Fighting for Judy: Inside a Wrongful Conviction and Redemption | Attorney Shannon Norman

Judd Shaw:
You know, you said before that Judy wasn’t just your client. Right. You’ve come to, like, kind of love Judy.

Shannon Norman:
She’s family. She’d tell you the same thing. Yeah.

Judd Shaw:
How do you think that she was able to stay kind and faithful through all of those years?

Shannon Norman:
I don’t know. I don’t know.

Judd Shaw:
My guest today is someone who didn’t just become an attorney. She became a force of love and belief in the Judy Henderson story. After learning about Judy’s case, Shannon Norman left law school, launched her own law firm, and took Judy’s case with her. Her first client, unpaid but not unloved. Shannon, welcome to the show.

Shannon Norman:
Thank you.

Judd Shaw:
Let’s go back to the beginning.

Shannon Norman:
Okay.

Judd Shaw:
How did you hear about Judy’s case?

Shannon Norman:
So I went back to law school much later in life and knew that I was going to open my own firm. So I did as much as I could to get practical experience in law school. And part of that practical experience meant doing work for the legal clinic that Saint Louis University, their law school has a couple of legal clinics that do different work for pro bono clients. And I was assigned Judy’s case. I was assigned to write a clemency to the governor and ask him to essentially commute her sentence. I had never written a clemency before. I had no idea how to write a clemency. But I was handed her case, started investigating it, started diving into it.

Shannon Norman:
And I’ll never forget the very first time I spoke to Judy on the phone. And I just as she’s exactly the way she is now. She was a ray of sunshine. Like, you picked up the phone and this person on the other end of the phone, and you’re just like, you’re in prison. She’s just so happy and just such a joy.

Judd Shaw:
What, what for the listener is the difference between a clemency and a pardon.

Shannon Norman:
So a clemency is an opportunity. It’s a petition where you’re essentially asking the governor to commute your sentence in some way. It can be a whole host of different types of things. It could be commuting from prison, from a life sentence to say, maybe a mental health facility, or it could be from life without parole to life with parole to make you eligible for release through the parole board. So there’s a lot of opportunities there. Of pardon, of course, is just saying you’re completely pardoned of whatever crime it is that you’ve been convicted of, and it just washes that away.

Judd Shaw:
So when you dive into Judy’s file, and I think at this time you were in law school?

Shannon Norman:
I was.

Judd Shaw:
Wow. How do you think Judy got caught up all in this? And what told you that Judy was innocent?

Shannon Norman:
It was interesting at first. It was just a case. Right. I’m just going to write a clemency, and then I start giving some records and I start reviewing some of the clemencies that had been written prior to this one, some that Judy had done on her own and looking at some of the things that it said. And then it was kind of going back and reviewing some court records. And I didn’t have all the records available to me. I had kind of a fraction of the records available to me. And as I go through them and I get deeper, and I get deeper, it was clear that this was an injustice.

Shannon Norman:
Whether or not you believed that Judy was innocent, it was clear that it was an injustice because the system broke down on her and she was not properly represented the way that someone accused of her crime is intended to be.

Judd Shaw:
Tell me more. Where did it break down?

Shannon Norman:
It broke down in the fact that she and Greg were represented by the same attorney.

Judd Shaw:
Now, Greg is the actual trigger man.

Shannon Norman:
Correct.

Judd Shaw:
And her ex husband?

Shannon Norman:
He was not. They were not married.

Judd Shaw:
Okay. But her partner at the time.

Shannon Norman:
Correct. The individual that she was dating at the time. Yes. And going off of memory, because it has been a very long time since I’ve looked at those files. The individual that represented her and Greg at one point in time, I believe the judge asked them, you know, is this what they want to do? Or do they want the same counsel? And the attorney responded, oh, yes, they’re in love. This is how they want to do this. And it’s interesting because there’s a United States Supreme Court case now that would prevent that from happening. In, I believe it was the early 90s, there was a Supreme Court case that came out and basically said that the court has a duty to investigate potential conflicts of interest, such as the same attorney representing both defendants.

