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It’s no secret South Carolina’s judicial branch of government wants convicted killer Alex Murdaugh to go away. Before his saga became a true crime cottage industry – and before his six-week trial for the murders of his wife and younger son turned into an internationally watched spectacle – his was a story of institutional corruption run amok.
Corruption which, for too long, has defined the Palmetto State’s judiciary…
Murdaugh was a crooked lawyer and corrupt assistant solicitor who leveraged his power, family connections and influence over the courts to steal millions of dollars from clients – and that’s the best possible interpretation of his situation.
A more plausible assessment? That something far more nefarious was (and is) afoot related to Murdaugh’s erstwhile empire. I’m talking about a much deeper, more sophisticated web of crime and corruption – one involving gangs, drug traffickers, money launderers and perhaps (just perhaps) upstanding individuals inexorably linked to the institutions complicit in Murdaugh’s many scams. This is the web, incidentally, which state police, prosecutors and judges seem especially eager not to uncover.
Just this week, reporter John Monk of The (Columbia, S.C.) State newspaper filed an expansive piece digging into one particularly curious facet of their failure to find the truth… the ongoing secrecy surrounding the decisive, last-minute dismissal of a juror from Murdaugh’s double homicide trial on March 2, 2023.
Why is the state so invested in keeping this information under wraps? And why is our highest court refusing to give a reason for its accommodation of the state’s secrecy?
Good questions…
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There are serious, credible allegations that Murdaugh’s trial was not on the level – and that’s before we get to the clear cut jury tampering by former Colleton County clerk of court Becky Hill. Hill’s tampering materially addressed the merits of the case and directly impacted a juror’s verdicts. Yet in a stunning rejection of federal and state constitutional standards related to such tampering – including her own standard – former chief justice Jean Toal inexplicably decided the guilty verdicts against Murdaugh would stand.
Why is such an obvious miscarriage of justice not generating more outrage? Especially after federal courts weighed in so decisively earlier this month – overturning the guilty verdicts of one of Murdaugh’s co-conspirators over a far less egregious jury issue?
Those are also good questions…
Moreover, consider this: Toal’s decision to deny Murdaugh a new trial despite clear and compelling evidence of jury tampering did not occur in a vacuum… it happened against the backdrop of clear conflicts of interest involving state investigations, questionable designations by state prosecutors and the shadow of alleged institutional corruption involving the very state court system presiding over the whole mess.
All of it begs a fundamental question: Do South Carolina police, prosecutors and judges just not want to get to the bottom of this?
And if not… why not?
Make no mistake: As committed as FITSNews has been over the last three years in search of justice for Murdaugh’s victims (and accountability for him and all those who supported and enabled his criminal acts), we will continue to be every bit as zealous in pursuing potentially orchestrated violations of his constitutional liberties – and attempts to cover those up.
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RELATED | THREE STRIKES AGAINST JEAN TOAL
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Truth demands – and justice dictates – we do as much for any defendant. At the end of the day, if constitutional liberty is a conception worthy of defenestration as it relates to even one defendant – even the most contemptible defendant – we must defenestrate it for all defendants.
Which means none of our rights are worth a damn…
While the many loose ends related to the Murdaugh story continue to frustrate and confound those committed to true justice, Toal’s ruling – as I noted in this piece – has become a lightning rod for the larger controversy. It has also become a potential point of unspooling for those in the broader “verdict protection” racket in South Carolina.
In reaching so recklessly – and missing the mark so widely – in pursuit of preserving these verdicts, Toal has exposed herself and the system propping her up to a decisive federal rebuke.
In its order earlier this month vacating the federal convictions of Murdaugh’s co-conspirator, disgraced banker Russell Laffitte, the U.S. fourth circuit court of appeals on multiple occasions referenced the “heavy burden” carried by the government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Sixth Amendment violations related to jury impartiality did not harm a defendant. Specifically, Laffitte.
Most decisively, the judges determined the state had “not carried its heavy burden to show beyond a reasonable doubt that the Sixth Amendment violation was harmless.”
