'I spend my days preparing for life, not for death'
The former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal has spent 25 years on death row in the United States - despite strong evidence that he is innocent. In his first British interview, he talks to Laura Smith about life in solitary, how he has remained politically active, and why the Panthers are still relevant today
https://thevoiceforum.org/node/627 08/11/2007
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Life term or new penalty hearing ordered for Mumia Abu-Jamal
Objet : MUMIA: news and comment
Date : 1 april 2008 21:02:06 HAE
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/local/pa/
20080328_Life_term_or_new_death-penalty_hearing_ordered_for_Mumia_Abu-
Jamal_in_police_murder.html
Fri, Mar. 28, 2008
Life term or new penalty hearing ordered for Mumia Abu-Jamal
By Emilie Lounsberry
Inquirer Staff Writer
At least for now, execution is off the table for the world-famous death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal following a federal appeals court decision yesterday that left intact his conviction in the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia police officer.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that Abu-Jamal must be sentenced to life in prison for killing Daniel Faulkner or get a chance with a new Philadelphia jury that would decide only whether he should get life or be sentenced - again - to death.
The much-anticipated decision set the stage for more appeals in the 26-year-old case. Abu-Jamal's lawyer said he would ask the full Third Circuit to review the panel's ruling.
The U.S. Supreme Court also is likely to be asked to examine the case, but that court hears fewer than 2 percent of all petitions and has rebuffed Abu-Jamal three times over the years.
Abu-Jamal, now 53 and known as "Pops" to other inmates at the state prison in southwestern Pennsylvania where he remains on death row, has long been a fiercely controversial symbol in the debate about capital punishment in the United States.
From death row, he has written books and recorded speeches for college students and radio commentaries, winning support from entertainment figures, academics, and death-penalty opponents in many parts of the world. Yesterday's Third Circuit panel ruling, for example, was big news in France, where a Paris suburb named a street after Abu-Jamal in 2006.
From Faulkner's widow, Maureen, the ruling brought a mixed reaction.
While calling it "somewhat of a victory" that the conviction was upheld, she said she was disheartened by the prospect of a new sentencing hearing.
"It's been such a long time," said Faulkner, who has remained active in speaking on behalf of her late husband and recently cowrote a book, Murdered by Mumia: A Life Sentence of Loss, Pain and Injustice, about the case.
The ruling, meanwhile, was criticized by supporters of Abu-Jamal, who had been hoping for a new trial, even as District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham expressed satisfaction at a news conference that Abu-Jamal's murder conviction remained intact. "He is nothing short of an assassin," Abraham said of Abu-Jamal, deriding him as a "loser" and a "stone-cold murderer."
Abraham also downplayed Abu-Jamal's fame, saying that a mere "11 people showed up" when the street was named for him in the Paris suburb of St.-Denis. And she said it wasn't much of a street – more like an alley.
Abu-Jamal's lawyer, Robert R. Bryan of San Francisco, said he was grateful that the Third Circuit panel did not reinstate Abu-Jamal's death sentence, as prosecutors had wanted. But he said he was deeply disappointed that the court did not order a hearing on Abu-Jamal's contention that blacks were unfairly excluded from his jury in violation of a Supreme Court ruling in Batson v. Kentucky.
"I am not happy that two of the three judges turned a deaf ear to the racism that permeated this case," said Bryan, who argued before the Third Circuit panel that Abu-Jamal deserved a new trial in the face of that racism.
Abraham, when asked whether she would allow Abu-Jamal to be sentenced to life in prison, gave a short, clear-cut response: "No." But she said she did not want to speculate about how the case might ultimately be resolved. "We're going to do whatever we have to do," Abraham said. "We don't have to decide that now."
She said that, as in all such cases, she would consider the wishes of the widow and other relatives of the victim. But in the end, she said, the decision of how to proceed is up to her. "That's why I am an elected official," she said.
