On May 13, 2026, the South Carolina Supreme Court unanimously vacated Alex Murdaugh’s 2023 double-murder conviction and ordered a new trial. The 5-0 opinion did not reach the merits of the murder case. It reached the conduct of Mary Rebecca “Becky” Hill, the Colleton County Clerk of Court who served during the six-week trial. The court found that Hill’s comments to jurors (reportedly including instructions to “watch his actions” and “watch him closely” when Murdaugh took the stand, along with comments suggesting jurors not be fooled by his testimony) placed her, in the court’s words, “fingers on the scales of justice” and denied Murdaugh his right to a fair trial by an impartial jury.

The court called Hill’s conduct “breathtaking,” “disgraceful,” and “unprecedented in South Carolina.” At least one juror, referred to in the appellate proceedings as Juror Z, told the court that Hill’s comments influenced her vote to convict.

Murdaugh is not walking free. He remains incarcerated on concurrent state and federal sentences for the dozens of financial crimes to which he separately pleaded guilty (27 years on the state side, 40 years on the federal side). He gets a new trial on the murder charges. The South Carolina Attorney General’s Office has signaled it intends to retry the case before the end of 2026.

That distinction between freeing a defendant and giving the defendant a new trial in a courtroom that has not been compromised is the doctrinal heart of the Sixth Amendment right at stake. We walk through what the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled, why this falls under what federal courts call the doctrine of “presumed prejudice,” and how the same framework operates under Texas law and Texas procedure.

What the South Carolina Supreme Court Actually Ruled

Several features of the May 13 ruling are worth unpacking before turning to the Texas-law overlay.

Hill Was Never Charged with Jury Tampering

Hill faced separate criminal charges arising out of her conduct during and after the trial, and in https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/08/us/murdaugh-killings-court-clerk December 2025 she pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, perjury, and misconduct in office. The factual basis for those pleas centered on showing sealed court evidence (photographs) to a reporter during the trial and then lying about doing so during the post-trial hearing on Murdaugh’s motion for a new trial. None of those charges alleged jury tampering. Hill testified under oath that she did not tamper with the jury, and the prosecutors never pleaded that allegation as a criminal charge against her.

Yet the appellate court did not need a criminal conviction for jury tampering to find a constitutional violation. The Sixth Amendment’s right to an impartial jury can be violated by conduct that is not itself a charged crime. The legal question on a new-trial motion is whether external influences reached the jury and whether there is a reasonable possibility those influences affected the verdict. A criminal conviction of the person responsible is not a prerequisite. That distinction matters enormously for Texas defendants facing analogous juror-misconduct claims.

The Trial Court Had Denied Relief; the Supreme Court Reversed

Murdaugh’s original new-trial motion went before retired South Carolina Chief Justice Jean Toal in January 2024. After conducting an evidentiary hearing in which she questioned jurors individually about what Hill had said and what effect it had on their decisions, Toal denied the motion. Her reasoning, in essence, was that Hill’s conduct did not actually affect the verdict because the evidence against Murdaugh was overwhelming.

The South Carolina Supreme Court rejected that approach. Under the law the court applied, the question is not whether the appellate court believes the jury would have convicted anyway. The question is whether external influences reached the jury and created a reasonable possibility of prejudice. The court was unwilling to look past Hill’s comments on the theory that the verdict would have come out the same way without them. That is the doctrinal point most worth absorbing: courts do not generally reweigh a record to decide whether a corrupted jury would still have convicted the defendant on a clean record. The corruption itself is the constitutional injury.

The Court Also Limited Financial-Crime Evidence at Retrial

The opinion went further than the jury issue. The court also addressed what it called the “thorny issue” of the admissibility of Murdaugh’s financial crimes. The State at the first trial was permitted to introduce more than twelve hours of testimony about Murdaugh’s embezzlement and fraud, on the theory that the financial crimes provided the motive for the murders. The court held that twelve-plus hours went well beyond what was necessary and produced unfair prejudice. On retrial, the trial court will need to apply stricter limits.

