Nancy Falling From Grace?

The effective end of “America’s Most Wanted” (Fox reduced it from once a week to once every three months last week) is the jumping off point for a David Carr take-down of Nancy Grace. Carr says that on her show “the presumption of innocence has found a willful and angry enemy.” Grace, a Georgia native and former Atlanta prosecutor, has been reprimanded more than once, was wrong about the Duke lacrosse rape case and wrong about who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart, among other controversies.

Observes Carr:

Ms. Grace came by her victimhood honestly when her fiancé, Keith Griffin, was killed when she was just 19. In her book “Objection,” Ms. Grace suggested that a stranger with a criminal record shot Mr. Griffin outside a convenience store, was arrested and denied any involvement. By her recollection, she had to sit through three days of agonizing deliberation and then the prosecutor asked her if the defendant should be given the death penalty. She said no, she had no stomach for it.

The New York Observer fact-checked her written account and discovered that Mr. Griffin was killed by a former co-worker with no criminal record who confessed to the crime immediately. At trial, he was convicted within hours and the prosecution did in fact ask for the death penalty, but was denied. Ms. Grace explained the variance by telling The Observer, “I have tried not to think about it.”

The 2006 Observer piece by Rebecca Dana is worth revisiting for a close reading. An excerpt:

Because of what happened in Georgia, Ms. Grace has said over and over, she knows firsthand how the system favors hardened criminals over victims. It is the foundation of her judicial philosophy, her motivation in life, her casus belli.

And much of it isn’t true.

Nancy Grace was engaged to a man named Keith Griffin. He was murdered in Georgia. And the man who killed him is serving a life sentence. In that, Ms. Grace’s version lines up with the official records from the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, newspaper articles from the time of the murder, and interviews with many of those involved in the case.

But those same sources contradict Ms. Grace when it comes to other salient facts of the crime and the trial—the facts that form the basis of Ms. Grace’s crusade against an impotent, criminal-coddling legal system.

• Griffin was shot not by a random robber, but by a former co-worker.
• The killer, Tommy McCoy, was 19, not 24, and had no prior convictions.
• Mr. McCoy confessed to the crime the evening he was arrested.
• The jury convicted in a matter of hours, not days.
• Prosecutors asked for the death penalty, but didn’t get it, because Mr. McCoy was mildly retarded.
• Mr. McCoy never had an appeal; he filed a habeas application five years ago, and after a hearing it was rejected.

Ms. Grace has also misreported the date of the incident—it was in 1979, not 1980—and has given Griffin’s age as 25 when it was 23.

The justice system, in other words, apparently worked the way it was supposed to.

“Nancy Grace” has lost nearly half its viewers over the last two years. And while HLN signed Grace to a multiyear deal at the beginning of the year, she’s lost her 10 p.m. repeat.