South Carolina is about to fill a Vacant SC Supreme Court Seat on its highest court, and not a single Horry County resident will cast a ballot in the race. That is not a scandal. It is the system. South Carolina and Virginia are the only two states in the country where the legislature — not voters, not the governor — elects nearly all of the judiciary [Ballotpedia, 2025]. The 170 members of the General Assembly will make this choice, and the only leverage the rest of us have runs through the legislators we send to Columbia.
The race for the Vacant SC Supreme Court Seat has garnered significant attention, highlighting the importance of judicial appointments.
The seat in question opened in an unusual way, the candidate field includes a judge from Conway, and the timeline stretches into the spring of 2027. Here is who is running, how the seat came open, and why the outcome matters on the Grand Strand.
The Importance of the Vacant SC Supreme Court Seat
Who filed
As of the most recent published count, five sitting judges had submitted applications for a full 10-year term on the state Supreme Court [SC Daily Gazette, 2026]:
- Ralph “Tripp” Anderson, chief judge of the Administrative Law Court, of Columbia. Anderson, 66, has served on that court since 1995 and became its chief judge in 2009. He has sought a Supreme Court seat several times without success.
- John Geathers, judge on the S.C. Court of Appeals, of Blythewood. Geathers, 65, also began his judicial career on the Administrative Law Court in 1995 and was elected to the appellate bench in 2008. Before becoming a judge he worked as senior counsel for the state Senate’s research office. If elected, he would be the third Black justice to serve on the court since Reconstruction.
- Eugene “Bubba” Griffith Jr., a Circuit Court judge from Newberry. Griffith, 62, has been on the circuit bench since 2009. He comes from a legal family and once reopened the law office his father and grandfather operated; his grandfather served 22 years as a judge in the 8th Circuit.
- Blake Hewitt, judge on the S.C. Court of Appeals, of Conway. Hewitt, 48, was elected to the appellate bench in 2019 and took the seat in January 2020 after a career as an appellate litigator. He clerked for former Chief Justice Jean Toal and for a federal district judge, and holds degrees from Georgia Tech and the University of South Carolina School of Law [S.C. Judicial Branch, 2026].
- Maite Murphy, a Circuit Court judge from Summerville. Murphy, 57, started as a magistrate in 2009 and reached the circuit bench in 2013. She would be the second woman on the current court, joining Justice Letitia Verdin.
The application window closed at noon on Aug. 24, 2026. The count above reflects filings reported as of mid-August; the Judicial Merit Selection Commission’s official roster is the authoritative list, and it is possible additional names surfaced in the final days. This publication will update the field when the commission posts it.
One name that had not appeared on the list as of mid-August is worth noting for reasons that become clear below: former House Speaker Jay Lucas [SC Daily Gazette, 2026].
How the seat came open — and why that is the real story
Vacancies on the state Supreme Court usually arrive quietly, through retirement. This one did not.
Last year, Justice John Few became the first sitting justice in more than two decades to draw a challenger for his own seat. Three candidates ran against him, including Anderson, Hewitt, and Lucas — the Hartsville attorney who spent 24 years in the House, six of them as speaker, and who has never served as a judge [SC Daily Gazette, 2026].
The prospect of a former speaker unseating a sitting justice alarmed at least one senior Republican. In February, Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey of Edgefield took the unusual step of arguing against a specific candidate from the Senate floor. Massey did not allege misconduct. His objection was to how the thing would look: that lawmakers appeared to be arranging a seat for one of their own at the expense of a justice who had earned his. He closed by asking colleagues, “Please, let’s not screw this up” [SC Daily Gazette, 2026].
Massey also pointed out the arithmetic that decides these races. The House has 124 members to the Senate’s 46, so in a joint assembly the House effectively controls the outcome. Whether a former speaker joined the court was going to be settled by his old colleagues [SC Daily Gazette, 2026].
It never came to a vote. Few withdrew a day before the scheduled election, once it was clear Lucas had the numbers. His withdrawal canceled the election entirely and reopened the application process — which is why five judges are now filing for a seat that a sitting justice held six months ago [SC Daily Gazette, 2026].
That sequence deserves a moment. A justice was pushed off the court without a recorded vote, and the public record contains no roll call showing which legislators were prepared to remove him. Under this system, the decisive action often happens before anything is formally decided. That pattern matters far more than any individual candidate’s résumé.
The Horry County angle
Hewitt’s candidacy is the direct local hook. He is a Conway judge making his third consecutive run at the high court — after the 2024 vacancy created when Chief Justice Don Beatty retired and John Kittredge was elevated, and after last year’s challenge to Few [SC Daily Gazette, 2026]. Persistence is not unusual in this process; Hewitt himself won his Court of Appeals seat on a third attempt [MyHorryNews, 2019].
Horry County has had a justice before, and the circumstances are instructive. Kaye Hearn, a Horry County jurist, served from 2009 until early 2023. She was elected to the high court while her husband, George Hearn, sat in the state House on the Judiciary Committee — the body most involved in judicial screening [SC Daily Gazette, 2026]. Hearn’s final opinion, written for a 3-2 majority, struck down the state’s first six-week abortion restriction on state constitutional privacy grounds. Legislators replaced her with Court of Appeals Judge Gary Hill, producing an all-male court, then passed a new version of the law that the reconstituted court upheld [SC Daily Gazette, 2026].
