Though Noura didn’t want to shame her mother, she also wondered whether her mother’s volatile relationships with men were connected to her killing. Jackson married for a second time when Noura was in elementary school. The relationship turned abusive and violent by the time it ended in 2001, according to Noura’s half uncle, who testified that Jackson’s ex-­husband even brought a gun to the divorce negotiations. In the months before her death, Jackson was going out to bars and picking up strangers. Did one of those encounters go wrong? The jury had no inkling of that possibility.

Then there was the unsolved murder of Noura’s father, which also went unexplored at trial. At the time of his death in January 2004, Hassanieh was running a limousine service that ferried clients to and from a strip club next to his convenience store. When he was killed in the store, surveillance video showed the assailant ransacking the place, as if he was looking for something. Rumors swirled that Hassanieh was renting out limos to a prostitution ring and had compromising videotapes of clients who had ridden in his cars. Jennifer Jackson had collected Hassanieh’s belongings from the store for Noura. Their home was also ransacked the night of Jackson’s murder, according to the police.

Once her conviction was overturned, Noura was still charged with murder. She was moved from the prison she had been living in for nearly a decade to a jail close to the courthouse. She had a right to a hearing, where Judge Craft would decide whether to set a bond she could pay in order to be released until the new trial. She started letting herself imagine getting out. Giving administrative reasons, Craft refused to hold the hearing. Months unspooled while Noura waited in jail, unable to talk to her friends in prison or even receive their letters. Her lawyers argued that Craft should remove Weirich and her office from the case and appoint a new prosecutor. As the reality of standing trial for a second time sank in, Noura started to fill with dread. ‘‘The first time I didn’t know what to expect,’’ she says. ‘‘But now I did know. So much of the trial was about my own emotions being examined. The idea of putting myself back out there again started to seem awful.’’

In January 2015, after a five-month delay, Weirich agreed to hand Noura’s case to a neighboring district attorney’s office. But Judge Craft still did not grant Noura a bond hearing. That May, the new prosecutor offered her a deal: a reduced sentence if she pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Her lawyers checked with the Tennessee Department of Corrections, which they say told them that she had enough credits for good behavior and for working in prison to be released the same day. A spokeswoman for the department said its staff members do not recall those conversations ‘‘as being erroneous or misleading in any way.’’

Noura knew that her friends in prison would feel as though a guilty plea was an act of betrayal. She felt that way herself. But she was also deeply torn. Her friends outside prison urged her to seize the chance to get out. Ansley Larsson, a friend of her mother’s, invited Noura to live in her home after she was released.

Noura’s mother and father were lost to her, and more than anything, she wanted to rebuild a family. ‘‘I’ve never known always what I wanted to be, or who I wanted to be with, but the one thing that has remained constant in my life is that I wanted to be a mother,’’ Noura told me. If she went to trial for a second time and lost, her years of fertility would tick away in prison. ‘‘I just wanted out so bad,’’ Noura said. ‘‘I thought, People will have to forgive me.’’

On May 20, 2015, wearing her prison uniform, an orange top and navy pants, Noura was taken to a courtroom. A bailiff she met when she was arrested at 18 took off her handcuffs so she could sign an Alford plea that her lawyers had negotiated, which allows a defendant to acknowledge that the state has enough evidence to convict her while she maintains her innocence. Noura remembers feeling detached from herself, as if she were performing the part of a person about to be released from prison.