Judd Shaw:
And my research, when I was really doing a deep dive, it appeared to me that now Greg was part of the Kansas City Mafia.

Shannon Norman:
I don’t know if it was the Kansas City, but it was Mafia for sure.

Judd Shaw:
And it seems like there was a connection between this attorney who may have been connected to the mafia 100%. And in fact, there’s information that Judy had wanted to cooperate at one point, provided that request to her attorney to convey it to the prosecutor.

Shannon Norman:
Correct.

Judd Shaw:
And later the prosecutor indicated that he was never presented with that offer.

Shannon Norman:
That is correct. She at some point told her attorney, I will testify I’m willing to tell what I know in exchange for, you know, some sort of plea deal. And her attorney told her that he went to the prosecutor and that the prosecutor refused and would not offer her a plea, when, in fact, the prosecutor had offered her a plea and had said, if she will testify, then we will be happy to give her a plea. Because the prosecutor knew she didn’t pull the trigger. And her attorney came back to her and said, yeah, there’s no deal. They won’t do anything for you.

Judd Shaw:
Thus the inherent problem in a conflict of interest.

Shannon Norman:
Correct.

Judd Shaw:
It sounds like he was working really on Greg’s behalf and keeping Judy in it to set her up.

Shannon Norman:
In my opinion, based on everything I know, I think that this attorney was compensated by the Mafia. And it was this attorney’s job to make sure that Judy went down for this and Greg walked. And that’s what happened. Who?

Judd Shaw:
I mean, it’s amazing how many calamities, things that worked against Judy in this whole thing, right. At one point. And who knows what the attorney said to anyone else once Judy said she wants to cooperate. But the next thing I hear is that somebody’s bringing Judy into a motel, really literally putting a silencer on a gun, telling her, today’s the day you’re going to die. And that’s because she was, like, gonna cooperate. And then this hitman basically tells her that her mother had helped him and his family when he relocated. And because of that, I’m not gonna kill you.

Shannon Norman:
And that did happen, but that was not about cooperation. So that happened after she was shot at the scene, and they fled to St. Louis, and they were in a hotel room in St. Louis. And the Mafia had sent this hitman to take care of both her and Greg. And he came in, recognized her or got her name, said, your parents, because they owned a general store. And I guess at one point in time, this man’s family had come in and didn’t have anything. And Judy’s parents, who were very generous people, had helped his family.

Shannon Norman:
And he knew her mother. And so he said, I know your mother, and that’s what I’m not going to do that. Hence the plot that this guy and Greg launched to try to get themselves out of this, which involved taking it out another third party that didn’t work out so well. And then after that was when they fled to Alaska.

Judd Shaw:
How did. From my understanding, too, there were women in prison who testified against her.

Shannon Norman:
That’s correct.

Judd Shaw:
How did they get to these women?

Shannon Norman:
I don’t know that I can answer that question, I don’t think I have enough information to tell you exactly. Somehow they later came and signed affidavits that they were paid to come in and testify that she had said this and she had done that. And it was very frustrating for Judy when all those years later, and this may be something more that Mr. Ramsey can talk to you about, because he was kind of involved during some of that time. She was very frustrated because here we’ve got like 10 years later, these women are saying, hey, I was paid to lie on this affidavit. This affidavit is not true. I perjured myself. And it still wasn’t enough to try to overturn anything or create another appeal.

Judd Shaw:
It’s rare for someone to do law school in two years.

Shannon Norman:
It was at two and a half, but, yeah.

Judd Shaw:
Even launch their own law firm right out of law school and choose probably one of the toughest and the most uphill cases as their first case. What made you stay in this? What made you say, this is. I need to bring this with me.

