"Trial by Fury" and the presumption of innocence (Nancy Grace)

[XanaDUer]

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=mM6WW%2FF7VMCLk%2BmZugS8QB%3D%3D


"The Atlanta defense bar, however, was not so enamored. Defense lawyers accused her of intimidating witnesses and withholding evidence. They also lambasted her for her behavior in the courtroom, which blended the sacred (the Atlanta defense lawyer Jack Martin says Grace would ostentatiously thumb through a Bible while the defense was cross-examining one of her witnesses) with the profane (another Atlanta attorney, Dennis Scheib, complains that she would wear low-cut blouses and provocatively lean over into the jury box). "You needed three lawyers to try a case with Nancy Grace--two to watch her and one to argue the case," says Scheib, who represented a man Grace successfully prosecuted for murder in 1996. Grace vehemently denies all of these charges, dismissing such complaints as "sour grapes" from the very people she repeatedly bested in the courtroom. But, in at least two instances, the Georgia Supreme Court also took issue with her prosecutorial tactics. In 1994, the Court overturned a drug-dealing conviction she had won on the grounds that she improperly inflamed the jury by mentioning in her closing arguments an unrelated triple homicide and a serial rape case. And, in 1997, the Court reversed a murder and arson conviction Grace had secured, chastising her for "an extensive pattern of inappropriate and, in some cases, illegal conduct," including her decision to allow a CNN camera crew to film her inside the defendant's house, to which she had gained entry through a search warrant...

[jmm]

1. Wow,

I never thought I'd see presumption of innocence and Nancy Grace in the same sentence.