[2] She received national media attention after her U.S. Supreme Court victory in Buck v. Davis, a case that overturned a death sentence on the grounds of unfair racial bias.
[2] Swarns also worked with the Legal Aid Society and then the capital unit of the Philadelphia Federal Community Defender’s Office in the mid-1990s.
[7] In 1997, Duane Buck, an African American man, was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend, Debra Gardner, and one of her friends, Kenneth Butler, after arriving at her home armed with a rifle and shotgun on July 30, 1995.
[8] In an ill-attempt to prove that Buck wouldn’t commit acts like these again, his court-appointed attorney, Jerry Guerinot, called two psychologists as expert witnesses.
[11] On February 22, 2017, the judgment was reversed and remanded in a 6-2 vote with Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissenting.
[10]As an Assistant Federal Defender in the Capital Habeas Unit, Swarns was instrumental in using DNA evidence to exonerate Nick Yarris in 2003 from his convictions for the 1981 abduction, rape and murder of Linda May Craig that had put him on death row in Pennsylvania for over 20 years.