Prosecutors Reject Claims of Withheld Phone Data for Alex Murdaugh

A judge in Alex Murdaugh's case readied a ruling on a defense request to extract phone data while legal teams confirmed they are now auditing discovery materials years after the original trial began. Prosecutors say they recently spent hours reconstructing a corrupted August 2022 murder download for the defense, but the court clarified that this file is simply recopied data and not new evidence.

New court documents show South Carolina state prosecutors flatly rejecting claims from Murdaugh's side that the government withheld critical "raw" cellphone files. The motion filed Tuesday directly answers a September filing by Murdaugh's legal team, which insisted it never received extraction files, keychain files, or logs from seized smartphones.

Murdaugh was convicted in March 2023 for killing his wife Maggie and son Paul in 2021. He faced two life sentences until May 2026, when the South Carolina Supreme Court overturned that verdict after finding former Colleton County Clerk of Court Rebecca "Becky" Hill improperly influenced jurors. A new trial is now scheduled for April 2027.

In this latest round of filings, prosecutors argue the defense already possessed the evidence multiple times and labels their current account as false and manufactured. They point to the defense's own emails as proof they contradicted themselves.

Circuit Judge Debra McCaslin presided over attorneys arguing these motions ahead of the April 2027 retrial in Lexington, South Carolina, on August 14, 2026. The state released 40 pages of emails, file folder screenshots, and signed discovery receipts covering late 2022 through early 2023.

Records reveal investigators from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) handed over full, unredacted raw extractions, password logs, keychain files, and reports to defense experts as early as October and November 2022.

Furthermore, prosecutors produced emails dated January 20, 2023. That date was just three days before jury selection started in the first trial. The documents show the defense team asking for a duplicate copy of Murdaugh's phone extraction because they had misplaced the original.

"The State will be glad to send the cell phone evidence to the defense yet one more time if they have somehow messed up or lost their copies again," the motion states. Fox News Digital has reached out to Murdaugh's defense team for comment on these latest developments.