The South Carolina supreme court issued an interim suspension earlier this week in the case of an Horry county lawyer accused of beating a woman in front of his child …
As our news editor Mandy Matney reported last week, Ralph James Wilson, Jr, of Myrtle Beach, S.C. was charged with first degree domestic violence in connection with an alleged attack on a woman inside his home on Sunday, January 24, 2021.
According to police, Wilson hit the woman “in the back of the head and the face several times.” He also allegedly placed a pillow over her nose and mouth to cut off her airflow, according to arrest warrants. Furthermore, Wilson is accused of taking the woman’s cell phone away from her and throwing it in the back yard so she couldn’t call for help.
The incident occurred in front of Wilson’s child, police say.
Wilson has denied attacking the woman …
“This story is completely incorrect even based on the allegations … which are completely false,” he wrote in an email to our news outlet.
Wilson went on to say the narrative against him had been “fabricated.”
As Matney wrote in her report, Wilson is “considered innocent until proven guilty by our criminal justice system – or until such a time as he may wish to enter a plea in connection to the charge filed against him.”
Given the seriousness of the allegation against him, however, the court suspended Wilson’s law license pursuant to rule 17 (b) of the Rules for Lawyer Disciplinary Enforcement (RLDE) – which are contained in rule 413 of the S.C. Appellate Court Rules (SCACR).
This allows the court to place a lawyer on interim suspension “upon receipt of sufficient evidence demonstrating that a lawyer poses a substantial threat of serious harm to the public or to the administration of justice.”
The court is also allowed to impose an interim suspension “upon notice of the filing of an indictment, information, or complaint charging the lawyer with a serious crime.”
The suspension will remain effective until a “determination” is reached in Wilson’s case.
As Matney reported, Wilson has represented several well-known defendants in high-profile Horry County cases. In 2019, he defended Jerome Jenkins in Horry County’s only death penalty case in the last decade, according to local television station WPDE TV-15 (ABC – Florence/ Myrtle Beach).
Wilson faces up to a decade behind bars if found guilty of first-degree domestic violence, which is a felony in South Carolina.
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