What Does Alex Murdaugh's Federal Lawsuit Against Becky Hill Actually Do?
Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary
True Crime Today
3.3 • 907 Ratings
🗓️ 22 May 2026
⏱️ 16 minutes
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Summary
Alex Murdaugh's defense team filed a seventeen-page Section 1983 civil rights complaint against former Colleton County Clerk of Court Becky Hill in federal court in Charleston — five days after the South Carolina Supreme Court unanimously overturned his murder convictions based on what the justices called "shocking jury interference." The complaint seeks six hundred thousand dollars in compensatory and punitive damages, but Jim Griffin told reporters none of it would go to Murdaugh personally.
Eric Faddis explains the legal mechanics — what Section 1983 requires, what civil discovery gives the defense that the criminal process never did, and what "peeling the onion" actually looks like when you have subpoena power and deposition authority aimed at a government official who's already pleaded guilty to misconduct, obstruction, and perjury.
He addresses the gap between the state prosecutor telling the court there wasn't enough evidence to charge Hill with jury tampering and the Supreme Court ruling four months later that tampering is exactly what happened. He examines Dick Harpootlian's public question about whether Hill was a "lone wolf" and what that signal means on day one of a federal lawsuit.
And he connects the civil case to the criminal retrial — where the AG is openly considering the death penalty and depositions from the federal suit could reshape the landscape before a single juror is seated.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brewski and Robin Drey. |
| 0:07.8 | Let's go to another topic. |
| 0:09.2 | Alec Murdoch just got his convictions overturned, and instead of sitting back and waiting |
| 0:13.7 | for a retrial, his defense team did something a lot of people didn't see coming. |
| 0:17.6 | Five days after the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that Becky Hill placed her fingers on the scales of justice. Dick Harputalin and Jim Griffin walked into a federal |
| 0:27.4 | court in Charleston and sued her personally. A 17-page civil rights complaint, $600,000 |
| 0:34.4 | in damages, and Griffin openly admitted at a press conference that the money isn't the point. |
| 0:39.3 | The point is to peel back the onion of Becky Hill, subpoena power, depositions, the ability to drag people under oath and ask questions. |
| 0:48.8 | The state's own investigators never bothered to ask to bring this down legally strategically and in the bigger picture of |
| 0:57.5 | the retrial Eric Fadis is with us to help us have this discussion Eric let's start here and let's |
| 1:04.9 | walk people through the 1983 lawsuit to what it actually is this is usually a statute used against cops and prison |
| 1:13.4 | guards. So why is Murdoch using it against the clerk court? And what does the defense have to |
| 1:19.8 | prove to win going at her in this lane? Yeah. And Tony, I've got to say, I think we all called this, whereas a lot of people |
| 1:30.8 | didn't see it coming, but on a prior show, we had discussed those possibilities. |
| 1:34.4 | And lo and behold, here we are. |
| 1:36.5 | So viewers need to tune in on that stuff. |
| 1:40.2 | Yeah. |
| 1:40.8 | You know, for a 1983 lawsuit, what we're talking about is when the government deprives a person |
| 1:47.7 | of a constitutional right and causes them damages. So like you said, usually that's police. |
| 1:54.1 | Usually it's police brutality. It's excessive force. It's something like that. But here, Becky Hale is still the government. |
| 2:02.7 | She's just court clerk, man. |
| 2:04.6 | And so if she took actions that deprived Murdoch of the right to a fair trial, of the right to an impartial jury, of the right to due process, and that caused damages, the causation piece is a little more tricky but uh he would |
... |
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