Unless the panel's ruling is overturned - or Abraham or her successor decide to allow a life sentence - the most likely scenario would be a new sentencing hearing, which would unfold in Common Pleas Court with much of the same evidence that came out during Abu-Jamal's 1982 trial. Under the court's decision, the hearing must be held or a life sentence ordered within six months. Appeals, however, would delay the process.
Abraham said that some cases cry out for a death sentence - such as the killing of a police officer.
The panel's decision upheld in all respects the 2001 decision of U.S. District Judge William H. Yohn Jr., who had thrown out the death sentence after concluding that the jury might have been confused by the judge's instructions and wording on the verdict form filled out when the jury decided on death.
Yohn ruled that the jury might have mistakenly believed it had to agree unanimously on any "mitigating" circumstances - factors that might have persuaded jurors to decide on a life sentence, instead of death.
The three Third Circuit judges agreed.
"The jury instructions and the verdict form created a reasonable likelihood that the jury believed it was precluded from finding a mitigating circumstance that had not been unanimously agreed upon,"wrote Chief Judge Anthony J. Scirica in the 77-page majority opinion, joined by Judge Robert E. Cowen and Thomas L. Ambro.
But Ambro said he would have gone further than his colleagues and granted a hearing on Abu-Jamal's claim of racial discrimination in jury selection.
In a strong dissent on that issue, Ambro said he believed that Abu-Jamal had met the threshold test of whether discrimination had occurred and that further hearings were warranted.
"This inference requires courts to look further," Ambro wrote. "To move past the prima facie case is not to throw open the jailhouse doors and overturn Abu-Jamal's conviction."
Ambro said it was the duty of courts, under the holding of the Batson case, to be vigilant for signs of racial discrimination. "No matter how guilty one may be, he or she is entitled to a fair and impartial trial by a jury of his or her peers," he wrote in his own 41-page opinion.
The high court said in the Batson case that if even one juror were excluded because of race, that would violate the Constitution.
A Philadelphia jury of 10 whites and two blacks convicted Abu-Jamal of killing Faulkner, who was shot to death near 13th and Locust Streets in the early morning of Dec. 9, 1981.
Prosecutors contend that Faulkner had just pulled over Abu-Jamal's brother, William Cook, for a vehicle stop, and that Abu-Jamal ran toward them and shot Faulkner. Abu-Jamal was shot during the confrontation and was found slumped on a curb with a gunshot wound.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the conviction and sentence in 1989 and also rejected other appeals by Abu-Jamal.
Neither Abu-Jamal nor his brother has ever testified about what happened. In an affidavit filed in 2001, Abu-Jamal said he did not shoot Faulkner.
He said he was moonlighting as a cabdriver that night and filling out paperwork when he heard gunshots and saw his brother staggering in the street. He ran toward him, Abu-Jamal said in the affidavit, and was then shot by a uniformed officer.
Abu-Jamal, then 27, was a radio reporter, a onetime Black Panther, and a vocal supporter of the radical group MOVE, whose dreadlock hairstyle he adopted. Philadelphia Magazine named him one of its "People to Watch in '81."
Now, he is one of 228 prisoners on death row in Pennsylvania, which has the fourth-largest death row in the nation, behind California, Texas and Florida.
Abu-Jamal will remain on death row in spite of the Third Circuit panel's ruling, under prison policy, because he still is at risk of execution if a new jury were to order it.
Three prisoners have been executed since the state reinstated capital punishment in 1978, and all three essentially asked to be executed after giving up their appeals. The last to be put to death, in 1999, was Gary Heidnik, the "House of Horrors" killer convicted of torturing and murdering two women in the basement of his North Philadelphia home.
Read the text of the federal appeals court decision and find more coverage at http://go.philly.com/mumia
Contact staff writer Emilie Lounsberry at 215-854-4828 or
elounsberry@phillynews.com.
Inquirer staff writers Vernon Clark and Jennifer Lin contributed to this article.
