Uncovered update: South Carolina’s parade of sheriff scandals is growing. Could an old law help?

For the past decade, South Carolina has seen one county sheriff after another violate laws they swore to uphold.

And as the train of scandals grew longer, John Crangle, the state’s gruffest government watchdog, lobbied lawmakers to do something to curb the misconduct — efforts that typically fell on deaf ears.

Then Crangle stumbled on an old South Carolina law. A very old law.

One that had long been ignored.

Dating back to 1837, the law says the attorney general and solicitors should do regular examinations of sheriffs, along with other county offices.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Crangle said. “This statute would do two things: provide oversight and deter misconduct.”

Or it could be repealed. Legislation slowly working through the General Assembly would strike this long-ignored imperative. The bill is currently in the state Senate.

Some background: The law’s official designation is Title 1, Section 1-7-730: “Examination of offices of county officers.” 

And its archaic language hints at its age. Specifically, the law says the attorney general and solicitors should:

“… examine into the condition of the offices of the clerk of the court of common pleas and general sessions, of the sheriff and of the register of deeds in the counties of the respective solicitors and ascertain if such officers have discharged the duties which now are, or shall be, required of them.”

The attorney general and solicitors are supposed to submit annual reports to the General Assembly and state courts.

After coming across the law, Crangle polled solicitors, circuit courts and clerks with the General Assembly.

“No one has done any of the reports as far as I can tell,” he said.

A spokesman for Attorney General Alan Wilson confirmed the agency hasn’t followed this law — and doesn’t intend to in the future.

“We are aware of the law but it has never been implemented, at least not in more than a century,” said Robert Kittle, communications director. “It’s one of many outdated laws that are still on the books.”

Kittle noted that lawmakers passed it in the 1830s, before they ratified the state’s current constitution. From a practical standpoint, solicitors simply wouldn’t have enough auditors to comply, he said. 

He added that the attorney general is a “prosecutorial agency, not a regulatory one,” and that “there’s a long list of those elected officials our office has prosecuted.”

In fact, since 2010, 15 sheriffs have been charged with crimes and a 16th died before charges could be brought. This includes recent corruption cases against former Chester County Sheriff Alex Underwood, former Colleton County Sheriff Andy Strickland and ex-Florence County Sheriff Kenney Boone. 

It’s a litany of crime that affected one out of three South Carolina counties — so embarrassing that Gov. Henry McMaster earlier this year called for legislation requiring sheriffs undergo annual ethics training. 

Crangle said the sheriffs themselves have demonstrated they can’t police themselves. He hopes that old law might be a new tool of deterrence. He said he’s spoken with lawmakers, sheriffs and solicitors. He’s asked solicitors to do a “demonstration project.” He’s thinking about filing a lawsuit if officials continue to ignore the problem.

“Nobody is doing what they’re supposed to under the law,” he said.

First Circuit Solicitor David Pascoe, who led the Statehouse corruption probe, said he knows of no one who has used the law, but that doesn’t mean it might not still be a valuable tool. The timing on the effort to strike the law is curious, he said, given the number of sheriff scandals and incidents involving other officials mentioned in the statute. 

Charleston County’s Register of Deeds, for example, has been embroiled in controversy over sometimes monthslong delays in the recording of property sales and other time-sensitive legal documents. And more than a half-dozen court clerks or their staff have been accused of embezzlement or other misdeeds around the state since 2010, according to The Post and Courier’s corruption database. 

“Why would you repeal it now?” Pascoe said of the law. “It might be good for the attorney general or solicitors to look at some of these offices.”

Jarrod Bruder, executive director of the S.C. Sheriffs Association, said his group has no official position on the law.

He said his group has stepped up ethics training and is trying to find ways to “hold each other accountable.”

But given the variety of crimes the state’s sheriffs have committed, he said: “I just don’t know how you guard against those bad decisions.” 

Some solicitors are leery about the old law’s requirements.

Fourteenth Circuit Solicitor Duffie Stone said he was familiar with the statute but has never heard of anyone actually using it.

Part of the reason, he said, is that it is a vague directive that offers no clear guidance as to how such an examination should be done.

“It’s asking you to try to analyze someone’s job and how they do it,” he said. “But I have never been a sheriff or a clerk of court.” 

Stone oversees prosecutions in Allendale, Hampton, Jasper, Beaufort and Colleton counties. And he also serves as chairman of the state prosecutors’ coordinating commission, a panel of law enforcement officials that looked at the law in 2018.

The panel’s members couldn’t find any evidence that it had been followed. It found that doing a proper investigation into a county-elected official might take a full year. The agency recommended lawmakers either eliminate the old law or find a way for solicitors to enforce it. And in late 2020, two coastal state representatives — Weston Newton, R-Beaufort, and Jeff Johnson, R-Horry — introduced the bill to repeal it.

Johnson, a member of the Legislative Oversight Committee, said the bill was part of his panel’s ongoing effort to get rid of antiquated laws. In the 1830s, counties were smaller “so it might not have been so expensive” to do what the law required, he said. But now it “would be very costly to taxpayers.

But Jessica Pishko, a lawyer and former fellow at the University of South Carolina who researched corrupt sheriffs, said she thought the law was still useful.

“It’s not as though South Carolina sheriffs are known for their upstanding behavior,” she said, adding that the law itself dents the often-repeated argument by sheriffs that elections serve as the ultimate form of oversight.

“Because the law is from the 1830s, this implies that for almost 200 years legislators have understood that local officials, like sheriffs, need oversight,” she said.