That secondary ruling is itself important for Texas practice. Texas Rule of Evidence 404(b) and 403 operate similarly: prior bad acts evidence is admissible for purposes such as motive, opportunity, or intent, but only when the probative value substantially outweighs the prejudicial effect, and only when the evidence is reasonably necessary. A trial court that allows the State to put on hours of prior-bad-acts testimony to establish a motive theory should expect that ruling to be tested closely on appeal.

The Sixth Amendment Right to an Impartial Jury

The Sixth Amendment guarantees an accused, in all criminal prosecutions, the right to “a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.” The phrase “impartial jury” is doing real work. The Supreme Court has said for more than a century that the constitutional guarantee is the right to have one’s case decided by twelve jurors whose verdict is based only on evidence properly admitted at trial: not on information from outside the courtroom, not on contact with court personnel about the case and not on private opinions communicated to jurors by anyone in a position of authority over the proceedings.

The Texas Constitution provides parallel protection. Article I, §10 guarantees the right to “a speedy public trial by an impartial jury” in all criminal prosecutions. CCP Article 1.05 tracks the constitutional language. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has consistently held that the right to an impartial jury includes the right to a jury that is not exposed to extraneous influences during deliberations.

The Doctrine of Presumed Prejudice

The doctrinal lever the South Carolina Supreme Court used (and the doctrine every American jurisdiction works with in some form) is presumed prejudice. The leading federal case is Remmer v. United States, 347 U.S. 227 (1954). The Supreme Court held that any private communication, contact, or tampering with a juror during a trial about a matter pending before the jury is “deemed presumptively prejudicial.” The burden then shifts to the government to show that the contact was harmless. The trial court must conduct a hearing (what defense lawyers now routinely call a Remmer hearing) to determine the nature of the contact and its effect on the verdict.

The Supreme Court reinforced this framework in Smith v. Phillips, 455 U.S. 209 (1982), which held that due process requires a hearing whenever there is a substantial likelihood that a juror was biased or improperly influenced. The fact-finding can be done at the trial-court level, but the constitutional protection requires that it be done.

Two structural features matter:

  • The presumption applies to any external influence on the jury, regardless of source. Federal cases applying Remmer have found presumed prejudice from contact by a prosecutor, by a sheriff’s deputy escorting jurors, by a member of the public during a courthouse lunch break, by a court clerk, by media reports brought into the jury room, by social-media research by an individual juror, and by communications among jurors about evidence not admitted at trial. The Murdaugh fact pattern (a court clerk communicating with jurors about the defendant’s testimony) falls squarely within the recognized categories.
  • The presumption shifts the burden to the State. Once a defendant makes a credible showing that external influences reached the jury, the State must prove the contact was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. That burden is real, and on a record where jurors themselves report that the comments affected their decisions, it is a burden the State will rarely meet.

How Texas Handles Juror Misconduct and Extraneous-Influence Claims

Texas’s framework for handling juror misconduct claims operates through three interlocking provisions (a statute, an evidentiary rule, and an appellate rule) plus a robust line of Court of Criminal Appeals decisions applying them.

CCP Article 36.22 — The Statute

Texas’s prohibition on juror contact is Code of Criminal Procedure Article 36.22, which provides:

“No person shall be permitted to converse with a juror about the case on trial. After the jurors have been impaneled and sworn in, no person other than the judge shall have any communication with the jury except in the presence of and by permission of the court.”

