This investigation was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system, The Dallas Morning News and NBC 5.
DALLAS — Shuranda Williams spent more than a year in the county jail here, waiting to talk to someone about fighting the murder charge she faces. The police have said she was involved in the 2019 killing of a suspected drug dealer; she insists she wasn’t.
If she’s convicted of capital murder, Williams, 44, faces a minimum sentence of life in prison without parole. She wanted a lawyer to help her make her case and to argue for her release from jail, but she couldn’t afford to hire one.
If prosecutors had announced they were seeking the death penalty, Williams would have been guaranteed a pair of lawyers whose expertise in capital cases has been vetted by a court-appointed screening committee. The government would have paid for an investigator and a mental health expert to examine her case. And under national legal guidelines, her lawyers would have had a special obligation to aggressively assert every possible argument to defend her.
But because Williams could face life without parole -a sentence that also means she would die behind bars - she didn’t get any of that. Continue reading >>>
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