Alex Murdaugh murder conviction overturned by South Carolina Supreme Court
Alex Murdaugh, convicted of killing his wife and youngest son, listens as his attorneys Dick Harpootlian, left, and Phil Barber speak during a judicial hearing at the Richland County Judicial Center in Columbia, South Carolina, on Jan. 29, 2024. (Tracy Glantz/The State/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — The South Carolina Supreme Court has overturned the murder convictions of Alex Murdaugh.
The former attorney was sentenced in 2023 to life in prison for the murder convictions of his wife Margaret “Maggie” Murdaugh, 52, and younger son, Paul Murdaugh, 22. Both were found shot inside their home in 2021.
The Carolina Supreme Court ruled that Murdaugh must have a new trial, citing the actions of former Colleton County Clerk of Court Mary Rebecca “Becky” Hill, who has been charged with perjury, obstructing justice and misconduct in relation to the murder trial.
Murdaugh’s attorneys contend that Hill tampered with the jury by “advising it not to believe Murdaugh’s testimony and other defense evidence, pressuring it to reach a quick guilty verdict, misrepresenting information to the trial court in an attempt to have the court remove a juror she believed to favor the defense.”
Murdaugh was also convicted on several financial crimes following the murder trial and is serving a 27-year sentence on state charges and a 40-year sentence on federal charges related to those crimes.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Artemis II: the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft at Launch Pad 39B, on Friday, Jan. 30, 2026. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
(MERRITT ISLAND, Fla.) — Weather conditions have again delayed operations leading to the launch of the Artemis II rocket mission to the moon.
The rollback of the Artemis II rocket and spacecraft at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida was originally scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. Due to high winds in the area, NASA said its plans to move the rocket and Orion spacecraft for Artemis II off the launch pad and back to the vehicle assembly building were pushed to Wednesday morning.
The 4-mile trek is expected to take 12 hours, the space agency said.
The move was deemed necessary after crews detected an interrupted flow of helium to the Artemis II rocket’s upper stage on Saturday. Helium did not flow properly during normal operations and reconfigurations that followed the wet dress rehearsal that concluded on Thursday.
The upper stage uses helium to maintain the proper environmental conditions for its engine and to pressurize liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellant tanks, according to NASA. Essentially, helium is a critical element that ensures the proper flow of fuel into the rocket.
Once back in the vehicle assembly building, teams will install platforms to access the helium flow issue, NASA said. Teams will review potential causes of the issue as well as data from the 2022 Artemis I mission, in which teams had to troubleshoot helium-related pressurization of the upper stage before launch.
The Artemis II mission is a test flight that will send four astronauts on a more than 600,000-mile journey around the moon to test critical spacecraft systems, according to NASA. The crew will fly over the far side of the moon — passing between 4,000 and 6,000 miles above it — and spend a day observing and photographing the region.
After the lunar flyby, the astronauts will circle the moon for a return to Earth, in which the Earth-moon gravity field will help pull the spacecraft back to Earth over the course of its three-day return trip.
The Orion will then splashdown off the coast of San Diego after re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere, and the U.S. Navy will recover the astronauts from the Pacific Ocean.
The journey is expected to take 10 days total.
The mission sets the stage for the future Artemis III, which aims to someday land astronauts near the moon’s South Pole. The region has never been explored by humans before.
Artemis II will mark the first time humans have traveled beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.
In January, NASA delayed the Artemis moonshot due to near-freezing temperatures at the launch site.
Heaters were deployed to keep the Orion capsule on top of the rocket warm, while rocket-purging systems were adapted to the cold.
The rollback of Artemis II means it will not launch during the March launch window, NASA said.
The quick preparations will potentially preserve the April launch window, pending the outcome of data findings and repair efforts, according to the agency.
ABC News’ Briana Alvarado and Matthew Glasser contributed to this report.
Daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, Maurene Comey, leaves the Albert V. Bryan United States Courthouse on November 13, 2025 in Alexandria, Virginia. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — A federal judge in New York on Tuesday blocked the Justice Department’s attempt to move Maurene Comey’s lawsuit over her firing as a federal prosecutor out of court.
Comey, the daughter of former FBI director James Comey, has joined a private law practice but is suing for unlawful termination after she was fired last year from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
The Justice Department argued that her case belongs before the Merit Systems Protection Board and not in federal district court.
Judge Jesse Furman decided the case belongs with him because Comey was fired pursuant to the president’s executive authority and not the usual procedures for civil servants.