The relevance to 2026 is not the abortion question. It is that a single seat on a five-member court changed a constitutional outcome for the entire state within a matter of months. The court that will hear Horry County’s next annexation fight, next zoning appeal, next public-records dispute, next challenge to a county tax or fee, is decided in this process.
And there is a marker of the system’s continuing tangles: Murphy withdrew from a 2022 Supreme Court race amid concerns that her then-husband, Rep. Chris Murphy, chaired the House Judiciary Committee. The couple divorced in May, and he died in July [SC Daily Gazette, 2026]. Those relationships keep arising because the same small circle of people keeps deciding.
What happens next, and what to watch
The calendar is long. Screening hearings before the Judicial Merit Selection Commission begin Nov. 16, and the election in joint assembly is tentatively set for March 3, 2027 [SC Daily Gazette, 2026].
Three features of the process are worth understanding before then.
The commission is a filter, not a scorekeeper. The JMSC screens applicants and forwards a limited slate — no more than three names per seat — to the full General Assembly, which then votes [Ballotpedia, 2025]. Being qualified is not the same as being nominated. A capable candidate can be screened out before any legislator votes on the record.
Withdrawals do the work of elections. It is routine for nominees to drop out once informal head counts show they cannot win [SC Daily Gazette, 2024]. That is what happened to Few in March. Expect a field of five to become a field of one or two by the time anything is formally recorded.
The rules restrict open campaigning. Judicial candidates may not seek or accept commitments from legislators until the commission’s report becomes final [JMSC, 2026]. The rule exists to prevent vote-trading. Its practical effect is that the persuasion that does occur is unusually hard to observe.
One more wrinkle: the mandatory retirement age for South Carolina judges rose from 72 to 74 under a law Gov. Henry McMaster signed this month. Under the change, Geathers could serve all but roughly seven months of a full 10-year term rather than aging off the bench early [SC Daily Gazette, 2026]. A statute passed in the same session as a pending vacancy materially altered one applicant’s viability. That is worth noting, whatever the intent behind it.
The bottom line for Grand Strand readers
There is no ballot here to fill out. There is a phone call to make.
Horry and Georgetown counties send a substantial bloc of members to the General Assembly, and every one of them will vote in the joint assembly on March 3, 2027. Constituents can ask each of them a short list of questions and publish the answers: Which candidates have you committed to, and when? Did you support removing Justice Few, and would you say so on the record? Do you believe judicial candidates with legislative backgrounds should face a higher bar?
Massey’s warning in February was fundamentally about public trust — that the appearance of insider dealing damages the institution even when no rule is broken. The five judges now seeking this seat are, by any measure, credentialed. The question worth pressing over the next six months is not whether the winner is qualified. It is whether the process that selects them can survive being looked at closely.
Further Reading
Vacant SC Supreme Court Seat – SC Daily Gazette, “Five judges so far file to run for SC Supreme Court seat” (Aug. 14, 2026) — https://scdailygazette.com/2026/08/14/five-judges-so-far-file-to-run-for-sc-supreme-court-seat/
Vacant SC Supreme Court Seat – SC Daily Gazette, “‘Let’s not screw this up’: Senate GOP leader raises alarm ahead of rare SC Supreme Court contest” (Feb. 18, 2026) — https://scdailygazette.com/2026/02/18/lets-not-screw-this-up-senate-gop-leader-raises-alarm-ahead-of-rare-sc-supreme-court-contest/
Vacant SC Supreme Court Seat – SC Daily Gazette, “SC Supreme Court election canceled after sitting justice drops out of race” (March 3, 2026) — https://scdailygazette.com/2026/03/03/sc-supreme-court-election-cancelled-after-sitting-justice-drops-out-of-race/
Vacant SC Supreme Court Seat – Ballotpedia, “Judicial selection in South Carolina” — https://ballotpedia.org/Judicial_selection_in_South_Carolina
Vacant SC Supreme Court Seat – Ballotpedia, “South Carolina Supreme Court justice vacancy (2026)” — https://ballotpedia.org/South_Carolina_Supreme_Court_justice_vacancy_(2026)
Vacant SC Supreme Court Seat – S.C. Judicial Branch, Judge Blake A. Hewitt biography — https://www.sccourts.org/courts/court-of-appeals/judges/blake-a-hewitt/
Vacant SC Supreme Court Seat – S.C. Judicial Branch, Judge John D. Geathers biography — https://www.sccourts.org/courts/court-of-appeals/judges/john-d-geathers/
Vacant SC Supreme Court Seat – S.C. Legislature, Judicial Merit Selection Commission general information — https://www.scstatehouse.gov/JudicialMeritPage/RunningforJudgeshipGeneralInformation.php
Vacant SC Supreme Court Seat – S.C. Legislature, 2026 JMSC screening schedule — https://www.scstatehouse.gov/JudicialMeritPage/2026Screening/2026%20Screening%20Schedule.pdf
Vacant SC Supreme Court Seat – MyHorryNews, “Conwayite wins seat on S.C. Appeals Court” (2019) — https://www.myhorrynews.com/news/local/conway/conwayite-wins-seat-on-s-c-appeals-court/article_f5528910-3166-11e9-be3a-1f2d8f60ea6e.html