Shannon Norman:
By the time that I had done a couple of semesters with the legal clinic, all of which working on Judy’s case, Judy and I had become extremely close, and we talked a couple times a week. And the more I got into this, the more it just was this incredible miscarriage of justice, Right? And I just didn’t want to let it go. I couldn’t. I couldn’t just drop it and just say, gosh, I hope it works out for you, Judy. I had no idea what I was doing. I brought it into my firm. I went to John Ammon at the SLU Legal clinic, and I said, hey, listen, I’m starting my firm and I’d really like to take this case into my firm. Can I have it? And surprisingly, they said, sure, run with it.

Shannon Norman:
So I did. And it just launched years of work, years of walking the halls down at the state capitol and meeting with every senator and every House rep, you know, that would meet with me to talk.

Judd Shaw:
About Judy, you know, and that’s interesting because I know from. With Bob Ramsey, who was Judy’s lawyer for a long time, there were the legal avenues, the state appeals, the federal appeals, the federal motions, even all the way up to the US Supreme Court, Right. But there was also sort of a rallying cry. There was coalition building networks. What was his strategy, in a sense that you just pointed out, the sort of the political and public pressure. Why was that part of the strategy? Why was that important as much as the legal work of the case?

Shannon Norman:
Well, it was important because the only thing that Judy had left after losing all of the appeals was clemency, and that is at the grace of the governor. So if you can’t get the governor’s attention, then why are they going to read the petition? That’s what I needed. I needed the governor to hear me. I needed the governor to read her petition. I needed them to believe in it and start investigating it, which Governor Greitens did. @ the time, though the governor before Greitens was there for two terms, and that’s when I had started all of this. And I needed assistance getting his attention because he had 3,300 clemency petitions sitting in a filing cabinet in a closet at the end of a hallway in his office. And they had been sitting there for years and years and years, and nobody had looked at them and nobody had read them.

Shannon Norman:
And the interesting part about that is that when you write a clemency petition and you submit it to the governor’s office, you can’t submit another clemency until three years after a decision has been made on that one. So as long as those clemency petitions are sitting in that closet, everybody’s just sitting forever and ever and ever. There was no system for it. Nobody was looking at them, nobody was reading them. They’re just getting thrown in there and forgotten about. So I started creating some noise. Made a lot of friends down there. At the time, all the LA’s knew me.

Shannon Norman:
And, yeah, I would just. I would book a room at the Capitol Plaza Hotel for Monday and Tuesday night. I would drive down on Monday morning, meet with them all day on Monday, all day on Tuesday, all day on Wednesday, drive back. And I was trying to get my firm launched as well. But eventually it did work because I made enough friends and I made enough noise down there that when Governor Greitens took office, he paid attention.

Judd Shaw:
And we’re going to hear from Eric. Why do you think that he paid attention?

Shannon Norman:
First off, I think it’s just who he is. I think he just cares. I just think that’s who he is as an individual. But I think he went into the office and he realized that there were a lot of things broken, and there had been more than just me. There had been several people from slu, John Ammon. There had been a lot of people making a lot of noise about these 3,300 petitions that were sitting in this closet. And so I think it was one of the things that he walked in and he said, well, we got to do something with them. What are we going to do? And so he did.

Shannon Norman:
He brought in Stacy from, you know, she was going to law school at Mizzou. And he brought her in and said, we need some kind of system that’s going to filter these out. Like, we need to be able to figure out which ones need to go over here and which ones need to go to the next level. And they created a sort of a tier system. And Judy’s and one other petition made it to the. To the top level where the investigation was done. And they had met with Judy and eventually, you know, commuted her sentence. So.

Judd Shaw:
And it was interesting that I think when they were reviewing her case, they had it all set up, like, okay, this is. This is good. This is a case that we want to provide some sort of clemency to. And then. And Governor Greitens learns that there’s a disciplinary action against Judy, right. And he’s like, what is it? What does he do? Contraband. He’s like, contraband. Oh, this is not good.

