Grace was born in Macon, Georgia to a working-class family.Mentioned on The Glenn Beck Show, August 12 or December 8, 2006 She attended Valdosta State University, and later received a B.A. from Mercer University. 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 Master of Laws degree 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.

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 fiancé, 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 HLN 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 to twins, named Lucy and John, on November 4, 2007.

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, 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 in which 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.

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 drug 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. Overturning the murder-arson conviction of businessman W. W. Carr in the death of his wife. 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.

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

Nancy Grace has a distinctive interviewing style mixing vocal questions with multimedia stats displays. The Foundation of American Women in Radio & Television has presented Nancy Grace with two Gracie Awards for her Court TV show.

Controversy

Suicide of interviewee Melinda Duckett

In 2006, 21-year-old Melinda Duckett committed suicide following an interview conducted by Grace concerning the disappearance of Duckett's 2-year-old son Trenton.

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 that relatives claim was influenced by media scrutiny, particularly from Grace. Speaking to 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, as nearly all parents are in missing-child cases, she 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 commented that "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. Trenton has never been found.

Duke Lacrosse scandal

Grace took a pro-prosecution position throughout the 2006 Duke University lacrosse case, in which Crystal Gail Mangum, an African-American stripper and North Carolina Central University student, falsely accused three members of Duke University's men's lacrosse team of raping her at a party. 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?" 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.

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 CourtTV confronted Grace seven months later to ask whether she was incorrect in her assertion 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."