Christine Mumma - Tar Heel of the Year

The director of the N.C. Center on Actual Innocence works to free those who are wrongly convicted -- and pushes for laws to prevent such mistakes

A legal file folder tucked under her arm, Christine Mumma hops out of her Lexus SUV and surveys the Boone trailer park. She steps from the pavement onto browning grass, her high heels sinking into the dirt. She starts rapping on doors.

"I'm here investigating a murder," she tells residents. The 1994 case was resolved in the courts long ago. But the well-dressed woman who has come knocking says there is a problem: the man in prison for the crime is innocent.

Correcting such cases consumes Mumma, a lawyer and director of the N.C. Center on Actual Innocence. She knows that almost all people sent to prison are guilty. But when she thinks police and prosecutors got it wrong, she works tirelessly to set it right.

"There is a need," Mumma said, "and I'm driven to be where there is a need. ... It's in my blood."

She spent six years trying to liberate Dwayne Dail, wrongly imprisoned for raping a child. He walked out of a Goldsboro courtroom in August, free after nearly 19 years.

Mumma, 45, is not a famous lawyer, but she is a force behind what has become a high-profile movement -- the effort to reverse and prevent wrongful convictions.

Since leaving the corporate fast track for a career in pro bono legal work, Mumma has pushed to establish laws to ensure that there will be fewer cases like Dwayne Dail's.

"There have been many prominent people who have strengthened the system," said former state Supreme Court Chief Justice I. Beverly Lake Jr., for whom Mumma clerked in the late 1990s. "Chris has gone beyond that, being innovative and willing to look at the process objectively and being willing to change it."

Mumma helped design guidelines for police lineups that, if followed, should prevent the kinds of missteps that led to wrongful arrests in the Duke lacrosse case. Also due to Mumma's work, North Carolina is one of only nine states that require investigators to record interrogations of murder suspects. And soon, a state law Mumma drafted will ensure that biological evidence is safely retained long after a suspect is convicted. Had evidence in Dail's case been readily available for DNA testing, he wouldn't have spent half his life in prison.

The changes in laws and procedures have drawn national attention to North Carolina, now recognized as a pace-setter for criminal justice reform. Mumma often travels the country to show others how to minimize wrongful convictions.

'She bothers to care'

Mumma (pronounced MOO-ma) is an unlikely crusader. She is a Republican mother of three who lives in a $4 million Durham home with her husband, Mitch Mumma, who has made a fortune in venture capital. Yet she works long days in her office, over the phone in her car and most weekends at home on behalf of people branded murderers, robbers and rapists. She does it all for free.

"The starkest thing about her is that she bothers to care," said friend Greg Parent. "She could spend her time at the spa or at the country club sipping mint juleps."

Two years ago, when Mumma was honored by the N.C. Bar Association for her pro bono projects, an observer asked her, "Are you really that altruistic, or do you just have a rich husband?"

"Both," Mumma replied.

For the past 10 years, the Mummas have enjoyed the prosperity that came with Mitch Mumma's success at Intersouth Partners in Durham. That financial security helps her to help others, an instinct she embraced even as a young girl.

When Mumma's father, an engineer, took the family to Libya for his work, young Christine, then in middle school, protested the maltreatment of sheep and camels in the open markets. During her senior year in high school, she ran away to Massachusetts to be with a troubled boyfriend who had lost his best friend in a car crash. She called her parents after a week and came back to New Jersey after a month.