LARIMER COUNTY — A Greeley woman convicted last year of fatally shooting her ex-lover’s wife has filed legal documents to drop her appeal of her first-degree-murder conviction and instead is seeking a hearing where she would claim she had ineffective counsel during the trial.
A Larimer County jury convicted Shawna Nelson in March 2008 of murdering Heather Garraus outside a Greeley credit union in 2007.
Nelson is serving a mandatory life sentence without the option of parole at a Pueblo prison.
In a letter to Weld County District Court Judge James Hartmann obtained by 9News, Nelson maintains her innocence and accuses the public defenders who represented her at trial of being ineffective. She requested a hearing, which would give her the chance to attack her conviction on those grounds.
Prosecutors argued at the two-week trial that Nelson killed Heather Garraus because she came to view her as the obstacle in the way of a family life with Heather’s husband, Ignacio Garraus.
Nelson is a former police and sheriff’s dispatcher in Weld County and was married to Ken Nelson, an investigator with the Weld County Sheriff’s Office. Her ex-lover and the father of one of her children, Ignacio Garraus, is a former police officer in Greeley.
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