Shannon Norman:
Your mind immediately goes to, you know, drugs, a cell phone, a weapon, whatever.

Judd Shaw:
And what was it, if I recall.

Shannon Norman:
And you might even be able to correct me on this, if I recall. I think it was an apple. I think it was an apple. It was some kind of food.

Judd Shaw:
There were two. One of them, from my understanding, was also too many books.

Shannon Norman:
Too many books, Yes. I forgot about that. One of those books was Governor Greiten’s book. Yes, it was. That is correct.

Judd Shaw:
Like, how many books? What books does she have? And they’re like your book.

Shannon Norman:
Yeah, yeah, that is right. And maybe it might have been a previous disciplinary. Because I remember having conversations when Justin Smith with Governor Greiten’s office was doing his investigations. At some point in her career there at the prison, she was cited for having contraband. And it was an apple. There was at some point in time, she was cited for an apple.

Judd Shaw:
What. What was. What kind of resil. Resistance did you face? What were the real roadblocks that just kept being, like, crushing?

Shannon Norman:
One of the things I did was I was trying to get her story across because immediately when you start talking, particularly to a politician, right. And a Republican politician, and we have a lot of those in Jeff City, and she was convicted for life without. Her appeals were not. They were denied. Why should we let her out? She clearly was given that sentence for a reason. She killed somebody. She’s there because that’s where she belongs. That’s what I probably ran up against most often.

Shannon Norman:
And there’s a very dear friend of mine who has since passed away, Representative Tom Hannigan, who really I met with him and another representative, Phil Cristofanelli, and told them they were new, they were brand new, they were freshmen House reps. And I told them about Judy’s case, and they became just as enthralled with her case as I was, and they became champions of her. And the three of us worked together down there a lot. And there was an incident. I generally can put my filter on and behave the way I need to, but there was this incident with a. A representative from Jefferson County, South Jefferson county. And Tom Hannekin had brought me into his office, and we were there to talk about Judy. And things got quite heated.

Shannon Norman:
He didn’t want anything to do with it, and basically said that I was wasting my time and that I was, you know, lobbying for a murderer and all of that. And we exchanged some not so nice words and then saw each other later in the hallways maybe three or four years later and still didn’t like each other.

Judd Shaw:
You know, when you’re fighting for Judy beyond the conflict of interest, though. Right. So I can sit with my attorney lens on something because I’m a lawyer by background and I clerked for criminal court. I started the Criminal Law Society. My law school, you know, that was sort of my first into law, was criminal.

Shannon Norman:
And.

Judd Shaw:
You know, you have your feelings about your client, and then you can put those feelings aside and say, this is my job in my role as a lawyer. But for me, when I sort of like hear your story through your fight, particular because there was no monetary incentive, you know, it was an incredible uphill battle. It wasn’t something easy that was, you know, gonna land your name to it, that there’s gotta be this passion and purpose in it, this belief. And you’re fighting also for a woman who, to your point, Judy was a convicted murderer, lost all the appeals, most of the world had turned away from her. What was it, your belief in Judy?

Shannon Norman:
Well, you’ve met Judy.

Judd Shaw:
Yes.

Shannon Norman:
So it only takes meeting her once.

Judd Shaw:
Yes.

Shannon Norman:
So beyond that, honestly, what I think got me. And you probably remember going to law school, and even though I was not in my early 20s when I went to law school, still when we go into law school, we’re so technical, right? This is how it’s supposed to go, and this is what you’re supposed to do, and this is how you’re supposed to think and how you’re supposed to represent a client. And so being in the midst of learning all of that, and then reading Judy’s case and seeing how horribly wrong it went, what horrible representation she had, and all the rules this lawyer broke in her case and all the things that went wrong in her case that caused her to just fall through one crack and the next crack and the next crack. And I think. So part of it, I think, was a little bit that idealism of going to law school. And, you know, I just got through taking my ethics exam. And he says, we’re not supposed to do this, you know, but this guy did. And I think there’s that sort of outrage that it’s like, oh, you want to be a member of this profession that I’m trying to join, and you’re doing such a crappy job.