Article 36.22 is breathtakingly broad on its face. “No person” means anyone: not just lawyers, not just witnesses, not just law-enforcement officers, but anyone, including court personnel. A clerk of court doing precisely what Becky Hill is alleged to have done in Colleton County (communicating with jurors about the defendant and his testimony) violates the plain text of Article 36.22.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has held that a violation of Article 36.22, once shown, creates a rebuttable presumption of prejudice that the State must overcome. The leading case is Ocon v. State, 284 S.W.3d 880 (Tex. Crim. App. 2009), which adopted the federal Remmer framework as a matter of Texas law. The framework Texas applies tracks the federal one: defendant shows external influence reached the jury, State must rebut the presumption of prejudice, trial court conducts a hearing on the record.

Texas Rule of Evidence 606(b) — The Evidentiary Rule

The companion evidentiary rule is Texas Rule of Evidence 606(b), governs when a juror may testify about what happened during deliberations. The general rule (the same as the federal Rule 606(b)) is that jurors generally may not testify about the deliberative process or about the mental processes underlying the verdict. The verdict is, in that sense, sacrosanct from internal second-guessing.

But Rule 606(b) contains two important exceptions on which any juror-misconduct litigation turns:

  • A juror may testify about whether any outside influence was improperly brought to bear on any juror; and
  • A juror may testify about whether extraneous prejudicial information was improperly brought to the jury’s attention.

Those two exceptions are how juror-misconduct claims are litigated. A defendant who alleges a court officer made improper comments to the jury is asking the court to take juror testimony precisely about the external influence (the very subject Rule 606(b) authorizes the jurors to be questioned on). The Murdaugh hearing before Chief Justice Toal in 2024 followed exactly this pattern: she questioned the jurors individually about Hill’s comments, on the record, in proceedings that produced the appellate record the South Carolina Supreme Court reviewed in 2026.

 

Texas Rule of Appellate Procedure 21.3 — The Procedural Vehicle

Where the defendant is still within the trial court’s post-verdict window, the procedural vehicle for litigating juror misconduct is the motion for new trial under Texas Rule of Appellate Procedure 21.3. The rule lists several grounds for a new trial; the ones most relevant here are:

  • Rule 21.3(f) — when, after retiring to deliberate, the jury has received other evidence; when a juror has talked with anyone about the case; or when a juror became so intoxicated that the juror’s vote was probably influenced.
  • Rule 21.3(g) — when the jury has engaged in such misconduct that the defendant did not receive a fair and impartial trial.

A motion for new trial under Rule 21.3 must be filed within 30 days after the date when the trial court imposes or suspends sentence in open court. The motion must be presented to the trial court within 10 days of filing, and the court must rule within 75 days of imposition of sentence or the motion is overruled by operation of law. Those deadlines are jurisdictional in practical effect: missing them forfeits the new-trial vehicle entirely, leaving the defendant to litigate the issue on direct appeal under the plain-error standard, which is substantially harder to win.

Criminal Exposure for Jury-Interference Conduct in Texas

Independent of the constitutional and procedural framework, a court officer who interfered with a Texas jury the way Becky Hill is alleged to have interfered with the Murdaugh jury would face criminal exposure but not under a Texas statute that specifically criminalizes “jury tampering.” Texas’s Penal Code is unusual in this respect. Some states have dedicated jury-tampering statutes. Texas does not. The prosecutorial response to Hill-pattern conduct in this state is built from several Penal Code provisions working together:

