SC Supreme Court

Will the S.C. Legislature change the way most judges are vetted and elected in South Carolina? A debate is raging in the Statehouse over how much influence legislators should have in who becomes a state judge.

The only candidate running to be South Carolina's top judge defended the state's method of having lawmakers fill the state’s bench, saying appointees are ethical and qualified.

South Carolina's highest court apparently is not ready to allow the state to restart executions after more than 12 years until they hear more arguments about newly obtained lethal injection drugs as well as a recently added firing squad and the old electric chair.

A special committee has been created in the South Carolina House to study how the state chooses its judges. Republican House Speaker Murrell Smith says he wants the eight Republicans and five Democrats to hold public hearings and then debate a bill that can be introduced by the start of February.

The South Carolina Supreme Court upheld a ban on most abortions this week but left undecided the question of when, exactly, the “fetal heartbeat” limit begins during pregnancy. Doctors practicing under the strict law cannot punt on that question.

The new all-male S.C. Supreme Court has upheld the state's six-week abortion ban roughly eight months after ruling a previous and similar ban unconstitutional.

A potential swing vote on the newly all-male South Carolina Supreme Court grilled lawyers over whether patients have enough time to get an abortion after learning of their pregnancy as the justices weighed whether a new ban is similarly unconstitutional to one that got shot down earlier this year. The right to an abortion in South Carolina was back before the state's highest court Tuesday as Republicans try to restore the ban. A 3-2 majority in January tossed a similar law that banned abortion once cardiac activity is detected. Republican Gov. Henry McMaster recently signed into law a similar ban that starts once cardiac activity is detected. That restriction has been placed on hold as the case involving the new ban moves through the courts.

Justices on South Carolina's highest court have erased an order that cut 16 years off a convicted murderer's sentence. The prisoner secured the deal after reporting another inmate's escape that had gone undetected for two days. The 3-2 ruling vacating the reduced sentence for Jeroid Price came less than two hours after the South Carolina Supreme Court heard arguments in the case. The justices wrote that they would explain their decision later. During oral arguments Wednesday, the justices said in part that they didn't like Price's deal having been kept secret. Price walked out of prison 19 years into his 35-year murder sentence. The state is arguing that the deal to release him was invalid.

South Carolina has became the nation's only state without a woman on its Supreme Court — a development that comes amid increasing Republican scrutiny of the court that narrowly struck down the conservative state's abortion ban last month. The Republican-led Legislature on Wednesday chose Judge Gary Hill to replace the high court's lone female justice, Kaye Hearn, who had reached the court's retirement age. Hearn wrote the leading opinion in the 3-2 ruling overturning the state's 2021 abortion ban. Hill was the only candidate for the position remaining after two female candidates, Judges Stephanie McDonald and Aphrodite Konduros, dropped out on Jan. 17, which was the day candidates could begin seeking legislators' support.

South Carolina's attorney general on Monday is asking the state's high court to reconsider its ruling striking down the state's six-week abortion ban. South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson filed the rehearing request with the South Carolina Supreme Court on Monday. The court, in a 3-2 decision earlier this month, ruled that the 2021 law banning abortions when cardiac activity is detected, at about six weeks after conception, violated the state constitution's right to privacy. Wilson said he disagreed with the decision and argued that the framers of the privacy provision did not envision it as a right to abortion.