Nancy Grace DOESN'T CARE!

Objection to Nancy Grace, June 13, 2005
Reviewer: Tim Roberts (Denver CO USA) - See all my reviews
This book is full of lots of raw emotion directed against defense attorneys, celebrities, judges, juries and lots of others. The pattern to it is that the emotion is directed against those either who Nancy Grace thinks are guilty or who don't think that Nancy Grace does. The book tries to very loosely offer a plan to make the criminal justice system better, but the plan is ill-defined and weak.

Her objections, summarized by me, are:

- She wants tighter controls on the behavior of the defense.
- She doesn't seem to like the jury system at all
- She wants to re-define downward the standard for guilt. Rather than prosecutors having to prove guilt, the prosecutor would be allowed to make a circumstantial or emotional case for guilt.

She spends a whole lot of time attacking defense attorneys in the book, but its not really credible because its a one-sided attack where she is blind to the possiblity of misconduct by
prosecutors.

The problem with the book is that Nancy Grace is blind to her own faults and her own behavior. She is critical of 24/7 News coverage of trials, but doesn't deal with her own large role in that coverage. She is also blind to the problems in her record as a prosecutor.

Since leaving the prosecutor's office, Nancy Grace has been sharply repremanded by three different appeals courts for unethical and illegal behavior while she was a prosecutor. Her behavior was called illegal by every judge on the Georgia Supreme Court. Georgia is not exactly a friendly place for criminal defense and the lengths the court went in calling out Nancy Grace for ethical violations was very unusual.

They said she:

- Misrepresented facts to the trial judge so that her out of state witness could access the defendants home without the knowledge of the defense. Her witness gained access by breaking down the front door. For good measure, she subsequently also entered the defendants home with CNN cameras.

- Outright misrepresented the testimony of witnesses (falsely indicating in her closing argument that a defense witness had not disagreed with an opinion of the state).

- She inserted false information regarding hearing dates into a court proceeding to gain an advantage.

- She repeatedly ignored the instructions of the court. For example, she made multiple references to issues in her opening statement that the court had ruled (previously) to be inadmissiable.

- She failed to disclose a romantic relationship she knew about between two of her witnesses to the defense. She deliberatly held back her full witness list until the start of the trial.

For those interested, the case was: Carr v. State, 267 Ga. 701, 482 S.E.2d 314 (1997). Its a very detailed case study in how Nancy Grace abused her power as a prosecutor and how she operated without any real sort of ethics.

The court summarized her conduct in really harsh language:
begin quote -

Our review of the record supports Carr's contention that the prosecuting attorney engaged in an extensive pattern of inappropriate and, in some cases, illegal conduct in the course of the trial.

end quote -

This isn't one bad judge, its the entire very conservative usually pro prosection Georgia Supreme Court giving that opinion.

Its also important to remember that the person involved is free today only because he was rich and had the money to hire the lawyers to fight back against what she was trying to do. Most people would have ended up in jail for the rest of their lives.

Now you can choose to think that Nancy was right in this case and that somehow the entire court system of a state is so corrupt that it is misrepresenting the facts to free a man in a corrupt manner. But if you step back from that, your left with a prosecutor in Nancy Grace whose record of abuse in court is horrible. They didn't say sort-of illegal or maybe illegal, they said illegal.

Nancy has nothing to say about this. Since she doesn't participate in any forum that she doesn't control, nobody really has the chance to ask her about it. And this isn't her only problem with an appeals court.

This is important because it shows the big flaw of the book: hypocrisy. The book gets three stars because its a very useful book to read to see the dishonesty and maybe even self-deception that is behind Nancy Grace. The legal system does have ethical problems and problems with the media. But its not just defense attorneys, its prosecutors too. Its also almost surreal to see Nancy Grace of all people object to the media culture of 24/7 surrounding trials.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1401301800