“The government bears the heavy burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the error complained of did not contribute to the result obtained,” the judges wrote (.pdf).
In their review of the record of Laffitte’s trial, the fourth circuit judges “did not find that the government has shown beyond a reasonable doubt that the removal of (the juror) was harmless.”
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These conclusions are explicit repudiations of Toal’s ruling – expressed, unambiguous rebukes of her findings related to both law and fact in the Murdaugh case. They unilaterally affirm Toal committed judicial error in denying Murdaugh a new trial, at least insofar as the federal standard for Sixth Amendment violations is concerned.
Certainly, these are two different cases – two different types of cases, actually. Laffitte was directly appealing his federal convictions, whereas Murdaugh will (assuming the S.C. supreme court shoots him down) be submitting a habeas corpus motion asking the federal court to vacate his state convictions. Murdaugh faces a substantially higher bar than Laffitte on that count, but Toal has dramatically increased the likelihood of him clearing it.
“In the Murdaugh case, (Toal) flagrantly flaunted the law – and not just ‘the law,’ but her own narrow interpretation of it – for what appears to have been the expressed purpose of reaching a preordained outcome,” I wrote last month. “Based on that, how on earth is she still allowed to sit in judgment over cases?”
“If Toal cannot be trusted to render verdicts based on the law in this case, how can she be trusted to uphold the law in other cases?” I added earlier this month.
This question is being asked with increasing frequency in Columbia, S.C. this holiday season… and is even sparking conversation among state lawmakers who are facing pressure to do more on the issue of judicial reform.
How will it all shake out? We shall see… but Toal’s apparent commitment to a preordained outcome as opposed to following the law has put the Palmetto State’s judicial system on very precarious footing indeed.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR …
Will Folks is the founding editor of the news outlet you are currently reading. Prior to founding FITSNews, he served as press secretary to the governor of South Carolina. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and seven children.
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3 comments
FITS, I notice this time you did not repeat your fig-leaf that you still think Richard Alexander Murdaugh (“RAM”) killed his wife and younger son but that RAM should get a new trial for it to be proven again beyond reasonable doubt and with constitutional t’s crossed and i’s dotted.
I also respect and encourage the father of (seven or eight?) children waking up after Thanksgiving and writing such a courageous, if repetitive, article.
BUT it is not that simple.
The REAL reason for resistance to a new trial for RAM is that a new trial will prove him INNOCENT and could, God willing, reveal the real killers, throw light on the facts that RAM’s so-called “client-victims” were NOT victims at all but were co-conspirators with RAM in presenting grossly-exaggerated, if not outright fraudulent, insurance claims, and that those claims would NOT have been paid out to such levels without the collusion of LOCAL insurance adjustors AND local supposed defense-lawyers hired by those big insurance companies with (physically and operationally) remote head-quarters.
Most significantly, the real truths about RAM would hinder, if not end, Alan Wilson’s gubernatorial ambitions if he really has any. After all, South Carolina’s (“SC”) Attorney General (“SCAG”) is not term-limited; but SC’s governor is.
As young as Alan Wilson is, and as ailing as his adoptive father is, Alan might not want to end is own political career by going into a dead-end (proven by Nikki Haley) term-limited state position instead of staying where he is or inheriting his adoptive father’s congressional seat.
And where SCAG Wilson is is literally worth millions. Many more millions than RAM’s so-called missing millions which are really not missing at all.
SCAG Wilson’s predecessors, including Charlie Condon, controlled millions in the State Insurance Reserve Fund’s farming out the state’s public business to private law firms AND in farming out the state’s huge civil cases to private law firms.
The latter civil cases (such as the tobacco litigation) were typically NOT started by SC but by other states with all SC having to do being signing its name to share in the settlements.
Since Condon’s time, the cases increased to include insulin pricing, the opioid litigation, etc. The one SC exclusive case was that nuclear waste case for which SCAG Wilson assigned two private law firms: one headed by his former lawyer, Ken Woodington, and the other by Jean Toal’s brother, Willoughby and Hoefer. The $75M SCAG Wilson gave those two private law firms instead of depositing them for SC’s tax-payers may still be in litigation; but all who will rule on it know on which side their bread is buttered.
