Early life
Nancy Grace was born in Macon, Georgia, the youngest of three children, to Mac Grace, a freight agent for Southern Railway, and Elizabeth Grace, a payroll clerk for a manufacturing plant. Grace has two older siblings: a brother, Mac Jr., and a sister, Ginny. The members of the Grace family have been longtime members of Macon's Liberty United Methodist Church, where Nancy's mother Elizabeth plays the church organ and her father Mac was once a Sunday School teacher.
Grace attended high school at Macon's Windsor Academy, graduating in 1977. She attended Valdosta State University, and later received a B.A. from Mercer University. As a student, Grace was a fan of Shakespearean literature, and intended to become an English professor after graduating from college. However, after the murder of her fiancé, Keith Griffin, when she was 19, Grace decided to enroll in law school and went on to become a felony prosecutor and a supporter of victims' rights.
Grace was a member of the law review at and received her Juris Doctor degree from the Walter F. George School of Law at Mercer University. She went on to earn a Master of Laws degree in constitutional and criminal law from New York University. She has written articles and opinion pieces for legal periodicals, including the American Bar Association Journal. Grace worked as a clerk for a federal court judge and practiced antitrust and consumer protection law with the Federal Trade Commission. She taught litigation at the Georgia State University College of Law and business law at GSU's School of Business. As of 2006, she is part of Mercer University's board of trustees and adopted a section of the street surrounding the law school.
Personal life
Marriage and motherhood
In April 2007, Grace married David Linch, an Atlanta investment banker, in a small private ceremony. The two had met while she was studying at Mercer University in the '70s. Grace, who had given up on marriage after the death of her fiancé, said, "We've been in touch all these years, and a lot of time, we were separated by geography and time. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to get married. I told my family only two days before the wedding."
On June 26, 2007, an emotional Grace announced on her HLN talk show that her life had "taken a U-turn" in that she was pregnant and expecting twins due in January 2008. Lucy and John David arrived on November 4, 2007.
When questioned, she would not reveal whether or not she underwent fertility treatments. But the expectant mom did say that finding "such happiness" at this point in her life should inspire people. " She also did not explain the apparent discrepancy between the announced twins' January 2008 birth date and their actual birth in November 2007. The April 2007 wedding date is notably 7 months earlier than the twins' birth, giving speculation as to the honesty behind her public statement that the decision to marry was "spur-of-the-moment."
Allegations regarding fiancé's murder
In March 2006, an article in the New York Observer suggested that in her book Objection!, Grace had embellished the story of her college fiancé's 1979 murder and the ensuing trial to make it better support her image. Grace has described the tragedy as the impetus for her career as a prosecutor and victims' rights advocate, and has often publicly referred to the incident. The Observer researched the murder and found several apparent contradictions between the events and Grace's subsequent statements, including the following:
Her fiancé, Keith Griffin, was shot not at random by a stranger, but by a former coworker, Tommy McCoy.
McCoy did not have a prior criminal record and, rather than denying the crime, confessed on the night of the murder.
The jury deliberated for a few hours, not days.
There was no ongoing string of appeals (McCoy's family did not want any). McCoy has only once filed a habeas petition, which was rejected.
Grace told the Observer she had not looked into the case in many years and "tried not to think about it." She said she made her previous statements about the case "with the knowledge I had."
In response to Keith Olbermann's claims in a March 2007 Rolling Stone interview in which he was quoted as saying, "Anybody who would embellish the story of their own fiancé's murder should spend that hour a day not on television but in a psychiatrist's chair," Grace stated, "I did not put myself through law school and fight for all those years for victims of crime to waste one minute of my time, my energy, and my education in a war of words with Keith Olbermann, whom I've never met nor had any disagreement. I feel we have X amount of time on Earth, and that when we give in to our detractors or spend needless time on silly fights, I think that's abusing the chance we have to do something good."
Keith Griffin's murderer, Tommy McCoy, was released from the Georgia Department of Corrections on December 5, 2006.
Career as prosecutor
Grace worked for nearly a decade in the Atlanta-Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney's office as Special Prosecutor. Her work focused on felony cases involving serial murder, serial rape, serial child molestation, and arson.
Grace left the prosecutors' office after the District Attorney she had been working under decided not to run for reelection.
Prosecutorial misconduct
The Supreme Court of Georgia has twice commented on Grace's conduct as a prosecutor. First, in a 1994 heroin drug trafficking case, Bell v. State, the Court declared a mistrial, saying that Grace had "exceeded the wide latitude of closing argument" by drawing comparisons to unrelated murder and rape cases.
In 1997, the court was more severe, overturning the murder-arson conviction of businessman W. W. Carr in the death of his wife. While the court said its reversal was not due to these transgressions, since the case had turned primarily on circumstantial evidence, it nevertheless concluded "the conduct of the prosecuting attorney in this case demonstrated her disregard of the notions of due process and fairness, and was inexcusable." Carr was freed in 2004 when The Georgia Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Fulton County had waited too long to retry him, thereby unfairly prejudicing his right to a fair trial.