  • Texas Penal Code §39.02 (Abuse of Official Capacity). The cleanest fit. A public servant commits an offense if, with intent to obtain a benefit or with intent to harm or defraud another, she intentionally or knowingly violates a law relating to her office or misuses government property, services, or personnel that have come into her custody by virtue of office. A court clerk who makes improper comments to jurors with intent to obtain a benefit (the book deal Hill was reportedly working on) maps directly onto §39.02(a)(1). Punishment level depends on the value of any benefit obtained ranging from a Class C misdemeanor to a first-degree felony under §39.02(c).
  • Texas Penal Code §37.09 (Tampering with or Fabricating Physical Evidence). Hill’s separate conduct (showing sealed photographic court evidence to a reporter during trial) is the kind of conduct §37.09 reaches. A third-degree felony generally; a second-degree felony if the underlying investigation or official proceeding involves the death of a person. Hill’s 2025 South Carolina obstruction plea was based on closely analogous conduct.
  • Texas Penal Code §37.10 (Tampering with Governmental Record). Available if the conduct involved altering, destroying, or concealing a governmental record (jury notes, exhibit logs, deliberation records). Penalty ranges from a Class A misdemeanor to a second-degree felony depending on intent and the type of record involved.
  • Texas Penal Code §37.02 (Perjury) / 37.03 (Aggravated Perjury). If the court officer testified falsely under oath during a hearing on a motion for new trial (as Hill is alleged to have done in the 2024 South Carolina hearing) the resulting exposure is aggravated perjury under §37.03, a third-degree felony, because the false statement was made during an official proceeding and was material to the proceeding.
  • Texas Penal Code §39.03 (Official Oppression). A public servant acting under color of her office or employment commits an offense if she intentionally subjects another to mistreatment or to arrest, detention, search, seizure, dispossession, assessment, or lien that she knows is unlawful, or denies or impedes another in the exercise or enjoyment of a right, privilege, power, or immunity. A Class A misdemeanor In the Murdaugh fact pattern, the right being impeded was Murdaugh’s constitutional right to an impartial jury.

The takeaway: the State has tools for Hill-pattern conduct, but it must assemble them from §39.02, §37.09, §37.10, §37.03, and §39.03 rather than reach for a single dedicated jury-tampering statute. As the Murdaugh ruling underscores, the criminal exposure of the person responsible is independent of the constitutional remedy available to the defendant. A defendant whose trial was compromised by improper jury contact is entitled to a new trial whether or not the person responsible is prosecuted, and whether or not any prosecution that does occur succeeds. The two questions run on parallel tracks.

What Texas Defendants and Their Lawyers Should Watch For

Several practical points apply directly to Texas trial practice, both during trial and in the post-verdict window:

  • Track every external contact with the jury. Defense counsel and, ideally a designated member of the trial team, should be alert during every break, every lunch, every overnight recess to any communication between jurors and anyone outside the deliberation room. Comments from court personnel, comments from spectators in the hallway, social-media activity by jurors or any media exposure brought into the courthouse should be documented raised with the trial judge as soon as it is observed. Article 36.22 is broad; the violations the defense can document are the violations the appellate court can review.
  • Request limiting and admonishing instructions early and often. At the start of trial, at every recess, at every overnight break, and at the close of evidence, the trial court should be instructing the jury not to discuss the case with anyone, not to do independent research, and not to consume media coverage. Defense counsel preserves the record by requesting these admonitions in writing and on the record where the trial court does not provide them sua sponte.
  • Preserve the right to post-verdict juror contact. Texas does not categorically prohibit post-verdict juror interviews, but several Texas counties have local rules requiring leave of court before defense counsel may contact a discharged juror. Defense counsel needs to know the local practice in the trial court of jurisdiction and, where leave is required, to seek it promptly. The juror who can speak to external influences is the juror who provides the evidentiary basis for a Rule 21.3(f) or (g) motion.
  • File the new-trial motion within 30 days. The Rule 21.3 motion is the procedural vehicle for raising juror-misconduct claims in the trial court. The 30-day window runs from imposition (or suspension) of sentence. The 10-day presentation requirement and the 75-day ruling deadline are equally jurisdictional in practice. Calendaring these deadlines from the moment of conviction is core trial-team practice.
  • Develop the record at the new-trial hearing. Where the trial court grants an evidentiary hearing on the motion (and a credible showing of external influence almost always produces one), the hearing is where the appellate record is built. Subpoenas to court personnel, careful juror examination under the Rule 606(b) exceptions, contemporaneous documents, and any media reports of the conduct in question all matter. The factual record produced at that hearing is the record the appellate court will work from years later.
  • Direct-appeal preservation. If the new-trial motion is denied or overruled by operation of law, the issue is preserved for direct appeal under Texas Rule of Appellate Procedure 33.1. The Court of Criminal Appeals reviews juror-misconduct rulings under the abuse-of-discretion standard, but the underlying constitutional question (whether external influence violated the Sixth Amendment) is a question of law reviewed de novo. The Murdaugh appellate history is the same pattern Texas appellate courts work in: trial-court denial, intermediate appellate review, final appellate review at the state supreme court level.