=http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/news/id.6643/title.court-says-mumia-abu-
jamal-needs-new-hearing
Court Says Mumia Abu-Jamal Needs New Hearing March 28th, 2008 | Author: Anthony Springer Jr
Mumia Abu-Jamal's case took another twist this week after a federal appeals court ruled that the imprisoned author/activist cannot be executed without a new penalty hearing.
The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Abu-Jamal's 1982 conviction in the murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, but affirmed a lower court's previous ruling that Abu-Jamal cannot be executed without a new hearing due to faulty jury instructions during his original sentencing.
At this point, prosecutors in the case can grant a new penalty hearing. If they choose not to, Abu-Jamal will be re-sentenced to life in prison.
Abu-Jamal also appealed his conviction on the grounds of racism by the judge and misconduct by the police and prosecution.
He was convicted by a majority white jury.
The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal has inspired thousands of people in the United States and other countries to fight not only for Abu-Jamal,but other causes including the abolition of the death penalty and more rights for incarcerated people.
On the other side of the case, Daniel Faulkner's widow, Maureen,
released "Murdered by Mumia: A Life Sentence of Loss, Pain and Injustice" in December. The book is co-authored by talk radio host Michael Smerconish.
Regardless of the outcome of the forthcoming penalty hearing, Abu-Jamal's lawyer, Robert R. Bryan doesn't expect either side to wavier in their support.
"ŠIf anything it will heat up the outcry from people in the public," he said in March. "I think the support from people not only [in the United States ], but all across Europe will escalate."
=http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/03/30/18489543.php
Ruling Against Mumia Shows: No Justice in the Capitalist Courts
by Internationalist Group ( internationalistgroup [at] msn.com )
Sunday Mar 30th, 2008 7:57 PM
On March 27, the U.S. appeals court in Philadelphia reaffirmed the frame-up conviction of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther Party spokesman and world-renowned radical journalist who has been locked up on Pennsylvania's death row for more than a quarter century. After previously rejecting Mumia's request to present evidence of his innocence, as well as a host of issues showing that he was railroaded by a racist court, the Court turned down Mumia's request for a new trial. It upheld the 2001 ruling by a federal district judge that ordered a new hearing on the sentence, but limited the "choice" to the living hell of life imprisonment without parole ... or execution. Mumia is innocent. He was declared guilty
and sentenced to die because of his revolutionary politics and because for years he had been a thorn in the side of the racist rulers of the misnamed "city of brotherly love." Around the world,millions have come out in defense of Jamal. This latest ruling, like all those that preceded it, shows that the exploited and oppressed must have no faith in the racist injustice system. We call on the workers movement to mobilize its power to free Mumia now!
March 2008
Federal Court Reaffirms Frame-Up Conviction, Orders Life Behind Bars or Racist Legal Lynching
Ruling Against Mumia Shows:
No Justice in the Capitalist Courts
Mobilize the Working Class to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!
Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!
Internationalist Group contingent in March 28 Harlem protest the day after federal court decision against him.
Internationalist photo
On March 27, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia reaffirmed the frame-up conviction of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther Party spokesman and world-renowned radical journalist who has been locked up on Pennsylvania's death row for more than a quarter century. After previously rejecting Mumia's request to present evidence of his innocence, as well as a host of issues showing that he was railroaded by a racist court, the Court turned down Mumia's request for a new trial. It upheld the 2001 ruling by a federal district judge that ordered a new hearing on the sentence, but limited the "choice" to the living hell of life imprisonment without parole ... or execution.
This ruling demonstrates once again that there is no justice in the capitalist courts. Convicted in the 1981 shooting of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, Mumia Abu-Jamal is innocent. He did not commit the crime of which he was accused. He was declared guilty and sentenced to die because of his revolutionary politics and because for years he had been a thorn in the side of the racist rulers of the misnamed "city of brotherly love." Around the world, millions have come out in defense of Jamal. His eloquent writings exposing the crimes of imperialism have circled the globe, translated into numerous languages. Mumia is the symbol of the international struggle against the racist death penalty, inherited from the system of chattel slavery on which American capitalism was built.