Shannon Norman:
And, you know, so there was. It just. She was just wronged. And I don’t know. I don’t know if I had been given another case that wasn’t her. And I certainly knew about all of the other clemency cases that all the other students were working on, and I met a lot of them. Nobody is Judy, but I think Judy’s case was so different. And there were other cases.

Shannon Norman:
There were other cases that were really egregious. I mean, you’ve got somebody in there who is serving life without parole for having robbed a pharmacy, a mom and pop pharmacy. And she had a previous conviction, a previous felony conviction, and she went in and she was addicted to drugs. She and her boyfriend. She goes into this pharmacy and she fires a shot into the ceiling, and she tells everybody to get on the ground, and she steals two pills. Two pills, and she’s serving life without. And so you just ask yourself, like, does that sound right?

Judd Shaw:
Right.

Shannon Norman:
And you and I both know, too, that if that exact thing happened, say, in the last 10 years, the likelihood of her serving life without is. It’s like 5%. Right. So it’s just a product, I think, somewhat of the times and how much more we know now in Judy’s case, you know, we know so much more about the mentality of battered women and what goes along with that. And none of that was. None of that was admissible. None of that came into play in cases like Judy’s back then.

Judd Shaw:
Yeah. So it sounds like aside from even the facts of the case itself, Judy just didn’t get the fair fight.

Shannon Norman:
She didn’t.

Judd Shaw:
That, as a lawyer, it poked you deeply that her lawyer had failed to meet our. Our obligation to our client.

Shannon Norman:
Correct. I think it just being fresh and learning all of those things, you know, right there in law school, it just was sort of that. That like, wait a minute, we’re not supposed to do that, you know, and look at the catastrophe that it created.

Judd Shaw:
You know, you came through law school with the lens of domestic violence because you’re working in this coalition. Right. Advocacy in domestic violence cases. And I wonder, do you think that the system fails women, particularly women in abusive relationships?

Shannon Norman:
I think the system failed a lot of women in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s. I think that our system has gotten much better at dealing with that. We have things like ex parte orders of protection that are available now that weren’t available back then. We have battered women’s shelters now where the address can be kept confidential, which wasn’t available back then. We have a lot of mental health assistance that wasn’t available back then. That that allows the court system to be educated on kind of what comes along with somebody who has been in an abusive relationship for years and years and years, or somebody like Judy who came up and suffered abuse through essentially every section of life.

Judd Shaw:
Right, right.

Shannon Norman:
You know, if you think about the jury sitting there looking at her back then, I mean, 1983, 84, they don’t understand that. Like, they don’t know what we know today.

Judd Shaw:
Right.

Shannon Norman:
And so they were probably sitting there going, well, I mean, you went with him, right? I mean, why would you go with him?

Judd Shaw:
Right.

Shannon Norman:
Unless you just wanted to do this. Unless you just wanted. Of course, you had to have known about it. Why would you go? And. And I think it’s just a complete. We just have so much more education now. We have so much more information. So, you know, I think there are a lot of things in place these days that make the system better.

Shannon Norman:
It’s certainly not a perfect system in any way. And some of the tools that we’ve put in place for battered women get abused sometimes, you know, there. People use them in ways that they really weren’t intended to be used. But the court system does the best they can to filter through that.

Judd Shaw:
What’s one thing that you wish more people understood about incarcerated women?

Shannon Norman:
Oh, my gosh. I was always amazed at all the things that Judy would tell me about the things that they did in prison. Right. People think about prison, they have no idea what goes on in prison. It’s what they see on tv. Right. They see a bunch of guys out in the yard with the big, you know, barbed wire, the fence, and they’ve got some weights out in the yard, and they’re all standing around and doing whatever. And it’s not like that at all.

