Stephen Ross Johnson
speaker
245 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 9 Feb
Stephen Ross Johnson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
There was a door out, but it required Tanya to do the one thing she had refused to do for more than four decades.
A plea deal.
A best interest plea, also known as an Alford plea, allowed Tanya to enter a guilty plea while maintaining her innocence.
By taking this path, she would be acknowledging that if a trial were held, the state would likely have enough evidence to convict her, despite her innocence.
And here's the problem with that.
When Tanya hung up, she carried the weight of the decision back to her cell, her family, her health, the years slipping away.
And for the first time, she let herself wonder whether innocence was something she had to prove.
With a single signature in the fall of 2011, Tanya traded the fight for freedom for the rest of her life with her family.
In a way, through this compromise, everyone got what they wanted.
She's convicted.
She stands convicted of it.
Whether it's an Alford plea or not, it's still a conviction.
John Campbell got his guilty plea.
Tanya got to go home.
And Stephen's now decade-long battle to get Tanya free was finally won.
Nobody was anticipating her return more than her husband, Daryl.
And on Halloween night 2011, Tim McCarter's cell phone buzzed.
Tim and Casey wanted to get ahead of the media frenzy.
They were still shell-shocked from the circus after Tanya had been arrested.
On November 1st, outside the Shelby County Jail, it almost didn't feel real.
Showing 121–140 of 245 · page 7 of 13
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