This latest ruling, like all those that preceded it, shows that the exploited and oppressed must have no faith in the racist injustice system. We call on the workers movement to mobilize its power to free Mumia now!
Mumia's original 1982 trial and 1995 appeal hearing were such grotesque racist shams that many liberals and reformists saw them as aberrations, placing their hopes in a new trial. In both cases, the proceedings were presided over by the notorious "hanging judge" Albert Sabo, a lifetime member of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), who sentenced more defendants to death than any other sitting judge in the United States. Sabo was a certifiable racist who frequently made clear his disdain toward the defense and vowed in the hearing of a court employee that he would "help fry the n----r." He refused to admit evidence of state manipulation of eyewitnesses into changing their testimony to implicate Jamal, suppressed evidence of the shooter fleeing the scene, allowed the use of a fabricated "confession" cooked up months later by the prosecution, and ordered the jailing of defense attorney Rachel Wolkenstein for objecting tohis blatantly prejudicial rulings.
Yet it is not just one racist judge. The judicial system has repeatedly upheld the rigged trial and conviction of Jamal. State and federal courts have refused to admit the testimony of the man, Arnold Beverly, who confessed to carrying out the murder for which Mumia was convicted. The persecution of this champion of the oppressed is the result of a tight-knit ruling class determined to uphold the cops who enforce their "law and order." This is illustrated by the fact that the Philly district attorney who oversaw the prosecution of Jamal, Ed Rendell, is now governor of Pennsylvania (and has vowed to quickly sign a death warrant if the sentence is reinstated), while his wife sits on the federal court hearing Mumia's appeal.
Although Jamal's persecution began under police chief and later Republican mayor Frank Rizzo, Rendell is a leading Democrat.
Democratic president Bill Clinton authored the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which has hamstrung appeals by Mumia and others challenging the barbaric system of legal lynching. And while Hillary Clinton is a big FOP backer, her Democratic rival Barack Obama supports "the ultimate punishment" in particularly "heinous" cases, and sure as hell isn't going to come out for Mumia, a former Black Panther who the cops are set on executing.
Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham applauded yesterday's
federal court decision. While the local bourgeois press highlighted
"Life term or new penalty hearing ordered for Mumia Abu-
Jamal" (Philadelphia Inquirer, 28 March), Pam Africa of the MOVE
organization rightly denounced the ruling as "a divisive, deceptive
plot to fool people into thinking they had done something fair by
Mumia." An Inquirer article posted yesterday afternoon quoted Jeff
Mackler of the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal saying "Today's
decision is a travesty of justice," adding: "He said he had been
hoping that the Third Circuit would order an entirely new trial based
on the claim about racial discrimination in jury selection." A vain
hope indeed.
In fact, last year Mackler authored an article, "New Trial and
Freedom for Mumia" (Socialist Action, June 2007), displaying the
dangerous delusions purveyed by bourgeois liberals and reformist
would-be socialists:
"It is difficult to imagine that the systematic race and class bias
that permeate America's criminal 'justice' system could be set aside
and that the nation's most famed and innocent death row inmate and
political prisoner of 25 years, Mumia Abu-Jamal, could win a new
trial and freedom.
"But that is precisely what appeared to be unfolding on May 17 in the
packed Ceremonial Courtroom of the Federal Courthouse in
Philadelphia...."
After assuring readers that the judges on the panel "had carefully
read the voluminous briefs submitted by both sides and thoroughly
researched the history of the constitutional issues involved," the
Socialist Action article opined:
"Indeed, a number of the Third Circuit's previous decisions on
several critical issues that directly pertain to Mumia's most telling
arguments have marked this court as among the few remaining 'liberal'
juridical institutions in the country."