What This Ruling Confirms About the System

The Murdaugh case has now been on the public consciousness, almost continuously, since the June 2021 deaths of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh. It has produced a six-week trial in 2023, dozens of separate financial-crime guilty pleas, a Netflix documentary, a podcast, several books (including the very book Becky Hill was reportedly writing about the trial), and now a unanimous appellate reversal in May 2026. A jury convicted Murdaugh on the murder charges in fewer than three hours of deliberation; an appellate court has now found that the conviction must be set aside because the courthouse where the trial took place was itself compromised.

Three takeaways for Texas clients and for the lawyers who represent them in serious cases:

  • The Sixth Amendment is not abstract. The right to an impartial jury is a procedural right with teeth. When external influences reach the jury, courts may set aside the verdict, even where the substantive evidence against the defendant is strong. The Murdaugh ruling is the cleanest illustration of that doctrinal point in modern American practice.
  • Courthouse personnel are not neutral by default. Clerks, bailiffs, deputies escorting jurors, judicial assistants, and court reporters interact with juries every day. Most do so with care. Some do not. The constitutional protection is the rule that prohibits any person other than the judge from communicating with the jury about the case. The protection works only if defense counsel is watching and willing to enforce it.
  • Conviction is not the end of the case. Murdaugh was convicted in March 2023. The constitutional remedy did not come for more than three years. Texas defendants whose trials are compromised by juror misconduct have parallel post-conviction remedies — new trial under Rule 21.3, direct appeal, and habeas relief under CCP Article 11.07 for state cases (and the federal habeas framework under 28 U.S.C. § 2254 thereafter). The work that produces the eventual remedy starts with the contemporaneous record built during trial and at the new-trial hearing. Without that record, no later forum can grant relief.

The Bottom Line

Becky Hill’s comments did not become unconstitutional because she was charged with a crime, did not become unconstitutional because of the book she was reportedly writing, and did not become unconstitutional because of any particular motive she may have had. They were unconstitutional because they crossed the line that Remmer, Smith v. Phillips, and CCP Article 36.22 all draw at the same place: the line between the trial as it is presented in evidence and the trial as the jury imagines it after hearing from someone in a position of authority outside the courtroom.

The Sixth Amendment guarantees a trial by an impartial jury. The state and federal procedural rules that enforce that guarantee are not formalities. They are the mechanism by which an American criminal trial is supposed to be insulated from the rest of the world during the days or weeks the jury is deciding the defendant’s liberty. When the insulation fails (whether through a clerk’s improper comments, a bailiff’s overheard remarks, a juror’s independent research, or any other external influence) the constitutional remedy is a new trial.

That remedy does not put a guilty defendant on the street. Alex Murdaugh remains incarcerated for 27 years on the state financial-crime side and 40 years on the federal side, with both sentences running concurrently. He gets a new trial on the murder charges. The next jury will hear a trial conducted, the South Carolina Supreme Court has ruled, under stricter limits on the State’s prior-bad-acts evidence and (critically) in a courthouse that the state’s highest court has now made unambiguously clear must not be the source of any further extraneous influences on the jury.

For Texas defendants and the lawyers who represent them, the lesson is the work it takes to enforce that protection in real time: track every contact, request every admonition, preserve every objection, file the Rule 21.3 motion within 30 days, develop the hearing record. None of that is dramatic. All of it is the work that determines whether the constitutional protection means anything when it matters.

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