And it seems that nuclear waste settlement was easier than the proverbial shooting of a pig in a poke. It was handed to SCAG Wilson on a proverbial silver platter by you-know-whom. And SCAG Wilson passed the largesse down to two private law firms, not to the tax-payers.
Back to RAM!
This oulet, FITSNews, then led by Malicious Mandy Matney (“MMM”) and her “work wife” Liz Farrell (with MMM’s now-puppy-dog husband David Moses completing the menage-a-trois behind the scenes) insisted JUST PRIOR to Paul and Maggie’s 7 June 2021 shootings that RAM and/or his son(s) had killed Sanctimonious Sandy Smith’s (“SSS”) son Stephen and Ever-Bluffing Eric Bland’s (“EBEB”) clients’ decedent Gloria Harriot Statterfield (“GHS”).
The Prosecution’s theory was that RAM killed Paul and Maggie to delay the discovery of RAM’s involvement with GHS and SSS’s son.
But the truth is: GHS did NOT die at Moselle as a result of her fall but died in hospital 24 days later from myocardial infarction MOST PROBABLY resulting from her chronic diabetes complicated by TERMINAL renal failure and neuropathies causing imbalance.
The truth ALSO is: GHS’s heirs KNEW of GHS’s pre-existing conditions, of the REAL cause of her death, AND of the settlement reached, long before Paul and Maggie’s demises. They PROBABLY knew they were initiating a fraudulent insurance claim when they agreed to hire Corey Fleming to sue RAM under that fabricated dogs story.
In MMM’s book, “Blood on Their Hands,” she discloses that she discovered the GHS settlement by digging into court records ALMOST A YEAR before 7 June 2021.
That email which the grown-man, fully-employed (NOT “boy”) Tony Satterfield sent RAM in April 2021 was a dual function fabrication of deniability for GHS’s heirs and entrapment for RAM.
MY conclusion, based on MY experience with malicious prosecutions (which, thank God, I ultimately defeated WITHOUT A LAWYER and in the courtroom of none other than Judge Clifton Newman, who is still to stand up for me and say Dr. Faltas does NOT deserve to have her BASIC human right to speak for herself denied just because she defended herself pro se successfully) and without false humility is: GHS’s heirs and their lawyer EBEB have NO PROBLEM pursuing their fraudulent insurance claim about GHS’s demise; their ONLY problem is that RAM kept all the loot to himself.
OR not all of it because, my conclusion based on OTHER observations, is that such OBVIOUSLY fraudulent claim would NOT have succeeded without the complicity of the LOCAL insurance defense lawyer(s) and the LOCAL insurance adjustor(s). These were NOT “charmed” by RAM’s theatrics but functioned on a strict quid-pro-quo basis. THAT is where RAM’s supposed “missing millions” went: kick backs to LOCAL insurance defense lawyers and adjustors.
And THAT is why no one wants to delve more deeply.
The media, main stream or mom-and-pop, rely on advertisements from personal injury lawyers. The latter know that they cannot get the huge settlements about which they boast in their advertisements without insurance defense lawyers OCCASIONALLY rolling over.
The most probative case, the proverbial “original sin,” is buried deep in Cory Fleming’s deposition in the federal case of Nautilus v. Murdaugh.
In August 2010 years ago, Cory and Eve Fleming’s then-minor only son needed some surgery. So, they had Fleming’s MATERNAL cousin Jean Fowlkes as a guardian to a name-redacted-child sue Eve Fleming for having directed that name-redacted-child to exit Eve’s SUV through the backdoor causing the child to fall and suffer severe injuries. The case is in Beaufort County 2012-CP-07-2826.
Whether that is really what happened to that child or not, the Flemings could not have sued their own automobile insurance for their own negligence towards their own child.
The issue TO ME, is that the insurance defense lawyer could AND should, with MINIMAL RESEARCH, have found out that the injured child was Eve’s own son and that, as such, no insurance coverage is available.