The evidence of racist jury rigging in the Philadelphia courts is
extremely powerful, including a "training video" for new prosecutors
on how to exclude blacks jurors. Yet the Third Circuit judicial panel
dismissed the whole issue because Mumia's lawyer failed to raise it
at the 1982 trial and because there was no evidence of how many
blacks were in the jury pool, even though in previous cases the same
court had held that there were no such requirements.
The fact that Jamal's conviction was upheld by this "liberal" court
should dispel the idea that somehow the capitalist judicial system,
and particularly the federal courts, can produce justice for the
oppressed. This illusion permeated the liberal civil rights movement
of the 1960s, leading it to look to the Democratic Kennedy and
Johnson administrations for salvation. Yet it was under LBJ that the
full-scale persecution of the Black Panthers began, carried out by
his attorney general, Ramsey Clark, now a darling of the reformist
left. Revolutionary Marxists educated in the school of Lenin and
Trotsky, in contrast, understand that the bourgeois state in all of
its facets is a machine for enforcing the rule of capital over
oppressed racial minorities, immigrants, poor and working people.
In fact, the railroading of Mumia Abu-Jamal is one more in a long
string of frame-up trials including those of San Francisco labor
leaders Tom Mooney and Warren Billings and hundreds of revolutionary
syndicalists of the IWW in World War I; of anarchists Sacco and
Vanzetti in the 1920s "red scare"; of the nine Scottsboro youths in
Alabama who symbolized Jim Crow "justice"; of the Trotskyist leaders
and Minneapolis Teamsters during World War II; of Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg during the McCarthyite witchhunting at the height of the
anti-Soviet Cold War. And it is part of the campaign of state murder
against black radicals symbolized by the 38 Panthers gunned down by
the police and hundreds who were jailed under the FBI's notorious
COINTELPRO program of disruption and provocation.
The Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth
International, of which the IG is the U.S. section, have fought since
our inception to dispel illusions in the capitalist courts and
instead mobilize the power of the workers movement to free Mumia Abu-
Jamal. We seek to organize a revolutionary workers party against both
capitalist parties of racist legal lynching and imperialist war. The
LFI's Brazilian section, the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil,
sparked the first work stoppage for Jamal's freedom, called
throughout the state of Rio de Janeiro on 23 April 1999, which was
carried out in conjunction with a shutdown of West Coast U.S. ports
the next day by the powerful International Longshore and Warehouse
Union (ILWU). Currently, the ILWU has announced that it will stop
work at all 27 West Coast ports on May 1 to protest the war in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
Mass mobilization, including by several unions, was key in stopping
the scheduled execution of Jamal in 1995. Today Mumia's life is again
in danger. We urge people to attend protests around the world today,
March 28, and a march in Philadelphia scheduled for April 19. It is
urgent that all defenders of democratic rights, opponents of the
racist death penalty and fighters for black freedom come out now in
strength to denounce this new court attack and demand Freedom Now for
Mumia Abu-Jamal! ?
=http://atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/3643/32/
Circuit Court Rejects Abu-Jamal Appeal: The "Mumia Exception"
Written by Dave Lindorff
by Dave Lindorff
After spending almost a year's time deliberating following a brief
hearing last May 17, a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit Court
of Appeals in Philadelphia has shot down all three claims by death
row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal challenging his conviction for the 1981
murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner.
At the same time, the appeals court upheld a 2001 decision by Federal
District Judge William Yohn that had overturned former Black Panther
and Philadelphia journalist Abu-Jamal's death sentence. The panel
agreed with the lower court judge that the form used by the trial
jury in 1982 to establish whether jurors felt there were any
mitigating circumstances was flawed, and could have left panelists
mistakenly believing that before they could consider any such
mitigating factors in their deliberations, they would all have to
agree such a factor existed. In fact, by law if even one juror
believes that there is a mitigating factor, that factor can be
considered by jurors in deciding on death or life in prison.
