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Defense lawyer fights racism in death row cases

By Lonnae O’Neal Parker,January 31, 2012

Christina Swarns, director of the criminal justice program at the NAACP,… (Jennifer S. Altman/FOR…)

There’s a steadfast cheeriness to Christina Swarns as she talks rapid fire about the contours of her day. There are the rigors of her end-to-end Manhattan commute, how rarely she dresses like a grown-up and the usual challenges of the professional working mom.

But that changes when the conversation turns to the role of race in the criminal justice system. Then the Howard University grad becomes all authority and passion. She cites case law, death-penalty statistics and the history of Southern lynchings.She talks without pause, punctuating her words with hand gestures, even as her favorite portobello sandwich goes untouched in front of her.

As director of the criminal justice unit at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Swarns, 43, is one of the most prominent capital-defense lawyers in the country — the rare black woman in a community whose public face is most often white and male. Over the course of her career, she’s gotten seven convicted murderers off death row; one was exonerated, three had their convictions overturned and three had their death sentences vacated. But it is her most recent victory that is by far the most high-profile.

In December prosecutors in Philadelphia declined to seek another death sentence against Mumia Abu-Jamal, a decision that took him off death row for the first time in 30 years and rewarded years of effort Swarns — and many others — had put into the case. In 1982, Abu-Jamal was convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer and his decades-long court battles gained him a national and international following. There have been hip-hop tributes, “Free Mumia” T-shirts and a street named for him in France. When it was announced that he would no longer face the death penalty, famed writer Alice Walker wrote him a poem, activist and Princeton University professor Cornel West led a rally at the Philadelphia Constitution Center and the former South African archbishop Desmond Tutu called for his immediate release.

Abu-Jamal is Swarns’s biggest case, and she’s thrilled for the renewed attention it has received. But what she really wants is more scrutiny on an entire system she says is unfair and unjust.

Finding her passion

“Welcome to death row,” Swarns jokes outside her office. Behind her desk, a Halloween picture of her 3-year-old daughter, Amina, whom Swarns adopted as an infant from Ethiopia, shares space with a 1970s picture of a Ku Klux Klansman in full regalia holding a handwritten sign: “We support the Death Penalty.”

Growing up on Staten Island, Swarns never imagined she’d be in this place. Swarns is the middle of three girls (her younger sister, Jessica, is an elementary school teacher in Woodbridge, and her older sister, Rachel, a New York Times reporter). Her father is a real estate broker, her mother an educator who retired as a superintendent for the New York City Department of Education. At her mother’s insistence, during breaks from Howard, Swarns interned at the office of a neighbor who was a prosecutor and decided she hated criminal law.

“I was the only black person in a nonclerical capacity and all the people being prosecuted were black,” she says. It was a mill. “Nobody talked about how on Earth is this happening?”

But the law remained compelling, and at the University of Pennsylvania law school, she dabbled in public service law, worked on an AIDS project and taught at-risk kids at a community center. Nothing stuck. For six months after graduating, she grilled other lawyers about their jobs but remained “overwhelmingly confused.” One day she simply called the Legal Defense Fund to ask if she could volunteer. Absolutely, she was told, and she was immediately sent to the capital-crimes division.

She started on a Monday. A fellow lawyer had a client scheduled to die that week. He got a last-minute stay. Swarns says it was “the first time I felt I saw criminal law in its full capacity and power.” The first time she saw a place for herself.

Swarns gained courtroom experience at the Legal Aid Society in Manhattan and began doing full-time death-penalty work with the capital unit of the Philadelphia Federal Community Defender’s Office in the mid-1990s. In 2003 she was offered the position with the Legal Defense Fund. One of the first things she did was meet with Abu-Jamal. In late 2010, Jamal asked her and the LDF to take his case.

Swarns didn’t know if they could. Her daughter was 2. Her schedule was tight. As a single mom, she had to leave the office by 4:30 and already sometimes felt like a part-timer, rushing back and forth daily from her Washington Heights home to her office in TriBeCa. Dating was nonexistent. She came to terms with all that, then talked to her boss.

“This is that Mumia,” she told him, “with all the followers.”