NEW YORK – 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 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.

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 that 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 and 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.

“Welcome to death row,” Swarns jokes outside her New York City 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 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 non-clerical capacity, and all the people being prosecuted were black,” she says. “Nobody talked about, how on Earth is this happening?”

But 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. One day she simply called the Legal Defense Fund to ask whether she could volunteer. Absolutely, she was told, and she was immediately sent to the capital-crimes division.

She started on a Monday. One of a fellow lawyer’s clients was 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.

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.

Abu-Jamal was a former Black Panther, and his 1982 conviction for killing patrolman Daniel Faulkner came during a time of deep racial unrest. The U.S. Department of Justice had just sued the Philadelphia Police Department for federal civil rights violations.

By the time Swarns took over Abu-Jamal’s case, it was decades old and still politically explosive. But Swarns believed Abu-Jamal was innocent – and moreover that the death penalty is racist. It’s a belief that animates her life and makes it impossible for her to have casual conversations about capital punishment.

At the same time, she gets that victims’ families and death-penalty proponents believe just as strongly that the punishment must fit the crime, that convicted killers deserve to be killed.

“I don’t support murder. I don’t want people to be killed; that’s horrible,” she says. “My point is whether this person got what the American justice system guarantees. Is this the right person, and was justice done?”

Last spring, the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Abu-Jamal’s jury had received flawed instructions and his death sentence was unconstitutional. The Philadelphia prosecutor’s office appealed to the Supreme Court, which refused to take the case. That led to the December decision to not seek another death sentence for Abu-Jamal.

A study released last month by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 62 percent of Americans favor the death penalty for those convicted of murder. Less than 5 percent, however, cited concerns about racial disparities.

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.”