Alex Murdaugh, store owner to be tried together in Mallory Beach civil trial, judge rules

A circuit judge on Friday ruled that Alex Murdaugh and convenience store operator Greg Parker will be tried together in the upcoming civil trial involving the 2019 drowning death of Mallory Beach.

Although Parker attorney Pankaj “P.K.” Shere argued that the “media hurricane” surrounding Murdaugh — the convicted killer of his wife and son — would unfairly damage Parker if the two were tried together in Hampton County, Judge Daniel Hall ruled that the trial will start with both as co-defendants on Aug. 14.

Hall’s ruling to try Murdaugh and Parker together in a single trial carries major financial implications.

Under South Carolina’s “joint and several” liability law, if Parker is found even 1% liable for Beach’s death and Murdaugh is found 99 percent liable, Parker would be responsible for paying the entire amount of any damages the jury awards because Murdaugh — now serving two consecutive life sentences — has no money, Shere told the judge.

Hall also denied Shere’s motion to transfer the trial out of both Hampton County and the 14th Judicial Circuit in southeastern South Carolina.

“The court has full confidence it will find jurors here in Hampton County,” Hall ruled at the end of a hearing at the Hampton County courthouse that lasted less than an hour.

Some 600 prospective jurors will be summoned for jury duty. Court TV, a cable television network that broadcasts major trials and hearings around the nation, plans to air the Beach trial as it did Murdaugh’s murder trial earlier this year.

Although two weeks have been set aside for the trial, it may well go beyond that. Tinsley potentially plans to call more than 25 witnesses.

Murdaugh’s civil attorney, Dawes Cook, said Friday his client intends to attend the trial. Discussions will take place with the S.C. Department of Corrections on how to transport him safely and securely to the court each day. Murdaugh is currently in a high security state prison facility in the Lowcountry.

Cook told the judge that Murdaugh wants to be tried in the same trial as Parker.

Friday’s rulings were a victory for Beach family attorney Mark Tinsley, who told the judge that South Carolina law and state Supreme Court precedents fully support trying Murdaugh and Parker together, and trying them in Hampton County where Murdaugh and his law firm for decades occupied a prominent place.

After Beach’s February 2019 death, her mother sued Murdaugh, Parker and others. The lawsuit alleged that Murdaugh’s son Paul was driving the boat drunk when it crashed. Parker owns a chain of convenience stores, including one that sold the alcohol to Paul that allegedly contributed to the crash, according to the lawsuit.

Paul, 19 at the time, was too young to legally buy alcohol and the lawsuit alleges that the store clerk would have known that he was too young to buy alcohol if she had only scrutinized the driver’s license Paul used, the lawsuit alleged. The license belonged to Paul’s older brother, Buster, who is more than 6 inches taller than Paul and more than 50 pounds heavier, the lawsuit said.

Shere argued Friday there are actually two entirely separate cases against Murdaugh and Parker and to try them together is not right.

Shere said one case — against Murdaugh — involves “bad parenting” and includes allegations that Murdaugh entrusted Paul with the family boat while tolerating and abetting his drinking habits. Paul was known to act irresponsibly when drunk, according to the lawsuit.

The other case — against Parker and his stores — is what is called a “dram shop case,” in which the allegations only concern whether a store clerk was negligent in selling the alcohol to the underage Paul earlier on the night Mallory Beach died, Shere said.

“Those two claims are absolutely 100% different,” Shere told the judge.

Although Hall had previously rejected motions to try Parker and Murdaugh separately, Shere said he was making the motions again because in recent months, Murdaugh had been found guilty by a jury of murdering his wife, Maggie, and Paul Murdaugh.

“The media frenzy regarding Alex Murdaugh and his murder convictions has gone beyond South Carolina, beyond the Southeast, it’s gone national and global,” Shere said.

Because of Murdaugh’s convictions, and the dismissals of other parties to the civil case, the “prejudice” against Parker with Murdaugh as the only co-defendant is far more concentrated than it was previously, Shere argued.

Tinsley knows that a “stink” surrounds Murdaugh that will cause a jury to give a big award that Parker will be responsible for, Shere said. “You now have a 100% judgment proof co-defendant (Murdaugh) who murdered his wife, who murdered his son, and he wants us there together so a jury can get angry about that.”

Tinsley told the judge that Parker has “unclean hands” because he has spread negative information in national outlets such as Netflix and the Wall Street Journal about the case. In any event, long-settled law in South Carolina says a defendant in a case cannot dictate who the other defendants are, Tinsley said.

As for Shere’s efforts to move the trial from Hampton because Parker supposedly can’t get a fair trial, Tinsley told the judge there is no evidence to support that.

Prospective jurors are always questioned as to whether they can give the parties a fair trial and base their decision on evidence presented at trial, and that questioning won’t begin untll the trial starts, Tinsley said.

The state constitution requires 20 qualified people from which jurors will be selected, and “there’s no question that we’ll find 20 people,” Tinsley said.

After the hearing, Shere released a statement that said in part, “Being tethered to a convicted murderer — the most notorious criminal defendant in the last 50 years — leaves Parker’s potentially bearing the brunt of a punitive verdict... We simply asked for fairness.”

Judge Hall, in announcing his rulings, said that South Carolina has had experience with high profile criminal cases, experience that shows impartial juries can be found in places where dastardly crimes have taken place. Hall cited the 2016-17 federal death penalty trial of Dylann Roof, who was tried and convicted in Charleston County by a Charleston area jury. Roof, a white supremacist, massacred nine people at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel AME Church in 2015.

Tinsley said later that “the hearing went exactly as I expected. Parker continues to be unimpeded by the facts and the law. I look forward to August.”