Nancy Grace

Nancy Grace
Born	Nancy Ann Grace (1959-10-23) October 23, 1959 Macon, Georgia, United States
Status	married
Occupation(s)	Former Prosecutor, Television Personality
Notable credit	Closing Arguments anchor (1996–2007) Nancy Grace Program anchor (2005–Present)
Spouse	David Linch
Children	Lucy Elizabeth, John David

Nancy Ann Grace (born October 23, 1959) is an American legal commentator, television host, and former prosecutor. She frequently discusses issues from what she describes as a victims' rights standpoint, with an outspoken style that has won her both praise and condemnation. She is the host of Nancy Grace, a nightly current affairs show on CNN's Headline News, and she was the host of Court TV's Closing Arguments. She also co-wrote the book Objection! -- How High-Priced Defense Attorneys, Celebrity Defendants, and a 24/7 Media Have Hijacked Our Criminal Justice System.

Early life

Grace was born in Macon, Georgia to a working-class family. 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 Masters 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.

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 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. Although its unanimous decision overturning the murder-arson conviction of businessman W. W. Carr in the death of his wife was caused primarily by other issues, the court made note of Grace's court actions, citing "inappropriate and illegal conduct in the course of the trial."

• Her opening statement in the case promised the jury evidence of physical abuse that she had to know would never be admissible because that entire aspect of the case had already been excluded by the judge.
• Subpoenas that contained hearing dates Grace knew to be false.
• Failure to disclose a full witness list to the defense in a timely fashion.
• Showing a chart during closing arguments that falsely stated a defense expert had not contradicted the state's case on a key issue.
• Also, during closing argument, "vouching" for the case by telling the jury she herself believed Carr to be guilty.
• And finally, performing two illegal searches of Carr's house, including one during which she was accompanied by a CNN camera crew.

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.

Other courts have criticized Grace's conduct even while upholding convictions in her cases. In a 2005 opinion, a panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals said Grace "played fast and loose" with her ethical duties and failed to "fulfill her responsibilities" as a prosecutor in the 1990 triple murder trial of Herbert Connell Stephens. She failed to turn evidence over to his defense team that pointed to other suspects. The court noted that it was "difficult to conclude that Grace did not knowingly" elicit false testimony from a police investigator that there were no other suspects despite strong evidence to the contrary.

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 in addition to her CourtTV show. On May 9, 2007, Grace announced that she would be leaving CourtTV to focus more on her CNN Headline News Program and charity work. She did her last show on Court TV on June 19, 2007

The Foundation of American Women in Radio & Television has presented Nancy Grace with two Gracie Awards for her Court TV show.

Controversial broadcasts

Kidd Chris and East Coast Bob

Prank caller East Coast Bob from Kidd Chris, whose prank call ended Michael Savage's MSNBC show, once prank called on Grace's CNN show and called her a "big bitch."

Suicide of interviewee Melinda Duckett

In 2006, Grace was involved in an incident when a 21-year-old woman, Melinda Duckett, committed suicide following an interview conducted by Grace concerning the disappearance of Duckett's 2-year-old son.

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 which relatives claim was influenced by media scrutiny, particularly from Grace. Speaking to the 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. Police investigating the case had not named Melinda Duckett as a suspect in the case at the time, but, after her suicide the police did say that she, as nearly all parents are in missing-child cases, was a suspect from the beginning.

In an interview on Good Morning America, Nancy Grace said in reaction to events that "If anything, I would suggest that guilt made her commit suicide. To suggest that a 15- or 20-minute interview can cause someone to commit suicide is focusing on the wrong thing." She then said that, while she sympathized with the family, she knew from her own experience as a victim of crime that such people look for somebody else to blame.

While describing it as an "extremely sad development," Janine Iamunno, a spokeswoman for Grace, said that her program would continue to follow the case as they had a "responsibility to bring attention to this case in the hopes of helping find Trenton Duckett." Grace herself however said, "I do not feel that our show is to blame for what happened to Melinda Duckett. The truth is not always nice or polite or easy to go down. Sometimes it's harsh, and it hurts."

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 so traumatized Duckett that she committed suicide. She also argues that CNN's decision to air the interview after Duckett's suicide traumatized her family.

Despite the controversy that unfolded after the Melinda Duckett affair, Grace has not changed her interviewing technique, as evidenced in another Central Florida case - this time in Orlando - and the events surrounding missing toddler Caylee Anthony, maternal grandmother Cindy Anthony and her mother Casey Anthony, who was eventually prosecuted.

Duke Lacrosse Scandal

Grace took an extreme, one-sided prosecution position throughout the 2006 Duke University lacrosse case in which Crystal Gail Mangum, an African-American female North Carolina Central University student accused three members of Duke University's men's lacrosse team of raping her at a party. During Grace's coverage of the case, she made several inflammatory comments. 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?" On an April 6 episode, she referred to Clark Goldband on "the stats". Clark then jumped into a report on lacrosse statics. She then berated Goldband by telling him, "Clark, I don't mean the athletic stats. I meant the rape stats. What would that have to do with this case?" It is unknown if this was an honest mistake by Goldband or a set up by the show's staff.

After the disbarment of District Attorney Mike Nifong, Attorney General Roy Cooper pronounced all three players innocent of the rape charges made by Mangum. On the following broadcast of her show, Grace did not appear and a substitute reporter announced the removal of all charges. She never apologized for her comments.

