Lawyers for Alex Murdaugh are due in court on Friday to ask that the original murder indictments against him, for the killings of his wife and son, be thrown out. They now argue that the chief investigator in the case lied to the grand jury. The South Carolina Supreme Court has already thrown out Murdaugh’s convictions and his life sentence, ruling that a court clerk improperly influenced jurors against him during his 2023 trial.

That decision means Murdaugh faces a retrial on the murder charges. Judge Debra McCaslin will consider the request to dismiss the indictments at Friday’s pretrial hearing. Even if the long-shot request is granted, it may not stop, or even postpone, an April retrial for the disgraced lawyer.

Prosecutors can seek another set of grand jury indictments as soon as next month, and defense attorneys said they won’t stop them. But a ruling for Murdaugh would be another rebuke of the chief investigator, State Law Enforcement Division agent David Owen. A judge last year threw out a different murder case Owen was involved in.

The dead woman’s mother had told the agent about a suicide threat her daughter made days before she died, and Owen never relayed it to prosecutors or defense attorneys. Owen abruptly retired in 2024, not long after he was honored as State Law Enforcement Officer of the Year. Prosecutors said Murdaugh, 58, killed his wife, Maggie, and younger son, Paul, on their sprawling property in the South Carolina Lowcountry in 2021.

Murdaugh is spending decades in prison for stealing millions of dollars from clients. He has admitted in court that he is a thief, insurance cheat, bad lawyer and longtime opioid addict. But he denies being a killer. Defense lawyers said that as prosecutors sought the indictments, Owen told the Colleton County grand jury that blood spatter was found on a T-shirt Murdaugh was wearing the night of the killings.

An earlier report from state agents said there were no blood stains, and no such evidence was introduced at trial.

Owen also told grand jurors that the same ammunition load of buckshot in one chamber and large birdshot in the other used to kill Paul Murdaugh was found loaded in weapons all over the Murdaugh property, which wasn’t the case. Prosecutors said they had plenty of other evidence supporting the murder charges, and wrote that “a single mistake is not bad faith.”

Owen told grand jurors about the video Paul Murdaugh recorded in which Alex Murdaugh’s voice could be heard at the scene, contradicting his denials. He also told them about the family’s mounting debts and how Murdaugh’s schemes to steal from clients and his law firm were close to being discovered. But Murdaugh’s lawyers have repeatedly pointed out how little physical evidence prosecutors have.