This is bad for me: after all, my profession is substantially involved with the justice system and the law. I keep learning things that make me increasingly cynical regarding the fairness, competence and integrity of the American justice system, and lately it has been

…right in the kisser. (I’ll have another horror story for you later today, if all goes according to plan.)

Yesterday, a judge refused to grant a new trial for Alex Murdaugh, the former South Carolina lawyer, now disbarred and convicted of murdering his wife and son. His defense team argued that a court clerk had improperly influenced the jurors in his case, which, if she did not, was only moral luck. I wrote about the unethical clerk here last Fall. Even before the allegations were made about the clerk, Rebecca Hill, signaling and sometimes prompting jurors that they needed to convict Murdaugh, the trial and his conviction looked like a travesty of justice.

Here is what I wrote about the case after the trial…

“Reviewing the astoundingly thin evidence, I do not understand why the trial judge didn’t throw out the jury’s verdict and declare Murdaugh acquitted because there was not enough to convict him beyond a reasonable doubt as a matter of law. There wasn’t. This was an example of a jury convicting a defendant of murder because they decided he was a bad guy and there were no other suspects. Alex Murdaugh lied repeatedly regarding the deaths of his wife and son and he was undeniably a thief and a sociopath—but prosecutors couldn’t and didn’t present much more than theories about whether he was the killer. Judges are understandably, reluctant to over-ride juries, but in this case it was necessary. If the Trump Deranged reasoning that the conclusion that someone is just an untrustworthy bounder is sufficient to assume guilt of criminal activity is becoming a cultural norm, our justice system is approaching a crisis, if it isn’t in one already.

The only motive that the prosecution could come up with for claiming Murdaugh was behind the double murder of his wife and son was that the lawyer thought he would be more leniently treated for the other crimes he was being charged with if juries and judges felt sorry for him as a result of their deaths. That’s just bonkers, and if I were a member of the jury, I’d regard the prosecution having to resort to such a theory as per se reasonable doubt. But as if that weren’t enough, Murdaugh’s trial was tainted by a fame- and fortune-seeking law clerk. (I recently wrote about the carnage triggered by another unethical law clerk scandal. What the hell’s going on out there?)

The judge, Jean Toal, who decided that having a law clerk openly trying to turn the jury against a defendant in a capital crime trial was insufficiently prejudicial to throw out the verdict, heard testimony from Hill and all 12 jurors. The judge concluded that Hill had been “attracted by the siren call of celebrity” and did want Murdaugh to be convicted because she was planning to write a book about the trial. She also found Hill to be “not completely credible” in her testimony, and not completely credible means not credible at all.

Yet she let the verdict stand anyway. Allegedly Hill told jurors not to be “fooled” by Murdaugh’s defense, and had private conversations with a juror. It appears that she told jurors before they started deliberating that “this shouldn’t take ‘us’ long.”

One of the jurors testified that Hill told the panel “to watch him closely,” meaning Murdaugh, and that her comments had influenced her guilty vote in the jury room. “To me, it felt like she made it seem like he was already guilty,” the juror testified. Another juror in the trial said that Hill advised jurors to watch Murdaugh’s body language when he testified in his own defense; yet another reportedly said that Hill had mentioned to jurors that it was rare for a defendant to take the stand (wink wink nudge nudge).

Hill did indeed write a book about the trial, that, she testified, earned her and her coauthor about $100,000. She also acknowledged plagiarizing in some of the book’s preface, so she’s unlikely to become president of Harvard at this point. The former clerk admitted in her testimony that she lied in the book, including in the relevant passage about “locking eyes with a juror” during the trial and realizing in that meaningful moment that they knew Murdaugh was guilty. This was “poetic license,” she told the judge.

Oh.

How does someone this scummy, unprofessional and untrustworthy end up as a court clerk? Never mind, though: “everyone” knows that Murdaugh is a bad guy, so in reality, he’s considered guilty unless proven innocent…like Derek Chauvin. Like Donald Trump. This ugly case and unethical result increasingly looks like an ominous trend, with our justice system being more concerned with getting up-votes on social media than continuing the vital tradition of taking every precaution to make sure an innocent defendant isn’t convicted even if it means ten guilty defendants (or a hundred, depending on which quote you use) go free.