Shannon Norman:
Right. I mean, even In Judy’s book, she talks about going to Arizona and having all these programs available to her and finishing her education and becoming a paralegal. And I remember that at the time that I got her case, she was training dogs. She was training the service dogs at the time, and she had a couple of dogs and things like that. I think people, I think people would be really surprised to know that these programs go on. And I think that I would like for them to know how important these programs are. They’re important for our society, but they’re important for the mental health and rehabilitative benefit that they have for the women that are in there. And of course, the programs need funding.

Shannon Norman:
Right? So I think a lot of times people see. Well, I don’t, I don’t. Why are we giving funding to prisons? Why are we letting, you know, these convicted criminals? Why do we want to give them libraries? Why do we want to give them computers? Why do we want to pay for that? And I don’t think a lot of people look at it from how important it is for the person who’s inside there who’s spending all those years and still needs to develop as a person.

Judd Shaw:
And many of them are going to come out, many of them are going to come out at some point. And if they don’t have any rehabilitative programs, then it’s the cycle.

Shannon Norman:
Yeah, exactly. And there are so many programs that are so good, not just for the individuals that are incarcerated, but for. There are programs that benefit the community in the state that these individuals that are incarcerated work on. So there’s a lot of stuff there.

Judd Shaw:
You know, even, even the, even the children of incarcerated women. I mean, Judy started this program right, where she described how it was very sterile. You know, your kids would come in there, guards all around, scary environment, scary environment. You’re sitting across a table, no contact allowed. And it’s like. But this child, it could be a six year old, is sitting with their.

Shannon Norman:
Mother and can’t give him a hug.

Judd Shaw:
And so she started that program where now Chip, or Chip is her younger son. Right. And then the program, I can’t remember exactly the name of the program, but it’s where, you know, she had this trailer used. And then the moms who went through training on how to properly attend to their children could go into these trailers without security guards, with toys, sinks, sitting there hugging, you know. And so the rehabilitative programs, I think that until I heard about that program, I didn’t even realize it goes far beyond just the incarcerated people themselves.

Shannon Norman:
Yeah, Yeah. I mean, imagine these women like Judy, who has, you know, two children that she continued to try to raise as best she could and maintain a relationship with. And so if we think about it from. If we don’t think about the prisoner, but we just think about the children, what effect does it have on the children when they come in and all they can do is just sit here and look at Mom? They can’t hold her hand, they can’t hug her, they can’t feel her love. They can’t express love to her. So what does that do to them? Right. I mean, what are we setting them up for?

Judd Shaw:
Right. The system hardens them as much as it does to who it was meant to, which is the. You know, you said before that Judy wasn’t just your client. Right. You’ve come to, like, kind of love Judy.

Shannon Norman:
She’s family. She’d tell you the same thing. Yeah.

Judd Shaw:
How do you think that she was able to stay kind and faithful through all of those years?

Shannon Norman:
I don’t know. I don’t know. It is some kind of miracle. I don’t know. I have thought so many times, like, I don’t. I would have been angry. And she had her time that she was angry. But, you know, what is it that she says all the time? You can get bitter or you can get better.

Shannon Norman:
And so, I mean, she definitely chose to get better, and she got better and better and better and better. But it’s like I said, that first phone call with her, I didn’t know what to expect. Like, I didn’t have a lot of experience with people incarcerated. And so I get on the phone and she’s like, hi. And you’re like, okay, this person’s really happy. And she is really happy every single day. And those were the exact same conversations that we’d had and over the years. I mean, we spoke when I got done with law school and was still working on her case.

Shannon Norman:
We spoke every Sunday at 5 or somewhere thereabout. And every Sunday. And so. And there were plenty of times where I had a bad week or she had a bad week. And. But she was just always Judy. Right. Like, she was always happy.

Shannon Norman:
She was always absolutely certain that things were going to work out, she was going to get out. And she experienced a lot of heartbreak over the years when she really thought she was going to be released and she wasn’t.