For full disclosure, before reading Cory Fleming’s RECENT deposition in the Nautilus case, I had romanticized the story and thought the child was an abuse victim of one of Public Defender Eve Fleming’s clients and that Eve had exercised utter nobility in seeing to it that said poor child’s medical needs were met even at the cost of getting herself fraudulently sued.
I am naive, but I lose my naivety when confronted with OBJECTIVE evidence that that the REAL world is darker than I ever thought.
Parenthetically, I had also been naive about EBEB confronting big law firms. But that is another story.
Only in Cory Fleming’s deposition did I discover that the child was Cory’s own and gathered that said now-grown son did not attend Cory Fleming’s federal sentencing, not to be spared the humiliation of seeing his father sentenced, but to be spared being questioned about that August 2010 injury.
So, it appears to be a long tradition of insurance defense lawyers, FOR THE RIGHT PRICE, rolling over an paying obviously-invalid insurance claims.
How does that apply to GHS’s heirs claims and to Paul and Maggie’s demises?
Also deep in the depositions in the federal Nautilus case, John Grantland, of Murphy and Grantland, testifies that he could not find an internal medicine physician who could/could have done a life-expectancy analysis of GHS based on her pre-existing conditions.
Really? REALLY?!!!?? Really??!!
That is the bread and butter of ALL insurance defenses in wrongful deaths cases: the assessment of life expectancy independent of the event subject of the lawsuit.
And if you do not believe me, RAM himself had gotten a trial judge reversed based on that judge’s erroneous refusal to admit life-expectancy evidence.
The other side of the coin of insurance defense lawyers rolling over and paying worthless claims is their resorting to unethical extortions to terminate the cases of deserving claimants who cannot or would not pay bribes.
The cheating husband who brings flowers to the wronged and unsuspecting wife.
After all, a local insurance defense lawyer would not be rehired if (s)he kept rolling over and paying all claims. Only the select few get paid; the others get “defended” to the point of getting the worthy, deserving claimant falsely arrested to extort her to drop her claims or accept a penny on the dollar.
GHS’s heirs knew of the settlement and had confronted RAM about it. He PROBABLY responded that, if they do not buzz off, Paul and Maggie would testify that there were no dogs, and “Handsome” would testify that GHS was NOT picking up a check for services rendered to Libby Murdaugh. Thus, if GHS’s heirs had a case at all, it would be a workman’s comp, and that is only if GHS was even covered by workman’s comp insurance.
“Handsome” was dying and DID die three days later.
The only two remaining witnesses who could have brought the temple down a la Biblical Samson on themselves and their enemies were Paul and Maggie Murdaugh, who had made the 911 call when GHS had fallen at Moselle in February 2018.
So, follow the money. Who really profited from Paul and Maggie’s demise?
And what is the DOCUMENTED conduct of local insurance-defense-lawyers?
As always, do not take my words, take the OBJECTIVE records.
Trying again:
FITS, I notice this time you did not repeat your fig-leaf that you still think Richard Alexander Murdaugh (“RAM”) killed his wife and younger son but that RAM should get a new trial for it to be proven again beyond reasonable doubt and with constitutional t’s crossed and i’s dotted.
I also respect and encourage the father of (seven or eight?) children waking up after Thanksgiving and writing such a courageous, if repetitive, article.
BUT it is not that simple.
The REAL reason for resistance to a new trial for RAM is that a new trial will prove him INNOCENT and could, God willing, reveal the real killers, throw light on the facts that RAM’s so-called “client-victims” were NOT victims at all but were co-conspirators with RAM in presenting grossly-exaggerated, if not outright fraudulent, insurance claims, and that those claims would NOT have been paid out to such levels without the collusion of LOCAL insurance adjustors AND local supposed defense-lawyers hired by those big insurance companies with (physically and operationally) remote head-quarters.
Most significantly, the real truths about RAM would hinder, if not end, Alan Wilson’s gubernatorial ambitions if he really has any. After all, South Carolina’s (“SC”) Attorney General (“SCAG”) is not term-limited; but SC’s governor is.
