A Videotape and a First Grade Mind: The Shelton Holloway Story
In April of 1987, 17 year old Patricia Ann Hannah disappeared after a school dance in York, Alabama, and two weeks later her body was found behind an Alabama Power office. A fellow Sumter County High School student named Shelton Jerome Holloway, a special education student with a documented intellectual disability, was arrested and eventually convicted based largely on a videotaped confession. The legal question at the center of the case wasn't whether he said the words on that tape. It was whether a young man functioning at a first grade level could actually understand what he was giving up when he waived his rights. This one pulls you into a small Alabama town, a missing girl, and a confession that split experts, courts, and advocates for decades. The crime and the trial end up asking two completely different questions, and neither one has an easy answer.
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