Blind Plea

Podcast: Domestic violence and a broken justice system

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.

Trailer

PRESS

"Self-defense laws come with a lot of masculine assumptions [...] There's something that needs to change in our application of [them]."
PBS NewsHour
"Blind Plea takes listeners inside the case of Deven Grey, a then 25-year-old mother who claimed she fatally shot her abusive boyfriend, John Vance, in self-defense."
People Magazine
"A gripping saga [...]"
Paste Magazine
"Blind Plea [...] launched to #1 overall on the Apple Podcast charts."
Podnews
"Even though the overwhelming majority of criminal cases in the U.S. end in pleas, blind pleas [seem] to be something that [has] many legal experts stumped."
Advance Local

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