Despite upholding the conviction she sought, a panel of the 11th Circuit Court of
Career as broadcaster
After leaving the Fulton County prosecutors' office, Grace was approached by and accepted an offer from Court TV founder Steven Brill to do a legal commentary show alongside Johnnie Cochran. When Cochran left the show, Grace was moved to a solo trial coverage show on CourtTV.
In 2005, she began hosting a regular primetime legal analysis show on CNN Headline News (now HLN) in addition to her CourtTV show.[6] On May 9, 2007, Grace announced that she would be leaving Court TV to focus more on her CNN Headline News Program and charity work. She did her last show on Court TV on June 19, 2007.
Nancy Grace has a distinctive interviewing style mixing vocal questions with multimedia stats displays.
Controversies
In 2011 a New York Times article David Carr wrote “Since her show began in 2005, the presumption of innocence has found a willful enemy in the former prosecutor turned broadcast judge-and-jury." He criticized her handling of the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart, the Duke lacrosse team rape case, the Melinda Duckett interview and suicide and the Caylee Anthony case. George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley told Carr that Grace, as an attorney and reporter, “has managed to demean both professions with her hype, rabid persona, and sensational analysis. Some part of the public takes her seriously, and her show erodes the respect for basic rights.”
Elizabeth Smart kidnapping
During the 2002 Elizabeth Smart kidnapping case, when suspect Richard Ricci was arrested by police on the basis that he had a criminal record and had worked on the Smarts' home, Grace immediately and repeatedly proclaimed on CourtTV and CNN's Larry King that Ricci "was guilty," although there was little evidence to support this claim. She also suggested publicly that Ricci's girlfriend was involved in the cover-up of his alleged crime. Grace continued to accuse Ricci, though he died while in custody.
It was later revealed that Smart was kidnapped by Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Barzee, two individuals with whom Richard Ricci had no connection.
When CourtTV confronted Grace seven months later to ask whether she was incorrect in her assertion that Ricci was guilty, and whether or not she felt bad about it in any way, she stated that Ricci was "a known ex-con, a known felon, and brought suspicion on himself, so who could blame anyone for claiming he was the perpetrator?" When Larry King asked her about the matter, she equated criticism of herself with criticism of the police in the case. She said: "I'm not letting you take the police with me on a guilt trip."
Duke lacrosse allegations
Grace took a vehemently pro-prosecution position throughout the 2006 Duke University lacrosse case, in which Crystal Gail Mangum, a stripper and North Carolina Central University student, falsely accused three members of Duke University's men's lacrosse team of raping her at a party. Prior to Duke suspending its men's lacrosse team's season, she sarcastically noted on the air, "I'm so glad they didn't miss a lacrosse game over a little thing like gang rape!" and "Why would you go to a cop in an alleged gang rape case, say, and lie and give misleading information?" After the disbarment of District Attorney Mike Nifong, Attorney General Roy Cooper pronounced all three players innocent of the rape charges made by Mangum and Nifong. On the following broadcast of her show, Grace did not appear and a substitute reporter, Jane Velez-Mitchell, announced the removal of all charges.
Suicide of interviewee Melinda Duckett
In September 2006, 21-year-old Melinda Duckett committed suicide following an interview conducted by Grace concerning the disappearance of Duckett's 2-year-old son Trenton.
Grace interviewed Duckett less than two weeks after the child went missing, questioning her for her alleged lack of openness regarding her son's disappearance, asking Duckett "Where were you? Why aren't you telling us where you were that day?" Duckett appeared confused and was unable to answer whether or not she had taken a polygraph test. When Grace asked her why she could not account for specific details, Duckett began to reply, "Because I was told not to," to which Grace responded, "Ms. Duckett, you are not telling us for a reason. What is the reason? You refuse to give even the simplest facts of where you were with your son before he went missing. It is day twelve." According to the CNN transcript, Duckett replied, "(INAUDIBLE) with all media. It's not just there, just all media. Period." Grace then moved on to a media psychologist who asserted that Duckett was "skirting around the issue."
The next day, before the airing of the show, Duckett shot herself, a death that relatives claim was influenced by media scrutiny, particularly from Grace. Speaking to The Orlando Sentinel, Duckett's grandfather Bill Eubank said, "Nancy Grace and the others, they just bashed her to the end. She was not one anyone ever would have thought of to do something like this." CNN has also been criticized for allowing the show to air in the wake of Duckett's suicide.
On November 21, 2006, thesmokinggun.com exposed pending litigation on behalf of the estate of Melinda Duckett, asserting a wrongful death claim against CNN and Grace. The attorney for the estate alleges that, even if Duckett did kill her own son, Grace's aggressive questioning traumatized Duckett so much that she committed suicide. She also argues that CNN's decision to air the interview after Duckett's suicide traumatized her family. Trenton has never been found.
