This accused rapist was exonerated — but now he’s front and center in a GOP primary in NC
Attack ads are flying between two of the candidates in the three-way Republican primary for attorney general.
Voters will decide Tuesday who they want to take on Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein in the November general election. Early voting is underway.
Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill’s campaign took the rare step of replacing one ad with a new version. His opponent, Chris Mumma — the target of the ad — had threatened legal action against a TV station if it kept running.
“The advertisement contains egregious misrepresentations of fact that will mislead North Carolina voters,” wrote Mumma’s lawyer, Dan Boyce.
Mumma is the executive director of the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence, a group that investigates possible wrongful convictions. O’Neil is the top prosecutor in Forsyth County, which includes Winston-Salem.
Forsyth County prosecutors have sent at least two innocent men to prison for life, both of whom were freed after years behind bars.
O’Neill’s ad against Mumma criticizes her work freeing one of those prisoners, a man named Joseph Abbitt. The other man was Darryl Hunt. Both have since died. Abbitt died in a 2015 car crash.
“Activist lawyer Christine Mumma worked to set free a convicted child rapist, calling it justice,” the ad says. “Police disagreed and DNA tests proved them right.”
In fact, Abbitt was exonerated because of DNA tests.
Joseph Abbitt
Abbitt was sentenced to life in prison in 1995 after he was convicted of raping two children in Winston-Salem. But years later, after the advent of better DNA technology, newly retested evidence didn’t match Abbitt. The district attorney’s office and Mumma’s group both agreed the conviction should be thrown out, according to the Winston-Salem Journal. Abbitt was freed from prison in 2009, his name cleared after 14 years behind bars.
O’Neill wasn’t working for the Forsyth County District Attorney’s office in 1995, when Abbitt was originally convicted. He later became an assistant DA there, and took over the top job just a few months after Abbitt was released.
The police argued against the decision to free Abbitt, which the Journal described in 2010 as causing “a rift” between them and the prosecutors. O’Neill did not charge Abbitt again, despite the police objections, and told the newspaper that if the police had evidence they could always re-arrest Abbitt. They never did, local NPR affiliate WFDD reported after Abbitt died, noting the constitutional prohibition on trying someone twice for the same crime.
Abbitt’s brothers recently told local TV station WXII that they were disgusted by O’Neill’s ad — especially since Abbitt can’t defend himself.
“It’s just shameful, you know,” Thurmond Abbitt told the news station. “And I just could not understand why a politician would use, you know, a subject like that in order to get personal gain.”
O’Neill’s new version of the ad still has the controversial claims about Mumma and Abbitt. However, it no longer contains a claim about O’Neill’s own record on prosecuting sex crimes. The state court system specifically warns prosecutors not to make claims about conviction rates, and Mumma’s lawyer wrote that O’Neill’s claim was “not supported by any reliable data.”
O’Neill’s new version of the ad instead transitions to a defense of O’Neill’s record on ICE and sanctuary policies — an area where he says he’s the victim of a dishonest attack, from Mumma.
ICE detainers and Trump
In Forsyth County, both the current Democratic sheriff and his Republican predecessor have had a policy of not honoring requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain immigrants who are suspected of being in the country illegally but who would otherwise be let out of jail.
Every large county in North Carolina now has that same policy, after a wave of Democratic victories in sheriff elections in 2018.
Supporters of the policy say ICE detainer requests are frequently unconstitutional and also make it hard for local cops to work with Hispanic residents. Critics often call it a “sanctuary” policy. However, there’s no set definition of what a sanctuary city or county is, and the phrase has been used to criticize various other immigration policies as well.
Last year, Democratic Sheriff Bobby Kimbrough held a press conference to announce that he would continue the policy of not honoring ICE detainers — but that he would cooperate with ICE in other ways. The Winston-Salem Journal reported that O’Neill also spoke “and said that he agreed with Kimbrough’s position.”
O’Neill’s critics interpret that to mean that he’s anti-ICE, but in an interview O’Neill repeatedly called that contention “fake news.”
And while current ICE agents are legally prohibited from endorsing politicians, he said he has the support of former agents. He provided a letter of support from Gloria Fichou, a retired ICE supervisor in North Carolina. She said that under O’Neill’s leadership the DA’s office “was a valuable and integral partner in carrying out the mission of ICE.”
That’s contrary to the picture Mumma’s ad paints.
“We deserve an attorney general who will enforce our laws,” Mumma says in the ad, as ominous music plays. “District Attorney Jim O’Neill? He opposed President Trump’s policy of holding illegal immigrants arrested for a crime. Instead he supported releasing them back into our streets.”
Mumma’s campaign stands by the ad, but O’Neill says it couldn’t be further from the truth.
“How are they claiming this with a straight face? I work with ICE on a daily basis,” O’Neill said.
State Bar investigation
So when O’Neill’s campaign released a new version of their anti-Mumma ad, it added a section in which he defends his support for ICE, before the ad ends on another attack against Mumma, claiming: “The State Bar accused Mumma of engaging in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud and deceit.”
Mumma was cleared of those accusations in 2016. They stemmed from her work trying to get another man, Joseph Sledge, out of prison. Mumma’s group ultimately proved Sledge had spent 37 years behind bars for a Bladen County murder he didn’t commit. He later was paid $4 million for the decades of his life that were taken from him.
But during Mumma’s work to prove his innocence, she took a water bottle for DNA testing from someone who she believed might be related to the person who actually committed the murder. Mumma was wrong about that hunch, and although she was correct about Sledge’s innocence, the State Bar spent two years investigating Mumma for taking the bottle.
In 2016 she was given a written admonishment for those actions. It’s the most minor reprimand the State Bar can give, Mumma said, adding that she isn’t ashamed of it.
“I can never complain about the two years I went through when I know what innocent people go through who are in prison,” Mumma said. “I went through that process because I was fighting for someone who had been in prison for 37 years for a crime he didn’t commit.”
Lopsided fundraising
Mumma’s and O’Neill’s ads attacking one another are fueled by their hefty campaign accounts. Both went into 2020 with roughly $320,000 to spend.
Sam Hayes, the third candidate in the race, had only $10,000 in his campaign account at the start of the year.
Mumma didn’t get into the race until the last few days of 2019, and her campaign is largely self-funded; she loaned her campaign $250,000.
Several of the men she helped free from prison, including Sledge, have donated to her, state records show. Some of her other notable donors include GOP kingmaker Art Pope and former N.C. Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jackson.
O’Neill had significantly more individual donations than Mumma, having been actively campaigning for much of 2019.
Some of O’Neill’s more prominent supporters include Kieran Shanahan, who ran the Department of Public Safety under former Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, as well as former UNC Board of Governors Chairman John Fennebresque.
But while both Mumma and O’Neill have been far outpacing Hayes in fundraising, Hayes said in an interview that he’s concerned by what they’ve given in the past.
Mumma has previously donated money to Stein — who she’s now trying to take on in November — and O’Neill has donated to Democratic Sen. Paul Lowe of Winston-Salem. Both have also donated to numerous Republican politicians and causes, but Hayes said voters should be wary regardless.
“I don’t think that’s a conservative position,” Hayes said.
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Domecast politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it on Megaphone, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published February 27, 2020 at 5:18 PM with the headline "This accused rapist was exonerated — but now he’s front and center in a GOP primary in NC."