Student w/ 3.6 GPA Gets 30 Years In Prison.. 5 Days After Graduation For Killing A Woman Over A Man

[Walter Cronkite]

[WSHH]wshhG560ivfuV3RnhOF7[/WSHH]

An honor student who worked her way out of Chicago's crime-ridden Roseland neighborhood to become the first in her immediate family to graduate from college, Moody's life had once been on a different course. But in May, less than a week after she received a degree in criminal justice from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, a jury convicted her of killing a 21-year-old mother of two after a senseless altercation over a young man. Moody claimed that she had been bullied by a group of women from the neighborhood and that the shooting was self-defense.

The jury decided it was second-degree murder. Now the young woman born to a prostitute and crack addict who abandoned her at the hospital after birth, a young woman who believed that education would be her ticket "out of the ghetto," is serving a 30-year sentence in an Arkansas prison. "My world has been turned around," Moody said, tears trickling down her face as she sat for an interview at the McPherson Unit, a women's correctional facility about 100 miles northeast of Little Rock.