AG campaigns against his impeachment

 

With television ads and text messages, direct mail and billboards, supporters of the embattled Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, have embarked on an escalating campaign of political pressure, backed by hard-right billionaires, aimed at trying to sway the outcome of Mr. Paxton’s upcoming impeachment trial, reported The New York Times.

The targets of their efforts are narrow: the 19 Republican members of the State Senate who will act as jurors in the trial, set to begin on Tuesday, and decide whether allegations of corruption and abuse of power are serious enough to warrant permanently removing and barring Mr. Paxton from office.

But the effort to save Mr. Paxton, who is seen by many hard-core conservatives as their legal standard-bearer, is also the latest proxy in the broader fight over the future direction of the party, both in Texas and nationally.

It has drawn in a range of conservative figures on both sides, with Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, and Karl Rove, the political consultant to former President George W. Bush, arguing in support of the impeachment process, and Steve Bannon, the former Trump political adviser, lampooning it as a Democrat-inspired witch hunt.

“We want the entire MAGA movement to understand that what’s going on in Texas is not just about Texas,” Mr. Bannon told his podcast audience this month.

The wrangling over Mr. Paxton’s fate has reflected the same deep Republican divisions that emerged in Georgia over the indictment of Donald J. Trump, raising again the question of whether Republicans are willing to hold fellow conservatives to account — and whether, if they do so, they can survive a primary.

Mr. Paxton has so far managed to survive politically under both a criminal indictment and the looming impeachment, in part because he has become a key player on the right flank of the conservative legal movement. He has mounted aggressive challenges to the Biden administration, particularly over its immigration policies, and led coalitions of Republican states against Obama-era programs such as the Affordable Care Act and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which protects many migrants from deportation if they came to the United States as children.

He secured Mr. Trump’s endorsement in a hard-fought primary last year, after demonstrating his willingness to contest the results of the 2020 election in court. An outspoken partisan fighter, he addressed the crowd at a rally for Mr. Trump on Jan. 6, 2021, that preceded an insurrection at the Capitol.

Yet those conservative credentials may not be enough to help Mr. Paxton survive what promises to be the most significant test he has faced. Though Republicans have a clear majority in the Texas Legislature, the most stridently partisan members do not always hold sway.

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Mangino discusses the kidnapping and murder of a Memphis teacher with Nancy Grace

Join me and Nancy Grace on Crime Stories as we discuss the case of Tennessee prosecutors seeking the death penalty for Cleotha Abston, also known as Cleotha Henderson. He is charged with kidnapping and killing Memphis teacher Eliza Fletcher.

Fletcher vanished while out on her morning run. Neighborhood video captured images of Fletcher being forced into an SUV. The kindergarten teacher’s body was found days later near a vacant house less than a mile from the kidnapping site.

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Guns are everywhere in Tennessee, almost anyone can carry without a permit

When you talk about crime in Tennessee, guns are the elephant in the room. According to the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission, gun-related violent incidents topped 1,600 in 2022, up 28% from just over 1,250 such incidents in 2016, the year Strickland took office, reported MLK50. Guns are everywhere in Tennessee, and that’s how the Republican super-majority in the state legislature likes it. In 2021, the legislature made it legal for almost anyone to carry a firearm without a permit. 

After the Covenant School shooting in Nashville in March, where a former student killed three children and three teachers with a legally purchased AR-15 assault rifle, a student-led protest movement urged the legislature to pass red flag laws, which would allow authorities to confiscate guns from people deemed dangerous to themselves or others.

When Democratic Representatives Justin J. Pearson, Justin Jones, and Gloria Johnson brought the protests into the House chamber, Republicans responded by expelling Pearson and Jones, both of whom are Black. (Johnson, who is white, was spared expulsion by one vote.) President Joe Biden called the expulsions “shocking, undemocratic, and without precedent.” Both Pearson and Jones were easily re-elected to their seats earlier this month, in time to participate in the Aug. 21 special session called by Gov. Bill Lee, ostensibly to address the state’s exploding epidemic of gun violence.

