Two months before she was supposed to go on trial for killing her child, Michelle Taylor stood before a Florida judge and listened quietly as the prosecutor recited the allegations against her. Taylor, 41, had long insisted she was not what the state made her out to be: a mother who set fire to her home to collect insurance money, killing her 11-year-old son David in the process. Now there was proof she’d been telling the truth. The key arson evidence had been dismantled, with several top scientists saying that the forensics did not hold up.

But prosecutors refused to drop the charges, instead giving Taylor’s lawyer a deadline. According to defense attorney John Rockwell, if she did not take a plea deal by her next court hearing, all future offers were off the table. After several sleepless nights, Taylor walked into the St. Johns County Courthouse on April 2 and entered a plea: no contest to manslaughter.

“She was up there for maybe three minutes,” said Megan Wallace, Taylor’s fiercest advocate, who watched in the gallery alongside Taylor’s mother. Six-and-a-half years after the fire destroyed Taylor’s home and upended her life, the conviction happened in the blink of an eye.

I examined Taylor’s case in an in-depth story published by The Intercept last month. It described how she was accused of arson after escaping a nighttime fire that broke out in her St. Augustine home on October 23, 2018. Witnesses described her panic as she screamed that her son was inside, trying repeatedly to reenter the house. Taylor swore she had no idea how the fire started or why David did not make it out. The two had been watching TV in her bedroom that night, Taylor told investigators, when she heard smoke detectors go off and encountered thick black smoke outside her........

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