“Do the right thing, for the right people, for the right reason.”
Solicitor Duffie Stone
Credo for the 14th Circuit Solicitor’s OfficeDuffie Stone’s tenure as 14th Circuit Solicitor, which began in 2006, has been distinguished by innovation. The highly successful Career Criminal Unit, for example, seeks aggressive prosecution and lengthy sentences for the circuit’s most violent and habitual offenders. Stone also adopted intelligence-led prosecution, which uses technology and information-sharing to better understand and more effectively combat criminal elements within the 14th Circuit.
In 2015, he was appointed to Gov. Nikki Haley’s Domestic Violence Task Force, and he currently serves as chair of the S.C. Domestic Violence Advisory Committee. Applying the lessons of those endeavors, his office launched a Special Victims Unit to prosecute rapists, domestic batterers and child abusers; and it opened the 14th Circuit Victims Center, a partnership of various nonprofit agencies that assist victims of those crimes. With accreditation from the Alliance for Hope in 2021, the center became the first Family Justice Center in South Carolina.
Among his other achievements:
- Stone instituted a unique in-house training program geared toward new attorneys. It begins with sessions emphasizing the unique ethical demands of prosecutors and their roles as ministers of justice. It ends with a mock-trial competition that pairs newcomers with some of the staff’s most seasoned attorneys.
- In 2010, his office took over a mismanaged, privately run Beaufort Count Drug Court program and gave it a complete overhaul. Treatment services and a tract for military veterans were added, and the program was expanded into neighboring counties. The 14th Circuit Multidisciplinary Court now has one of the highest participation counts of any program in South Carolina. More importantly, it has a decade-long history of saving resources and lives while reducing crime.
- Stone has been an effective advocate for increased state funding for South Carolina’s prosecutors, with an emphasis on assistance for the least affluent counties and modernizing case-management systems statewide.
- In 2018, Stone was elected president of the National District Attorneys Association, becoming just the second South Carolinian to lead the group, which advances the cause of local prosecutors at the national level.
Stone became the 14th Circuit Solicitor in 2006, after nearly two decades split between private practice and his work as a prosecutor in South Carolina’s 14th and 5th judicial circuits. He was appointed by Gov. Mark Sanford to fill the unexpired term of Randolph Murdaugh III and has been subsequently reelected five times, most recently in 2024. A native of South Carolina, Stone is a graduate of Wofford College and the University of South Carolina School of Law.