 “Gun violence is the number one killer of children because of the decisions of the Tennessee state legislature that invoked permitless carry and that have put the values of the Tennessee Firearms Association, American Firearms Association, and the National Rifle Association over the lives of people in our community,” Pearson said.

Black communities in Tennessee are disproportionately affected by gun violence, Pearson noted. While 12% of Tennesseans are Black, they represent 38% of crime victims in 2022, according to the TBI. “I buried a friend this year,” he said. “Last year, I buried a mentor who died from gun violence. This is not normal.”

He wants to see laws that protect children, protection orders that shield domestic abuse victims, stronger background checks and tracing the routes by which guns come into our community.

“Memphis doesn’t have any gun manufacturers, yet we have this extreme amount of gun violence. We need to figure out why that is and who is proliferating and profiting off of the pain and the suffering that we are experiencing,” he said.

Recent proposals before the city council would repeal permitless carry in Memphis and ban the sale of assault rifles. But even if the local proposals passed, many assume that the state legislature would simply preempt them. “The reality is, we are always going to be facing the issue of preemption,” Pearson said. “Our state legislators who represent Memphis and Shelby County, they’re going to have to start standing tall and speaking up and using their voices.” 

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A tell of two courts: A clear double standard for Jurists

North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls could be ousted from her seat for judicial ethics violations, reported Slate. Did she fail to disclose gifts from a billionaire benefactor on whose cases she was ruling? No. Maybe she’d gone on luxury vacations across the globe paid for by some of the richest men in the country and neglected to mention them on disclosure forms? Nope. Perhaps one of these billionaires bought her mom a house? Not that either. 

Her true crime: Earls, the only Black woman on North Carolina’s high court, spoke out about racial bias in her courtroom. Her alleged misconduct was speaking to the media about how few clerks of color the court employed and how her colleagues treated certain attorneys, including a Black woman, who argued before them. For that, a Republican-stacked judicial “ethics” commission has gone after her. Its targeting of Earls could fulfill the wishes of the gerrymandered Republican Legislature by removing a tireless advocate of racial equality.

 Earls, who was elected with 1.8 million votes in 2018 and is a frequent dissenter to the right-wing majority’s decisions, was responding to a study of advocates who argued at the high court. This study found that 90 percent of the lawyers were white and nearly 70 percent were male. Asked for her response, Earls noted the lack of racial diversity among the court’s clerks and her colleagues’ disparate treatment of certain advocates at oral argument. She went out of her way to say she didn’t think that this was the result of conscious bias, but “we all have implicit biases.” Earls also criticized decisions by Chief Justice Paul Newby, a Republican, to end implicit bias training and disband commissions looking into racial justice issues.

The Judicial Standards Commission, which has been reshaped by GOP judges in recent years, is now alleging that Earls’ concerns about bias in the courtroom may violate judicial ethics rules. The commission investigates complaints against judges, and its investigation could result in discipline for Earls or even her removal from office. If the commission finds a violation, the state Supreme Court would ultimately decide whether to accept its recommended sanction.

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FBI has 21.7 million DNA profiles about 7 % of the U.S. population

 The FBI has amassed 21.7 million DNA profiles — equivalent to about 7 percent of the U.S. population — according to Bureau data reviewed by The Intercept.

The FBI aims to nearly double its current $56.7 million budget for dealing with its DNA catalog with an additional $53.1 million, according to its budget request for fiscal year 2024. “The requested resources will allow the FBI to process the rapidly increasing number of DNA samples collected by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,” the appeal for an increase says.

“When we’re talking about rapid expansion like this, it’s getting us ever closer to a universal DNA database.”

In an April 2023 statement submitted to Congress to explain the budget request, FBI Director Christopher Wray cited several factors that had “significantly expanded the DNA processing requirements of the FBI.” He said the FBI collected around 90,000 samples a month — “over 10 times the historical sample volume” — and expected that number to swell to about 120,000 a month, totaling about 1.5 million new DNA samples a year. (The FBI declined to comment.)

