Blind Plea

Podcast

Jun 15

Weathered vintage trailer parked on an overgrown lot under a moody, stormy sky with surrounding dark foliage. The scene evokes a sense of abandonment and rural isolation.

BLIND PLEA

In 2017, Deven Grey, a young mother, shot and killed her abusive partner in a remote trailer in rural Shelby County, Alabama. She claimed self-defense and filed a Stand Your Ground claim.

Instead of freedom, she was handed a “blind plea” – an option to take an unknown sentence in exchange for pleading guilty. As a Black woman who shot and killed a white man in Alabama, she did the only thing she could: She took the plea. Deven’s sentence became the final link in a chain of deceit, haunted land, generational trauma, false identity, coercive control, and a broken justice system.

Blind Plea asks: Who do we believe, and why? And in America, who has the right to self-defense and a fair trial?

Year: 2023

Project Type: Podcast

Evoke’s Role: Blind Plea is a program-related investment of Evoke Media. Evoke Media founder Sabrina Merage Naim is an Executive Producer.

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Liz is an Emmy Award –winning journalist and author with a focus on stories about women and the fight for justice. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and The Atlantic, and on PBS NewsHour and Netflix, among other outlets. Her new book, THE FURIES: Women, Vengeance, and Justice, tells the stories of three unforgettable women who used violence to protect themselves when institutions — government, police, and courts — utterly failed to do so.
She is the host of Blind Plea, a podcast about a woman who claimed Stand Your Ground, from Lemonada Media. Her reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center, PEN America, and the International Women’s Media Foundation. Her first book, THE HEART IS A SHIFTING SEA: Love and Marriage in Mumbai, won a Nautilus Book Award for books that inspire and make a difference.
She holds a masters degree in longform journalism from the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU, and has taught as an adjunct professor at American University in Washington D.C. She is represented by Suzanne Gluck (literary), Elizabeth Wachtel and Addie Poris (documentary) and Chelsea Kreps (podcast) at William Morris Endeavor, and lives in Chicago, Illinois.