Judd Shaw:
Yeah. That she came close to a number of times a prior governor, before Greitens Carnahan, was going to, you know, provide some kind of clemency apart and he ultimately dies and I.

Shannon Norman:
In a plane accident, which by a strange coincidence. So my husband is a highway patrol, or he was for 30 years. He recently retired and he actually worked that plane accident. Wow, that’s strange.

Judd Shaw:
I mean, just to keep getting that news and get kicked, kicked and kicked. You know, that, that, that’s a. That brings me to the point that this series is called Buried Alive. And to me, it’s about resilience and faith in the darkest places. What did Judy’s case teach you about resilience?

Shannon Norman:
Well, it certainly taught me that never give up. Right. And I remember having my mom, you know, I talk to my mom every day, and at some point early on, you know, I was like, oh, I’m going to get her out. Like, I don’t know when it’s going to happen, but I’m going to get her out. And then years go by, and I remember calling my mom on the way back, the day she was released. I was driving back to St. Louis from Chillicothe, and my mom said, well, you said you were going to get her out. She’s like, you said you didn’t know how long it was going to take, but you said you were going to get her out, and you did.

Shannon Norman:
So, I mean, there were plenty of times when I thought, this is hopeless. We’re never like, this is. We’re never going to get anybody to listen, you know, because the governor before Greitens was. He was not interested. And, and I, There were several times when I was just like, this is so crazy. Like, we are fighting the whole system, but we won.

Judd Shaw:
So how long did it take?

Shannon Norman:
Well, I graduated in 2012, and she got out in 2017. And I had been working on her case a couple years before I graduated. So it, I mean, I worked on it for, like, seven years. And I know Bob Ramsey worked on it for many, many years.

Judd Shaw:
Decades. Yeah. And so first came clemency, then the pardon.

Shannon Norman:
Yes. About four months later. Yeah. I want to say March or April.

Judd Shaw:
When, when the clemency was, I guess it’s heard or considered. How did you get the news that something was moving now?

Shannon Norman:
Well, we kind of knew things were moving probably for a couple of months before I was in. Probably every other day. I was talking to Justin Smith on the phone. And that was Governor Greiten’s chief counsel. And he and his team did the background on Judy and just dug into just every nook and cranny about her. In. I want to say it was about October of that year, 2017. He wanted to meet at.

Shannon Norman:
Wanted to actually go and meet her and talk with her. And, of course, me being her attorney. So he arranged that I drove to Chillicothe, and the three of us sat in a room for over an hour just chatting. He asked her all kinds of questions. I remember that he told her that he found out that she had had a traffic ticket back, like, I don’t know, a couple years before everything happened. And they had dug all the way back to find that traffic ticket. And she had told him. She’s like, that’s the only traffic ticket I’ve ever had.

Shannon Norman:
And so we sat there and, I mean, obviously, Justin left there. He had talked to her on the phone many times, but he left there with the same feeling that you and I have had when we’ve met her. And then we were in frequent touch between October and December and then those last couple of weeks, like, we knew something was going. You know, angel and I, her daughter, we were talking, and he was talking to her, and he was talking to me, and there was a lot of questions. And I remember. So when they finally. He’s like, listen, we’re doing a couple of more things. There’s just a couple more things we need to check.

Shannon Norman:
And then he’s going to make a decision. And, like, you know, and everything was so positive, and we’re like, this is it. This is it. I know this is it. And so they finally called, and he told me, he said, okay, look, he’s going to do it tomorrow. Can you be there? You know, can we get everybody there? And I was like, well, yeah, yeah, we make that happen. And he’s like, but you can’t tell her. You can’t tell her.

