CHRISTINE MUMMA ’ 85
never before happened in the history of the
judicial system, neither of them daring to
believe.
As fate would have it
Greg Taylor’s long struggle toward free-
dom began with the truck that got stuck in
the mud when he and his friend Johnny
Beck drove it into the woods to smoke
crack on Sept. 26, 1991. But the road to his
redemption stretches back farther and
heads northward, to a little girl in New Jer-
sey who had a penchant for bringing home
abandoned cats and who, at an early age,
had a boyfriend who came from an abusive
home. Her parents tell people that Chris-
tine Cecchetti, the fourth of their five chil-
dren, was born with a “take-people-under-
my-wing instinct.”
Her father was a chemical engineer
who worked for Exxon, moving the family
to the next gig (Libya was one) the way
career military officers might. The day after
Christine graduated from high school in
New Hanover, N.J., her parents bade her
goodbye and moved to Saudi Arabia, where
her father ran the largest gas plant in the
world for the next decade. Mumma headed
south to live with a sister, who was finish-
ing up her studies at Duke.
While Mumma was establishing residency so she could attend Carolina — “I
had to put myself through school,” working
30 hours a week during college;“I needed
to afford it” — she rekindled a fledgling
romance with Mitch Mumma, a Duke student with whom she’d been on a blind
date the previous year when each was visiting siblings in Durham. They soon began
dating and were married five years later.
She was “driven, self-starting, compas-
sionate — all of those things that come out
in what she does today,” said Mitch, who
attributed her initiative to being an “oil
brat.” “I was drawn to her for all of those
reasons. And she has an independent mind.”
That independence came to the fore-
front when Mumma was 33 and an execu-
tive in financial planning and analysis at
Nortel. Despite a career on the rise and
children aged 1, 4 and 6, she resigned after
nine years to go to law school.
The choice came with plenty of challenges. As her husband traveled constantly
for his work, Mumma carted her three kids
to class at Carolina’s law school whenever
babysitters fell through, which was fre-
18
September/October 2010
quently. Her children attended so often, coloring books mingling with law tomes, that
Professor Rich Rosen wrote their names
into his contract law exam. (To honor those
challenges, the Mummas later established
The Mumma Scholarship for Single Parents
at the law school, an endowed award that
assists true one-earner households.)
She intended to reboot as a corporate
lawyer, but her past exposure to the legal
world hinted otherwise. Long intrigued by
the law, it was her experience while serving
as a juror on a capital murder trial in 1988
that left her with a negative first impression
of the criminal justice system. It wasn’t the
guilty verdict she objected to; she firmly
believed the defendant had committed the
crime. Still, she felt there was inequality
inherent in the disorganized, disheveled
defense attorney squaring off against a prepared, powerful and neat-as-a-pin prosecutor in the case, and the memories were
strong enough to inspire her to write a retrospective on the trial for an independent
study during her third year of law school.
Her interest in criminal justice solidified
when Mumma clerked for N.C. Supreme
Court Chief Justice I. Beverly Lake after
graduating in 1998. Working after hours,
she began to study a number of inmate
cases in which innocence seemed possible,
even probable — and yet, no system existed
to prove it. The post-conviction process is
set up for appeals of constitutional rights
violations: the prosecution withholding evidence, for example, or proof of a racially
inequitable jury — so-called technicalities
that could result in a retrial.
“But innocence itself is not an appealable issue,” Mumma said. “Those cases
aren’t up there for the judges to determine
if the jury got it right or not. And that was
really troubling.”
A broken system
Mumma, who had received numerous
offers from the corporate world, didn’t need
money — Mitch Mumma had by then
built Durham-based Intersouth Partners
into a venture capital success story. What
she wanted, said Rosen, “was to be useful.”
Rosen pointed her in the direction of
the N.C. Center on Actual Innocence in
2001, an organization that he and two
Duke professors had formed the previous
year to consolidate Duke’s and UNC’s law
schools’ Innocence Projects — part of a
‘Innocence itself
is not an
appealable issue.
Those cases
to determine
if the jury got it
right or not.
Christine Mumma