As young as Alan Wilson is, and as ailing as his adoptive father is, Alan might not want to end is own political career by going into a dead-end (proven by Nikki Haley) term-limited state position instead of staying where he is or inheriting his adoptive father’s congressional seat.
And where SCAG Wilson is is literally worth millions. Many more millions than RAM’s so-called missing millions which are really not missing at all.
SCAG Wilson’s predecessors, including Charlie Condon, controlled millions in the State Insurance Reserve Fund’s farming out the state’s public business to private law firms AND in farming out the state’s huge civil cases to private law firms.
The latter civil cases (such as the tobacco litigation) were typically NOT started by SC but by other states with all SC having to do being signing its name to share in the settlements.
Since Condon’s time, the cases increased to include insulin pricing, the opioid litigation, etc. The one SC exclusive case was that nuclear waste case for which SCAG Wilson assigned two private law firms: one headed by his former lawyer, Ken Woodington, and the other by Jean Toal’s brother, Willoughby and Hoefer. The $75M SCAG Wilson gave those two private law firms instead of depositing them for SC’s tax-payers may still be in litigation; but all who will rule on it know on which side their bread is buttered.
And it seems that nuclear waste settlement was easier than the proverbial shooting of a pig in a poke. It was handed to SCAG Wilson on a proverbial silver platter by you-know-whom. And SCAG Wilson passed the largesse down to two private law firms, not to the tax-payers.
Back to RAM!
This oulet, FITSNews, then led by Malicious Mandy Matney (“MMM”) and her “work wife” Liz Farrell (with MMM’s now-puppy-dog husband David Moses completing the menage-a-trois behind the scenes) insisted JUST PRIOR to Paul and Maggie’s 7 June 2021 shootings that RAM and/or his son(s) had killed Sanctimonious Sandy Smith’s (“SSS”) son Stephen and Ever-Bluffing Eric Bland’s (“EBEB”) clients’ decedent Gloria Harriot Statterfield (“GHS”).
The Prosecution’s theory was that RAM killed Paul and Maggie to delay the discovery of RAM’s involvement with GHS and SSS’s son.
But the truth is: GHS did NOT die at Moselle as a result of her fall but died in hospital 24 days later from myocardial infarction MOST PROBABLY resulting from her chronic diabetes complicated by TERMINAL renal failure and neuropathies causing imbalance.
The truth ALSO is: GHS’s heirs KNEW of GHS’s pre-existing conditions, of the REAL cause of her death, AND of the settlement reached, long before Paul and Maggie’s demises. They PROBABLY knew they were initiating a fraudulent insurance claim when they agreed to hire Corey Fleming to sue RAM under that fabricated dogs story.
In MMM’s book, “Blood on Their Hands,” she discloses that she discovered the GHS settlement by digging into court records ALMOST A YEAR before 7 June 2021.
That email which the grown-man, fully-employed (NOT “boy”) Tony Satterfield sent RAM in April 2021 was a dual function fabrication of deniability for GHS’s heirs and entrapment for RAM.
MY conclusion, based on MY experience with malicious prosecutions (which, thank God, I ultimately defeated WITHOUT A LAWYER and in the courtroom of none other than Judge Clifton Newman, who is still to stand up for me and say Dr. Faltas does NOT deserve to have her BASIC human right to speak for herself denied just because she defended herself pro se successfully) and without false humility is: GHS’s heirs and their lawyer EBEB have NO PROBLEM pursuing their fraudulent insurance claim about GHS’s demise; their ONLY problem is that RAM kept all the loot to himself.
OR not all of it because, my conclusion based on OTHER observations, is that such OBVIOUSLY fraudulent claim would NOT have succeeded without the complicity of the LOCAL insurance defense lawyer(s) and the LOCAL insurance adjustor(s). These were NOT “charmed” by RAM’s theatrics but functioned on a strict quid-pro-quo basis. THAT is where RAM’s supposed “missing millions” went: kick backs to LOCAL insurance defense lawyers and adjustors.
