Originally from West Virginia, Shelley has also lived in New Mexico, Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and has lived in Alabama for the past 20 years, mainly in the Tuscaloosa area. She graduated from the University of Alabama with a Bachelor’s of Social Work and went on to earn her Master’s of Social Work also from UA. In 2015, she graduated from Faulkner’s Jones School of Law with her Juris Doctorate and was admitted to the Alabama State Bar also in 2015.

Prior to law school, Shelley worked as a client advocate in the Tuscaloosa County Public Defender’s Office. She went on to an internship at the Judge David Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law in Washington, D.C. She was Judicial Assistant to Hon. Philip N. Lisenby in Tuscaloosa Circuit Court.

During law school, Shelley was a law clerk for Hon. J. Greg Shaw, Associate Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, and Hon. W. Scott Donaldson of the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals. She was active in trial advocacy and moot court programs, was an editor on the Faulkner Law Review, and a Teaching/Research Assistant for the Director of the Legal Research and Writing Program.

Following law school, Shelley moved back to Tuscaloosa where she became the Executive Director of the Second Chance Program, a pretrial diversion program for criminal offenders in Tuscaloosa County.

She is an experienced capital mitigation investigator, which involves gathering information about the biopsychosocial history of capital-murder defendants for the purpose of presenting it to juries in an effort to mitigate death-penalty sentencing.

Shelley lives with her fiancé, two kids, three dogs, and a cat. She loves animals. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking, fishing, horseback riding, being active outdoors, traveling, and spending time with family and friends.