The court was unanimous in rejecting Abu-Jamal's claim that the trial
judge, Albert Sabo, had been prejudiced against him and in favor of
the prosecution when he presided over a Post-Conviction Relief Act
hearing in 1995-6, although it reached this conclusion by sleight-of-
hand. Rather than investigate Judge Sabo's bias, which was so evident
it was editorialized about at the time by Philadelphia's newspapers,
the judges argued that they could only use a habeas appeal to examine
bias at trial, not at other hearings.
The Third Circuit panel was also unanimous in rejecting Abu-Jamal's
claim that Prosecutor Joseph McGill had improperly diminished the
jury's sense of responsibility during the conviction phase of the
trial by telling jurors that their decision would not be final as
there would be "appeal after appeal." The appellate judges didn't say
that McGill's statement was proper, or even that it might not have
impacted jurors' decision regarding guilt, but rather agreed that by
court precedent they could only use evidence of such prosecutorial
misconduct to overturn death sentences, not convictions. (Arguably,
in the unlikely event that the Philadelphia DA were successful in
getting the US Supreme Court to reverse the Third Circuit and
reimpose Abu-Jamal's death penalty, he could go back and appeal the
sentence based upon this statement to the jury by McGill.)
But on Abu-Jamal's third claim-that the prosecution had improperly
violated his Constitutional right to a fair trial by his peers by
barring at least 10 qualified African-American potential jurors from
serving on his jury through the use of what are called "peremptory
challenges"-there was a dissent, making the vote 2-1.
Judge Thomas Ambro--a Clinton appointee to the bench-chastised his
two colleagues, Chief Judge Anthony Scirica and Judge Robert Cowan--
both Reagan appointees--pointing out that they were applying a
different (and unattainable) standard of proof to Abu-Jamal than they
had been using for other cases brought before them.
In rejecting Abu-Jamal's claim of racial bias in jury selection-
something known as a Batson violation, after the Supreme Court's 1986
decision in Batson v Kentucky-the court majority wrote that Abu-Jamal
had not made a timely protest over prosecutor McGill's rejection of
10 black jurors without cause (McGill used 15 of his 20 available
peremptory challenges to remove at least 10 qualified black and 5
qualified white jurors). The two judges in the majority also proposed
that because Abu-Jamal had not provided the court with the racial
makeup of the jury pool, it was impossible to know whether perhaps
two-thirds of that pool might have been black, giving an "innocent
explanation" to McGill's 66.7% black rejection rate. (Local attorneys
scoff at such a notion, saying they've never seen a jury pool so
skewed racially in this city that is 44 percent black. In fact, the
court struggles to try and find ways of getting more blacks and other
minorities in its jury pools, because they are typically
underrepresented.)
Judge Ambro demolished this rationale, saying that the US Supreme
Court had established that "excluding even a single person from a
jury because of race violated the Equal Protection Clause of our
Constitution." Significantly, the nation's High Court just reaffirmed
and strengthened that position March 19 with a powerful 7-2 ruling in
a Louisiana death penalty case (Snyder v. Louisiana).
Judge Ambro then accused his robed colleagues of having a double
standard, saying "Our Court has previously reached the merits of
Batson claims on habeas review in cases where the petitioner did not
make a timely objection during jury selection-signaling that our
Circuit does not have a federal contemporaneous objection rule-and I
see no reason why we should not afford Abu-Jamal the courtesy of our
precedents." He added, "Why we pick this case to depart from that
reasoning I do not know."
