Nancy Grace was born October 23^rd 1958 in Macon, Georgia into an ordinary southern family. During her early years as a student she showed an interest in literature and especially the works of William Shakespeare which spurred her on in her desire to become an English professor once she had graduated from college.

Nancy’s dreams and aspirations were to be brought to a shuddering halt when she was nineteen years old and experienced the chilling murder of her fiancé Keith Griffin. The life changing event propelled Nancy in the direction of law and victim’s rights and she enrolled in law school to follow her newly chosen career.

As a graduate of the Walter F. George School of Law at Mercer University, Nancy received her Master of Laws in constitutional and criminal law from New York University and eventually became a felony prosecutor.

For almost ten years Nancy worked as a special prosecutor in the Atlanta Fulton County District Attorney’s office. Her work was mainly focused on serial murders, serial rapes, child molestation and arson. Nancy achieved a one hundred percent success rate in her convictions.

On two occasions Nancy’s court actions have been brought into disrepute by The Supreme Court of Georgia when it considered that she exceeded the wide latitude of closing argument, and called for a mistrial on one case. Later in 1997 Nancy was once again brought to the courts attention for inappropriate and illegal conduct in the course of a trial.

After Nancy left the Fulton County prosecutor’s office she accepted the role of a legal commentator on television alongside Johnnie Cochran. Later she moved on to Court TV to host a show covering high profile trials and then to CNN Headline News where she once again covered high profile trials such as Scott Peterson, Robert Blake and Michael Jackson.

In the early part of the new millennium Nancy received criticism for her public comments on several high profile cases such as the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping, the Duke University Lacrosse team scandal and the John Mark Carr story.

In 2006 Nancy’s style of interviewing suspects on TV came under scrutiny when Melinda Duckett, who had been under suspicion in the case of her missing son, was questioned by Nancy on air, in her relentless manor, when later Duckett committed suicide. Nancy’s response to the accusation was that Melinda probably took her own life out of guilt rather in response to her hard line questioning. The Duckett family lodged a wrongful death claim against CNN and Nancy Grace.

Nancy Grace covered the story of the sudden death of Anna Nicole Smith’s son, Daniel, in the Bahamas in September 2006 and went on to cover the death of Anna Nicole in March 2007 and in doing so made it clear that she supported the claims by Larry Birkhead that he was the father of Anna’s baby, Dannielyn Birkhead, and not Howard K Stern as was being contested.

Nancy Grace, although a brilliant prosecutor has often come under fire for her out spoken opinions while on TV. Many of the high profile cases on which she has held extremely dogmatic opinions have been acquitted or dismissed. In particular, during the Michael Jackson trial Nancy repeatedly used a book of naked pictures of boys which had been sent to Jackson by a fan, as a prop to incriminate Jackson in his child molestation trial. Jackson was found not guilty. Again, in the trial of the Duke Lacrosse team in 2006 she constantly took the side of the rape accuser and once again the case was dismissed. While being interviewed on the Larry King show Nancy commented that Richard Ricci was guilty of the kidnapping of  Elizabeth Smart due to his previous felonies. There had been little evidence to prove his guilt and later, after his death Nancy still claimed he was guilty until it was revealed that the kidnapping had been conducted by Brian Mitchell and Wanda Barzee who had no connection with Ricci at all.

In her book, Objection?, which was published in 2005 Nancy was accused of plagiarism of 359 words which were lifted from a New York Times article of 2002. Nancy claimed the plagiarism was ‘an inadvertent error’ for which Nancy was instructed to write an apology letter to the original author and The New York Times.

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