| Harvard had already accepted Gina Grant when an anonymous source delivered a packet of newspaper clippings to the university, tipping off the admissions office that the teen honors student had killed her mother. During the application process, Grant had told an interviewer that the death was “an accident,” but the description was only debatably accurate, and only according to a narrow legal definition. The high-schooler, investigators concluded, had smashed her mother’s skull with a birthday gift, in what a veteran detective termed “one of the top three most brutal homicides I’ve ever seen.” How would Harvard respond? Grant hadn’t yet matriculated—and, owing to her status as a minor at the time of the crime, her identity was never supposed to have been revealed publicly. But it was too late, and the university’s dilemma quickly became a national story. Grant, who had served eight months in juvenile detention, testified that she had been the victim of horrific maternal abuse, a claim backed up by supporters. Critics attacked her credibility, citing changing accounts of what had happened. “In her determination to be treated just like any other college applicant, Gina Grant posed some uncomfortable questions,” The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer wrote at the time. “Should someone who took another person’s life—whatever the circumstances were, and however reformed the taker of that life was said to be—be granted so spectacular a second chance? Should a young killer, even one of inarguable talent and accomplishment, be accorded the same opportunities as her law-abiding peers?” | 
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