Like most mothers, Doreen Giuliano believed in the best of her son. That’s why she could hardly believe, as a jury did, that her son, John Giuca, could have played a role in the 2003 murder of Mark S. Fisher.

Prosecutors claim that Mr. Giuca and a friend were part of a gang, called the Ghetto Mafia, and fatally shot Fisher, a college student. Both men were sentenced to at least 25 years in prison. Shocked and outraged by the verdict, Mrs. Giuliano launched an undercover investigation of her own. She adopted a new identity and started looking into her son’s jury, a search that led her to Jason Allo; she would come to discover that Allo knew a few of her son’s acquaintances.

Over the course of several months, Giuliano, posing as Dee Quinn, flirted, drank and smoked pot with Allo in the hopes of uncovering the truth. Finally, through a series of secretly taped conversations, Giuliano got proof of a connection and promptly took the tapes to her lawyers, who she hoped could get a judge to overturn the verdict. Well, her plan came to a crashing end yesterday when a Brooklyn judge blasted her actions, The New York Times reports.

Equating the sting with "vigilante" behavior, the judge insisted that Guiliano acted inappropriately and, more importantly, violated Allo’s right to privacy:

Acting as a self-appointed juror-misconduct vigilante, with the obvious intention to destroy the credibility of a jury verdict that went against her son … The defendant’s mother violated the privacy rights of the juror and sought media coverage to support and glamorize her deceptive conduct before this motion was even filed in court.

Giuliano received national attention earlier this year when Vanity Fair published a profile of her. 

Regardless of yesterday’s ruling, Mrs. Giuliano insists that she will continue fighting for her son’s freedom. If there’s one thing as powerful as the judicial system, it’s a mother’s love.