Elizabeth Smart kidnapping

During the Elizabeth Smart 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 Grace was specifically confronted on CourtTV seven months later as to whether she was "incorrect" 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."

In July 2006, Grace interviewed Elizabeth Smart and repeatedly asked her for information about her experience. During the course of the questioning, Smart asked her to stop and stated, "I really am here to support the bill and not to go into what -- you know, what happened to me." When Grace persisted, asking Smart what it was like to see out of a burqa her abductors forced her to wear, Smart replied, "I'm really not going to talk about this at this time. ...to be frankly honest, I really don't appreciate you bringing all this up." Grace gave Smart a somewhat sarcastic apology in which she appeared to be admonishing Smart for not wanting to help other crime victims and avoided further questioning about the incident. Grace then directed her questions to Senator Orrin Hatch who was promoting the legislation.

YFZ ranch raid

During the 2008 raids on the Yearning for Zion (YFZ) ranch of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), Grace covered the FLDS raid heavily, calling the sect a "cult," and opposed court rulings that the children should be returned to their families. She asked an attorney for an FLDS girl if "they should have just left all the kids on that compound ... and let them continue to get broken bones naturally, like you did ... and get molested." Although the appeals court had noted that the only 13 year old pregnant girl was improperly detained because she was 22 years old, she continued to maintain that 13 year old girls were forced to become pregnant. Guest Michael called the sect "this group of child molesters". Bethany Marshall stated that some children would be "terrified" to return, and called the compound "a sex offender's paradise".

Other work

File:Nancy Grace - Objection.jpg

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 because Grace referred to defense lawyers as "pigs" and compared defense attorneys to Nazi concentration camp guards according to an ABC News article.

According to an article first published by the New York Daily News during September 2006, Grace plagiarized 359 words spread across pages 204 and 205 in the book, lifted without indication from a August 5, 2002 article in the The New York Times written by Sabra Chartrand. Hyperion, the book's publisher, accepted Grace's claim that the plagiarism was an "inadvertent error" but insisted that Grace send a letter to the Times to promise 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 would file a lawsuit against her. Grace reportedly declined the request.

Grace has also helped staff a hotline at an Atlanta battered women’s center for 10 years.

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, McCoy confessed 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 MSNBC's Keith Olbermann's claims in a March 2007 Rolling Stone interview where 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. According to the department's website, McCoy is a "Past Inmate," who is currently on parole (he is identified as Inmate No. 0000400964). He was convicted of Aggravated Assault, for which he received 10 years, and for Murder, for which he received 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 fiance 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 CNN talk show that her life had "taken a U-turn" in that she was pregnant and expecting twins due in January 2008. Nancy Grace gave birth via C-section to Lucy Elizabeth and John David on Sunday, November 4, 2007.

Grace in popular culture

Parodies and characters based on Grace

Grace has been parodied on several comedy programs, and several characters based on her persona have appeared on various television shows. Among the shows featuring parodies of Grace or a character based on Grace:

• In Jim Toomey's comic strip Sherman's Lagoon, on January 18, 2008, Sherman encounters deep sea vent worms who decide to act "dumb" AND "scary" by doing their Nancy Grace impression.
• A parody of Grace appeared on the television show Boston Legal in the form of a reporter named Gracie Jane. Most of the character's appearances consisted of her shouting "Guilty, guilty, guilty!" into the camera.
• Grace has been parodied several times by Amy Poehler on Saturday Night Live. She was also parodied in the TV Funhouse cartoon "Divertor," repeating the line, "I think [defendant's name] should fry!"
• Her CNN show is a regular clip on the E! network show The Soup with Joel McHale often poking fun at her way of talking.
• Grace inspired a lawyer character named Grace Nancier on the soap opera Passions.
• Grace also inspired a character in the Fox network's drama series Justice (TV series).
• Grace is parodied in episodes 5 and 17 of the NBC drama Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.
• During (American rock band) Eagles concerts, Don Henley dedicates the song "Dirty Laundry" to Nancy Grace. He also does this in his solo concerts.
• Grace has been parodied by Cathy Jones of This Hour Has 22 Minutes in Canada as Betty Hope, a reporter in a sketch entitled "Panic Room with Betty Hope".
• Both Jessica Holmes and Penelope Corrin of Royal Canadian Air Farce and Air Farce Live in Canada also portray Grace in parodies of her show.
• She is often parodied on MADtv as a hooker living life in New York City
• Grace appeared in the Movie Hancock as herself on her show, Nancy Grace and played a pregnant Nancy, expecting a baby girl.

"Law and Order" connection

The Law & Order programs, which are legal procedural 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 causes the mother of a kidnapped son to commit suicide, much like the Melinda Duckett situation. She has also been parodied repeatedly on Law & Order: Criminal Intent by a character named Faith Yancy who hosts a similar talk show.

Grace herself appeared on May 22, 2007, in the season finale of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. She played herself and was featured opposite Star Jones.

External links

• Unofficial Nancy Grace fan club
• Nancy Grace fan site
• CNN's Nancy Grace Show
• CNN's Bio of Nancy Grace
• CNN Transcript: Interview with Larry King
• CNN Transcript: "Nancy Grace" Show