Going further, Judge Ambro writes, "We have repeatedly said that a
defendant can make out a prima facie case for jury-selection
discrimination by showing that the prosecution struck a single juror
because of raceŠIn fact, in United States v. Clemons, we explained
that `striking a single black juror could constitute a prima facie
case even when blacks ultimately sit on the panel and even when valid
reasons exist for striking other blacks.'...Yet the majority focuses
on the absence of information about the racial composition and total
number of the venire, claiming that this statistical information-from
which one can compute the exclusion rate-is necessary to assess
whether an inference of discrimination can be discerned in Abu-
Jamal's case. Such a focus is contrary to the nondiscrimination
principle underpinning Batson, and it conflicts with our Court's
precedents, in which we have held that there is no "magic number or
percentage [necessary] to trigger a Batson inquiry,"
One thing Judge Ambro didn't mention in his 41-page dissent (which
begins at page 78 or the 118-page decision) was the evidence
presented by Abu-Jamal to the court of a clear history of deliberate
race-based purging of juries by the Philadelphia DA's office, and by
prosecutor McGill in particular. That evidence, developed by academic
researchers and by attorneys at the Federal Defenders' Office in
Philadelphia, documents that between 1977 and 1986, while current
Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell was Philadelphia's District Attorney,
local prosecutors like McGill acting under his direction used
peremptory challenges to remove qualified blacks from juries in death
penalty cases 58 percent of the time, compared to 22 percent of the
time for qualified whites. During the same period of time, prosecutor
McGill himself struck qualified black jurors 74 percent of the time
in death penalty cases he tried, compared to 25 percent of qualified
white jurors.
Interestingly, one of the Third Circuit precedents referred to by
Judge Ambro was a 2005 case heard by Judge Samuel Alito (who was
subsequently elevated to the Supreme Court). In that case, Brinson v
Vaughn, Alito wrote a decision which overturned the appellant's death
penalty conviction, establishing that "...a prosecutor may violate
Batson even if the prosecutor passes up the opportunity to strike
some African Americans jurors." Alito further stated in that decision
that "a prosecutor's decision to refrain from discriminating against
some African Americans does not cure discrimination against
others." (Significantly, the High Court's latest Snyder decision
opinion was also penned by Justice Alito, who, while a supporter of
capital punishment, shows himself to be a passionate opponent of
racism in jury selection.)
What appears to be happening here, and what obviously upset Judge
Ambro, is that the other two judges, Scirica and Cowan, are
demonstrating another disturbing example of what my colleague,
Philadelphia journalist Linn Washington, has dubbed the "Mumia
Exception."
Washington has noted that on several occasions during Abu-Jamal's
epic 26-year battle to survive Pennsylvania's death row machine, the
state's courts have altered the rules to keep him locked up and on
course for execution. Pennsylvania's top court in 1986 overturned a
death sentence where McGill, the same prosecutor in Abu-Jamal's case,
had made the same closing statement to jurors at the conclusion of a
murder trial presided over by Judge Sabo, the same trial judge who
presided in Abu-Jamal's case. The court, declaring that the
prosecutor's language had "minimize[ed] the jury's sense of
responsibility for a verdict of death," had ordered a new trial that
time. Three years later in 1989, despite this precedent and presented
with an identical situation involving the same cast of characters,
the same court reversed itself, though, upholding Abu-Jamal's
conviction. Eleven years later, Pennsylvania's highest court reversed
track again, barring such language by prosecutors "in all future
trials," but not making their decision retroactive to include Abu-Jamal.
Another example of this judicial "special handling" where Abu-Jamal's
case is concerned, involves the right of allocution - the right of
the convicted to make a statement without challenge before
sentencing. One month before initially upholding Abu-Jamal's
conviction in March 1989, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a
ruling declaring the right of allocution to be of "ancient origin"
and saying that any failure to permit a defendant to plead for mercy
demanded reversal of sentence. Abu-Jamal's appeal claimed Judge Sabo,
by allowing the prosecutor to question Abu-Jamal on the stand after
the convicted defendant had made just such a statement to jurors,
violated his allocution right during the '82 trial. The state's high
court, however - for the first time in its history - ruled that the
"right of allocution does not exist in the penalty phase of capital
murder prosecution."
In yet a third example, Common Pleas Judge Pat Dembe, hearing a
request by Abu-Jamal for a new Post-Conviction Relief Act Hearing on
his case after testimony from people who had overheard his trial and
PCRA judge vow to "fry the nigger" at the close of his trial's
opening day, asserted that he had no case because "...since this was
a jury trial, as long as the presiding judge's rulings were legally
correct, claims as to what might have motivated or animated those
rulings are not relevant."