Shannon Norman:
And I was like, what do you mean, I can’t. He’s like, no, he wants to tell her himself. And I’m like, okay. And so we laughed because her book launch was in Austin last month, and we were with Governor Greitens. And so we’re down there, we were talking, and angel and I were laughing because we both almost blew it the night before. We both almost, like, we were on the phone with Judy, and we almost blew it and said, okay, well, I’ll see you tomorrow. And she had absolutely no idea. And so we all drove up up there, and he surprised her.

Shannon Norman:
Completely surprised her. And she laughs because they came in and they said, hey, your attorney’s here. And she’s like, my attorney’s not here. No, no, your attorney’s here. You got to go out there. And she’s like, I’m telling you, my attorney’s in St. Louis. She’s not here.

Shannon Norman:
She would have told me if she was coming, so it was a real surprise. But there was a lot of activity going on. And I will tell you that I give a tremendous amount of credit to Governor Greitens and his team because they dove as deep as there is to dive. I mean, they looked at every nook and cranny of her background and her story and the case and all of it.

Judd Shaw:
Beyond your law practice, you’re actually a judge now?

Shannon Norman:
I am. I’m a municipal judge in four cities in St. Charles county, and I enjoy doing that. It’s a little bit different from what we do on our side of the bench, so that’s nice.

Judd Shaw:
How has that experience brought now, you know, a different lens to sitting on the bench?

Shannon Norman:
Well, municipal judges in Missouri, our goal is compliance, not punishment. And so it’s our job to try to get people who, you know, if they have a DWI or a speeding ticket or they’re not registered or they don’t have insurance or whatever it is, we want to work with them to get compliance. We’re not looking to just find them and send them back out the door.

Judd Shaw:
And.

Shannon Norman:
And I love that aspect of it because it falls kind of right in with Judy’s situation. Right. And her story. And so I always have Judy’s story in the back of my mind with anything that I do. I have another pro bono case that you know about that I’m working on right now up in Lincoln county, and Judy’s case is at the forefront of my thoughts in that case.

Judd Shaw:
So looking back, what would you say to that young lawyer who is walking out of law school, taking Judy’s case, starting her own law firm? What would you say to her now? Gosh.

Shannon Norman:
I mean, I would probably just give a little encouragement and say, hang in there, because it’s just a matter of time. Right. Because there were just so many times when it just felt like the system was too big. But at the end of the day, we got where we needed to be, and so it really is. It’s just like Judy’s story of resilience. I mean, it’s just keep going. And that’s what I’m doing on this other case, and that’s what I’m doing in my practice. So.

Judd Shaw:
And to anyone listening who feels trapped in a system, in a story, in a mistake, what would you tell them?

Shannon Norman:
I would tell them that Judy is a perfect example of continuing to work towards the goal that you want. But that they have to know that Judy worked for that goal. Like that didn’t just happen to Judy. Judy worked every single day that she was in prison for 36 years to be a better person. And she worked to maintain herself and not allow herself to get lost in the system. She worked very hard at that every day. And so you’ve got to work on yourself, but just keep going, because if you keep working on yourself and you keep moving towards your goal, you’ll get there eventually. You know, sometimes it’s the two steps forward, one step back situation, but even slow progress is progress.

Shannon Norman:
So.

Judd Shaw:
Well, I wish you the best in this other case that I know that you’ve been working really hard at six years because what you have done in Judy’s life is, it’s really a miracle. All of the characters of this story that never gave up on this woman when the entire world had essentially turned away from her is a miracle itself. So I know that Judy has said thanks and loved and hugged and kissed, but I am impressed with all of you, and I, I can’t thank you enough for coming on the show.

Shannon Norman:
Well, thank you for having me and thank you for doing this story on Judy. I know that she appreciates it, and I would hope that your listeners will appreciate getting to know her a little bit as well. So, yeah, it’s been a pleasure.

Judd Shaw:
Thanks for coming on. Up next, Governor Eric Greitens. He had the power to free Judy, but at a cost. He shared why he risked political backlash to grant clemency in a case most politicians would have buried. Don’t forget to subscribe to stay with us for the series. Stay Blessed.