The staggering increases are raising questions among civil liberties advocates.

“When we’re talking about rapid expansion like this, it’s getting us ever closer to a universal DNA database,” Vera Eidelman, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who specializes in genetic privacy, told The Intercept. “I think the civil liberties implications here are significant.”

The rapid growth of the FBI’s sample load is in large part thanks to a Trump-era rule change that mandated the collection of DNA from migrants who were arrested or detained by immigration authorities.

The FBI began building a DNA database as early as 1990. By 1998, it helped create a national database called Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, that spanned all 50 states. Each state maintained its own database, with police or other authorities submitting samples based on their states’ rules, and CODIS allowed all the states to search across the entire country. At first, the collection of data was limited to DNA from people convicted of crimes, from crime scenes, and from unidentified remains.

Even those categories were controversial at the time. When CODIS was launched nationally, most states did not submit DNA from all people convicted of felonies; the only point of consensus among the states’ collection programs was to take DNA from convicted sex offenders.

“If you look back at when CODIS was established, it was originally for violent or sexual offenders,” Anna Lewis, a Harvard researcher who specializes in the ethical implications of genetics research, told The Intercept. “The ACLU warned that this was going to be a slippery slope, and that’s indeed what we’ve seen.”

Today, police have the authority to take DNA samples from anyone sentenced for a felony charge. In 28 states, police can take DNA samples from suspects arrested for felonies but who have not been convicted of any crime. In some cases, police offer plea deals to reduce felony charges to misdemeanor offenses in exchange for DNA samples. Police are even acquiring DNA samples from unwitting people, as The Intercept recently reported.

“It changed massively,” Lewis said of the rules and regulations around government DNA collection. “You only have to be a person of interest to end up in these databases.”

The database is likely to continue proliferating as DNA technology becomes more sophisticated, Lewis explained, pointing to the advent of environmental DNA, which allows for DNA to be collected from ambient settings like wastewater or air.

“Just by breathing, you’re discarding DNA in a way that can be traced back to you,” Lewis said.

While this might sound like science fiction, the federal government has already embraced the technology. In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offered a contract for laboratory services to assist with “autonomously collected eDNA testing”: environmental DNA testing based on samples that are no longer even manually collected.

Until recently, the U.S. DNA database surpassed even that of authoritarian China, which launched an ambitious DNA collection program in 2017. That year, the BBC reported, the U.S. had about 4 percent of its population’s DNA, while China had about 3 percent. Since then, China announced a plan aimed at collecting between 5 and 10 percent of its male population’s DNA, according to a 2020 study cited by the New York Times.

China has a record of abusing its DNA database for surveillance and crackdowns on dissent. The efforts have been aided by American technology and expertise. In 2021, the U.S. intelligence community raised alarms about China’s widespread DNA collection, including foreigners’ genetic information.

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Houston PD's high-speed chases resulted in 27 deaths and 740 injuries over five years

High-speed chases launched by the Houston Police Department increased 47 percent over a five-year period, killing more than two dozen people and injuring hundreds more, a Houston Chronicle investigation has found.

Between Jan. 1, 2018, and Dec. 31, 2022, officers engaged in 6,303 chases. Twenty-seven people died during those pursuits, and at least 740 people were injured. 

At least 240 of the dead and injured were bystanders, including a man who’d just left a grocery store, a man walking to get a haircut and a Lyft driver with a passenger in his car.

To document the toll high-speed chases are taking citywide, the Chronicle analyzed more than 5,000 post-pursuit forms filled out by officers, filed a dozen-plus public information requests and spoke to family members of bystanders who were killed. 

During the five-year period:

• Houston police officers embarked on more chases annually than their counterparts in Los Angeles and Chicago. Police here reported more pursuits than in Dallas, San Antonio and Austin combined.
• One out of three HPD chases ended in a crash.
• HPD-launched crashes increased 57 percent.

About 85 percent of pursuits citywide started in predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, the reports analyzed by the Chronicle show. More than 80 percent of chase suspects were Black or Hispanic, HPD statistics show.

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