Today's Washington Post carries, "Defense lawyer fights racism in death row cases." It's written by Lonnae O’Neal Parker. Swarns is the LDF as the Director of the Criminal Justice Practice at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, an organization that has been at the forefront of fighting capital punishment. Here's the beginning:
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.
And:
For Swarns and “everybody in the [capital-defense] community,” she says the connection between the death penalty and race is irrefutable. “The death penalty is a direct descendant of lynching,” she says. “The states with the highest number of lynchings also have the highest numbers of death-penalty executions.
Swarns will be one of the participant's at UT Law's program Lynching and the Death Penalty, March 23 & 24. It's noted, here. Coverage of Mumia Abu-Jamal's case is also available.
Michael Meltsner's classic book on LDF's involvement in death penalty cases in the 1960's and '70's, Cruel and Unusual: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment, has recently been reissued by Quid Pro Books. Coverage of Meltsner's book is also available.
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