Rep. RJ May, R-West Columbia, listens from the back of the House chamber during an organizational session on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024 at the Statehouse in Columbia, SC. (Photo by Mary Ann Chastain/Special to the SC Daily Gazette)
COLUMBIA — Former state Rep. RJ May walked into federal court Wednesday with a legal motion consisting of 32 pages handwritten on the front and back of lined paper.
May, a founder of the South Carolina House’s ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus, opted last week to defend himself against charges of distributing images and videos of children being sexually abused. That means he must prepare for his October trial from his cell at the Edgefield County jail.
He has remained there without bond since his arrest June 11. He resigned his House seat last month, amid the federal charges and an ongoing investigation into his conduct by the House Ethics Committee.
May’s former public defense attorneys are on standby to help answer legal questions, but they can’t help with the actual content of his case, U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie reminded May during a half-hour hearing Wednesday morning.
May used some of that help in court Wednesday. When prosecutors used legal jargon to describe how their evidence was numbered, May told the judge his standby attorneys were explaining the numbering system to him.
He also asked Currie whether he could request a sample motion from an unrelated case to make sure his own motions were formatted correctly, which Currie approved.
To build his defense, May will go back and forth between the jail and the Office of Homeland Security in Columbia — a roughly 75-minute drive each way. The judge said he could make that trip as often as necessary.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office has set up a room with a computer displaying all the evidence against him, and May can bring bagged lunches from the jail to eat while he goes through it, prosecutor Scott Matthews said Wednesday.
May’s first trip to that room followed the hearing.
There is a “tremendous amount of data to go through” in May’s case, public defender Jenny Smith, one of May’s standby attorneys, said previously. Currie asked May to get through as much as possible ahead of a hearing on his pre-trial motions Sept. 24.
May will be able to bring documents back to his jail cell, as long as they don’t contain objectionable images, Currie said. He also has access to a tablet with the application Fastcase, a legal research system that May called the “poor man’s Westlaw,” referring to the more expensive legal research website available on state prisoners’ tablets.
Jailed suspects can also use the tablets to send messages, receive approved images and emails and make phone calls, according to the Edgefield County Sheriff’s Office. May has told relatives that he can use his tablet to listen to music or play games if he pays for them, according to messages obtained through an open records request.
May does not yet have access to the list of rules for federal criminal proceedings, he said, but Currie promised him attorneys would give that to him if the jail couldn’t.
May also can’t access the online court filing system from jail, meaning he has to visit the federal courthouse in Columbia each time he wants to file a motion, as he did Wednesday.
He will come back to court next Wednesday to file any remaining pre-trial motions and receive prosecutors’ motions, Currie said.
The motion May filed Wednesday asked Currie to throw out a search warrant used to collect cellphones, laptops, thumb drives and other electronics from his house in August 2024.
While asking for the warrant, Britton Lorenzen, a special agent for Homeland Security, told a magistrate that investigators were likely to find images or videos depicting child sexual abuse even though the tip was several months old by that point because people who collect such images don’t usually get rid of them, according to a sworn statement included with May’s motion.
During May’s June detention hearing, Lorenzen said it was “very, very common” not to find actual images and videos of child sexual abuse on a suspect’s phone or computer because of how easy it is to save media to the cloud or various apps.
May argued those statements contradicted each other, suggesting Lorenzen was lying in her statement to receive the search warrant.
Without that information, May argued, the search warrant was invalid and anything found on his devices couldn’t be used in court. Lorenzen’s assertion that people who collect child sexual abuse materials was integral to the judge issuing the warrant, and without it, the judge likely wouldn’t have signed off, May argued.
While investigators didn’t find videos or images on May’s devices, they did find other evidence linking May’s phone and laptop to a messaging account flagged for sending videos showing children being sexually abused, Lorenzen testified during his detention hearing. Data on May’s phone suggested that he had repeatedly typed “joebidennnn69,” the username of the flagged account, and that the Kik messaging app, along with several other encrypted apps, had been deleted from the device.
Investigators also tracked the IP address used to send the messages back to May’s house and personal phone, investigators said.
A hearing on that motion, along with any others filed in the coming weeks, is scheduled for Sept. 24.
Four Republicans and one Democrat have filed to replace May in the House. A primary election is scheduled for Oct. 21, followed by a general election Dec. 23.