SC judge once considered for Supreme Court assigned to Murdaugh’s jailhouse tapes case

A federal court case involving whether jail inmate Alex Murdaugh’s recorded telephone calls can be made public in response to an S.C. Freedom of Information request is only a week old, but already the first three judges assigned to the case are no longer on it, and a fourth federal judge has been assigned.

No reasons were given for the reassignments, but judges can recuse themselves from a case in the event of a real or perceived conflict.

U.S. District Judge Michelle Childs of Columbia, the fourth and latest judge on the case, was assigned late Monday afternoon, according to a federal court records database.

Childs was on President Joe Biden’s short list of potential nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court. Biden nominated District of Columbia Court of Appeals Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the high court. Childs’ nomination to the District Court of Appeals is still ongoing.

Childs replaces veteran federal Judge David Norton of Charleston, who was assigned to the case earlier Monday. He replaced Judge Mary Lewis of Columbia, according to federal court records data base. Lewis was assigned the case last Wednesday, replacing the first judge, Bruce Howe Hendricks of Greenville.

Murdaugh, 53, is a once-prominent, now-suspended lawyer who has many ties in South Carolina’s legal community.

Last fall and again in January, a state grand jury charged Murdaugh with multiple counts of fraud in the alleged thefts of more than $8 million from clients and associates spanning 10 years. He is also a “person of interest” in the still-unsolved murders last June of his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul, at the family’s Colleton County estate.

Murdaugh, a member of a Lowcountry legal dynasty centered around a Hampton law firm founded by his great-grandfather, has been an inmate in the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center in Richland County since last October. He has been unable to make a $7 million bond.

Transcripts and airings of some of the tapes in question were made by Fits News, a South Carolina web-based news site, and Murdaugh Murders podcast, which had made a Freedom of Information request to the jail for the tapes.

Norton was in several high-profile South Carolina cases, including a 2014 federal trial in Columbia where Greenville businessman Jonathan Pinson, former chairman of the board of trustees at S.C. State University, was convicted of racketeering.

In 2017, Norton sentenced former North Charleston police officer Michael Slager to 20 years in prison after Slager pleaded guilty to violating the civil rights of an unarmed Black man, Walter Scott, as Scott was fleeing. Scott was killed in the shooting, which Norton said he viewed as murder.

Lewis’ late husband, Cam Lewis, was a close friend of Murdaugh lawyer Sen. Dick Harpootlian, D-Richland, who spoke at Lewis’ funeral in November, 2017. When Harpootlian was elected state senator in 2018, Judge Lewis administered the him oath of office.

Murdaugh’s other lawyer in the jailhouse tapes lawsuit is Jim Griffin, a former member of Cam Lewis’ law firm.

Meanwhile, a prominent Columbia lawyer, Andrew Lindemann, who often defends state agencies accused of unlawful actions, will be representing the defendant in the case, Shane Kitchens, interim director of the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center.

The State newspaper, the Island Packet in Hilton Head, the Charleston Post and Courier, and the Hampton County Guardian, part of the USA Today Network, all filed FOI requests seeking the tapes after they were initially released to Fits News.

On Feb. 28, Murdaugh filed a lawsuit in federal court against Kitchens. The lawsuit seeks to prevent the further release to the public of any taped phone conversations between Murdaugh and others, including his family members.

“The reason we filed the lawsuit is to prevent any further disclosure of his intercepted telephone conversations to the public in order to protect Alex’s rights to a fair criminal proceeding and to avoid further exploitation of Alex and his family members in their personal communications,” Murdaugh’s attorney Griffin told The State and Packet last week.

The release to the public of taped inmate telephone calls, as unprecedented as that is, appears to be legal under South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act, said Jay Bender, a Columbia attorney who has long been one of the state’s foremost media lawyers.

Inmates on telephone calls are warned that their conversations are recorded and may be used in court.

This story was originally published March 7, 2022 at 4:52 PM with the headline "SC judge once considered for Supreme Court assigned to Murdaugh’s jailhouse tapes case."