On November 8, 2010, Grace reached a settlement with the estate of Melinda Duckett to create a $200,000 trust fund dedicated to locating Trenton. This settlement was reached a month before a jury trial was scheduled to start. According to the agreement, if the young boy is found alive before he turns 13, the remaining proceeds in the trust will be administered by a trustee – Trenton's great-aunt Kathleen Calvert – until he turns 18 and the funds are transferred for his use. If Trenton is not found by his 13th birthday, or if he is found but is not alive, the funds will be transferred immediately to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "We are pleased the lawsuit has been dismissed. The statement speaks for itself," a spokeswoman for CNN said.
Caylee Anthony case
From 2008 to 2011 the Caylee Anthony disappearance and the prosecution, trial and acquittal of her mother Casey Anthony on charges of murder of the child were a regular feature of the Nancy Grace show. She would reveal every new detail of the story. Her program is cited as having "almost single-handedly inflated the Anthony case from a routine local murder into a national obsession". Nancy Grace referred to Casey Anthony as the "tot mom," a phrase Elizabeth Flock in the Washington Post described as “almost derisive-sounding.”
The Nancy Grace audience more than doubled in the weeks after the start of the Anthony trial. David Carr wrote that Grace took her show to the trial scene in Clearwater, Florida in order to “hurl invective from a close, intimate distance.”Grace expressed rage at Anthony's acquittal right after announcement of the verdict, saying: "Tot Mom's lies seem to have worked. The devil is dancing tonight."
In a press conference after the verdicts were read, Cheney Mason, one of Casey Anthony's defense attorneys, blamed the media for a "media assassination" which led to public hatred toward Casey Anthony. He also said: "I can tell you that my colleagues from coast to coast and border to border have condemned this whole process of lawyers getting on television and talking about cases that they don't know a damn thing about, and don't have the experience to back up their words or the law to do it."
Grace took it personally and responded, "What does he care about what pundits are saying?" Stating she had as much legal experience as Mason, she criticized the defense attorneys for taking on the media before mentioning Caylee's name in their news conference and stated that "There is no way that this is a verdict that speaks the truth."
Michelle Zierler, director of the Project in Law and Journalism at New York Law School said Grace "is always certain that the defendant is guilty and needs instant punishment" and this had affected her analysis of the case.[34] Howard Finkelstein, the Broward County, Florida public defender said "Nancy Grace should offend every journalist out there. These lawyers on TV during the Anthony trial only offered one side, everybody believed them, and now you've got a big chunk of the population that thinks the legal system let them down. Every time that happens, you lose part of the national community.
Other work
Nancy Grace's Objection! — How High-Priced Defense Attorneys, Celebrity Defendants, and a 24/7 Media Have Hijacked Our Criminal Justice System
Grace co-wrote the book Objection! — How High-Priced Defense Attorneys, Celebrity Defendants, and a 24/7 Media Have Hijacked Our Criminal Justice System, which was published by Hyperion on June 8, 2005. The book caused notable controversy[citation needed] because Grace referred to defense lawyers as "pigs" and compared them to Nazi concentration camp guards.specify
According to an article first published by the New York Daily News in September 2006, Grace plagiarized 359 words spread sequentially across pages 204–5 of the book, lifted without indication from an August 5, 2002 article in The New York Times written by Sabra Chartrand. Hyperion accepted Grace's claim that the plagiarism was an "inadvertent error" but insisted that Grace send a letter to the Times promising that the content would be corrected in future printings. Hyperion explained that under contract, Grace must hold the publisher harmless in the event that the Times filed a lawsuit against her.
Nancy Grace's first work of fiction, The Eleventh Victim, also published by Hyperion, was released on August 11, 2009.
Grace in popular culture
"Law and Order" connection
The Law & Order programs often base their fictional stories on real-life events and have featured stories based on Grace on several occasions.
In an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, an overzealous reporter named Cindy Marino (played by Kali Rocha) causes the mother of a kidnapped son to commit suicide, echoing the Melinda Duckett incident.
Grace has also been parodied repeatedly on Law & Order: Criminal Intent by a character named Faith Yancy (Geneva Carr) who hosts a similar talk show (Inside American Justice) that sensationalizes whatever case the main characters are working on and makes it difficult for them to gain access to key witnesses. The character has appeared on the episodes "In the Wee Small Hours" (original air date November 6, 2005), "Masquerade" (original air date October 31, 2006), "Albatross" (original air date February 6, 2007), "Neighborhood Watch" (original air date August 10, 2008), and "Lady's Man" (original air date June 28, 2009).
On May 22, 2007, Grace appeared in the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Screwed" the season 8 finale, playing herself opposite Star Jones.
Bibliography
Objection! — How High-Priced Defense Attorneys, Celebrity Defendants, and a 24/7 Media Have Hijacked Our Criminal Justice System. Hyperion. 2005. pp. 336. ISBN 9781401301804.
The Eleventh Victim. Hyperion. 2009. pp. 368. ISBN 9781401303457.
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