And THAT is why no one wants to delve more deeply.
The media, main stream or mom-and-pop, rely on advertisements from personal injury lawyers. The latter know that they cannot get the huge settlements about which they boast in their advertisements without insurance defense lawyers OCCASIONALLY rolling over.
The most probative case, the proverbial “original sin,” is buried deep in Cory Fleming’s deposition in the federal case of Nautilus v. Murdaugh.
In August 2010 years ago, Cory and Eve Fleming’s then-minor only son needed some surgery. So, they had Fleming’s MATERNAL cousin Jean Fowlkes as a guardian to a name-redacted-child sue Eve Fleming for having directed that name-redacted-child to exit Eve’s SUV through the backdoor causing the child to fall and suffer severe injuries. The case is in Beaufort County 2012-CP-07-2826.
Whether that is really what happened to that child or not, the Flemings could not have sued their own automobile insurance for their own negligence towards their own child.
The issue TO ME, is that the insurance defense lawyer could AND should, with MINIMAL RESEARCH, have found out that the injured child was Eve’s own son and that, as such, no insurance coverage is available.
For full disclosure, before reading Cory Fleming’s RECENT deposition in the Nautilus case, I had romanticized the story and thought the child was an abuse victim of one of Public Defender Eve Fleming’s clients and that Eve had exercised utter nobility in seeing to it that said poor child’s medical needs were met even at the cost of getting herself fraudulently sued.
I am naive, but I lose my naivety when confronted with OBJECTIVE evidence that that the REAL world is darker than I ever thought.
Parenthetically, I had also been naive about EBEB confronting big law firms. But that is another story.
Only in Cory Fleming’s deposition did I discover that the child was Cory’s own and gathered that said now-grown son did not attend Cory Fleming’s federal sentencing, not to be spared the humiliation of seeing his father sentenced, but to be spared being questioned about that August 2010 injury.
So, it appears to be a long tradition of insurance defense lawyers, FOR THE RIGHT PRICE, rolling over an paying obviously-invalid insurance claims.
How does that apply to GHS’s heirs claims and to Paul and Maggie’s demises?
Also deep in the depositions in the federal Nautilus case, John Grantland, of Murphy and Grantland, testifies that he could not find an internal medicine physician who could/could have done a life-expectancy analysis of GHS based on her pre-existing conditions.
Really? REALLY?!!!?? Really??!!
That is the bread and butter of ALL insurance defenses in wrongful deaths cases: the assessment of life expectancy independent of the event subject of the lawsuit.
And if you do not believe me, RAM himself had gotten a trial judge reversed based on that judge’s erroneous refusal to admit life-expectancy evidence.
The other side of the coin of insurance defense lawyers rolling over and paying worthless claims is their resorting to unethical extortions to terminate the cases of deserving claimants who cannot or would not pay bribes.
The cheating husband who brings flowers to the wronged and unsuspecting wife.
After all, a local insurance defense lawyer would not be rehired if (s)he kept rolling over and paying all claims. Only the select few get paid; the others get “defended” to the point of getting the worthy, deserving claimant falsely arrested to extort her to drop her claims or accept a penny on the dollar.
GHS’s heirs knew of the settlement and had confronted RAM about it. He PROBABLY responded that, if they do not buzz off, Paul and Maggie would testify that there were no dogs, and “Handsome” would testify that GHS was NOT picking up a check for services rendered to Libby Murdaugh. Thus, if GHS’s heirs had a case at all, it would be a workman’s comp, and that is only if GHS was even covered by workman’s comp insurance.
“Handsome” was dying and DID die three days later.
The only two remaining witnesses who could have brought the temple down a la Biblical Samson on themselves and their enemies were Paul and Maggie Murdaugh, who had made the 911 call when GHS had fallen at Moselle in February 2018.
So, follow the money. Who really profited from Paul and Maggie’s demise?
And what is the DOCUMENTED conduct of local insurance-defense-lawyers?
As always, do not take my words, take the OBJECTIVE records.
Geez!