“Maurene Comey was, by all accounts, an exemplary Assistant United States Attorney. In her nearly ten years working at the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, she was assigned some of the country’s highest profile cases, and she consistently received the highest accolades from supervisors and peers alike,” the judge’s opinion said.
“Comey was notified by email from Department of Justice officials in Washington, D.C., that her employment was terminated, effective immediately,” the judge wrote. “She was given one and only one reason for her removal: Article II of the U.S. Constitution, which ‘vest[s]’ the ‘executive Power’ in the President.”
The DOJ, in court filings, has characterized Comey’s case as routine.
“A federal employee’s claims that removal from federal service was arbitrary and capricious or conducted in a manner that did not provide the process to which they contend they were due is not a novel issue,” government attorneys said.
Comey, who prosecuted high-profile defendants including Sean Combs, Robert Hadden, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, alleged she was fired “because her father is former FBI Director James B. Comey, or because of her perceived political affiliation and beliefs, or both.”
Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student and Palestinian activist, who was arrested by US immigration authorities in mid-April 2025, attends the inauguration ceremony at City Hall in New York, United States, on January 1, 2026. (Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — For the second time in a little more than a week, attorneys have announced that an immigration court has terminated deportation proceedings against a pro-Palestinian student after Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed they posed a threat to foreign policy.
According to a letter filed in court, attorneys for Mohsen Mahdawi, the Columbia University student who was detained at his naturalization interview in April, a judge has found that the Department of Homeland Security “did not meet its burden of proving by clear and convincing evidence” that he is removable.
It comes after an immigration court terminated removal proceedings against Tufts University Ph.D. student Rümeysa Öztürk. Her attorneys announced the order in a letter to the federal judge overseeing the case challenging her detention on Feb. 9.
For Mahdawi’s case, immigration judge Nina Froes appears to have based her decision on the finding that DHS failed to authenticate a memo allegedly signed by Rubio claiming Mahdawi was a threat to U.S. foreign policy.
Mahdawi’s attorneys have argued that, like other pro-Palestinian demonstrators, organizers and students, he was being targeted for his constitutionally protected speech.
Öztürk, like Mahdawi, was also labeled a foreign policy risk by Rubio in a memo.
Both cases can be appealed by the Trump administration, so their habeas petitions will likely continue to play out in federal court.
“I am grateful to the court for honoring the rule of law and holding the line against the government’s attempts to trample on due process,” Mahdawi said in a statement. “This decision is an important step towards upholding what fear tried to destroy: the right to speak for peace and justice.”
“In a climate where dissent is increasingly met with intimidation and detention, today’s ruling renews hope that due process still applies and that no agency stands above the Constitution,” he added.
In response to a request for comment about both cases, the Department of Homeland Security sent a previous statement about Mahdawi and said: “It is a privilege to be granted a visa or green card to live and study in the United States of America. When you advocate for violence, glorify and support terrorists that relish the killing of Americans, and harass Jews, that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country. No activist judge, not this one or any other, is going to stop us from doing that.”
Mahdawi was detained in Vermont last spring during his citizenship interview. Arguing that he should continue to be detained, lawyers for the Trump administration pointed to a 2015 FBI investigation, in which a gun shop owner alleged that Mahdawi had claimed to have built machine guns in the West Bank to kill Jews.
However, the FBI closed that investigation and Mahdawi was never charged with any crime, a point a federal judge highlighted when he ordered Mahdawi’s release.
In response to the government’s allegations against him, Mahdawi and his lawyers have firmly refuted allegations that he ever threatened Israelis or those of the Jewish faith. He told ABC News he has been advocating for peace and protesting against the war in Gaza.
“So for them to accuse me of this is not going to work, because I am a person who actually has condemned antisemitism,” Mahdawi said. “And I believe that the fight against antisemitism and the fight to free Palestine go hand in hand, because, as Martin Luther King said, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Öztürk was detained in March by masked federal agents, and the arrest was captured on camera. Attorneys representing her said she was targeted, like other high-profile arrests of students, for her Pro-Palestinian views, specifically, for co-authoring an Op-Ed in the student paper in March 2024 calling on the school’s administration to take steps to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.”
A federal judge ordered her release in May.
“Today, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that despite the justice system’s flaws, my case may give hope to those who have also been wronged by the U.S. government,” Öztürk said in a statement on Feb. 9. “Though the pain that I and thousands of other women wrongfully imprisoned by ICE have faced cannot be undone, it is heartening to know that some justice can prevail after all.”