This flip-flopping on allocution, on acceptable language for
prosecutors, on the importance of impartiality on the part of judges,
and on other legal precedents, all led Amnesty International to
conclude in its 2001 report on Abu-Jamal's case that the state's
highest court improperly invents new standards of procedure "to apply
it to one case only: that of Mumia Abu-Jamal."
Justice, that is to say, has not always been blind in this case of a
black, left-wing person killing a white policeman. A "Mumia
Exception" had been established.
And now this stain on Pennsylvania jurisprudence appears to have
migrated to the federal court system, at the Third Circuit.
Says Washington, "This decision once again shows that in the Abu-
Jamal case, evidence is not important. As with the Pennsylvania
courts, this federal court ignored its own precedents in reaching a
result that is contrary to the facts and to the law. The reason for
this is what Amnesty International pointed out in their 2001 report:
The Abu-Jamal case is hopelessly polluted by politics, which
precludes any justice in this case."
Robert Bryan, Abu-Jamal's lead attorney, said the Third Circuit
Court's upholding of the death penalty reversal was a "major
victory," but he said, "The fact that the court majority turned a
blind eye to the racially discriminatory practices of the DA's office
is outrageous."
Current Philadelphia District Attorney Lynn Abraham continued that
outrageous behavior, and gave a demonstration of the toxic politics
that infects the justice system where this case is concerned, at a
press conference following the announcement of the court's decision,
where she referred to Abu-Jamal repeatedly as an "assassin." In fact,
at no point during the trial was there ever any claim by the
prosecution, or any witness testimony, to even remotely suggest that
Abu-Jamal had "targeted" Faulkner for death. Rather, the prosecution
claimed that he had coincidentally been parked in a taxi he was
driving, across the street from where his brother William had been
stopped on a traffic violation by Faulkner, and had come across the
street when his brother and the officer became involved in an
altercation. To wrongly label the ensuing double shooting of Faulkner
and Abu-Jamal an "assassination" as Abraham did, implying a political
"hit" on Faulkner, was clearly aimed at inflaming public sentiment
against Abu-Jamal. It was the same thing prosecutor McGill had
attempted to do when, after the verdict, during his summation to the
jury in the penalty phase of the trial back in '82, he brought out an
old news clipping of an interview with a 15-year-old Abu-Jamal in
which the defendant had quoted Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Tse-
tung as saying "power flows from the barrel of a gun." (The context
of that full article made it clear the young Abu-Jamal was actually
referring in that quote to the power of police, who had just
"assassinated" Panther leader Fred Hampton in his bed in a raid on a
house in Chicago.)
With all three of Abu-Jamal's habeas claims for an overturning of his
conviction rejected, his case now moves to the US Supreme Court, with
a possible stop along the way for a hearing by the full Third Circuit
bench. Abu-Jamal's attorney Bryan says he plans to file a request for
such an en banc reconsideration of the ruling by the full 17-member
Third Circuit within the next two weeks. Neither the full Third
Circuit, nor the Supreme Court, are obligated to hear the case, which
would make the current Third Circuit decision the final word on his
conviction.
Bryan told ThisCantBeHappening, "Judge Ambro's dissent in the Batson
decision was very powerful, and we will certainly be using it in our
arguments to the full Third Circuit and to the Supreme Court."
As for the overturned death penalty ruling, which the DA's office
will certainly also appeal to the High Court, should it be sustained,
there are two options. The DA could decide to leave things at that-
something McGill, interviewed shortly after Judge Yohn's initial
ruling, said was being considered-in which case Abu-Jamal would face
life in prison with no possibility of parole. (He would not, however,
have to spend any more time in the near solitary confinement torture
of Pennsylvania's maximum-security death row, but would be moved to a
regular prison.) Alternatively, the DA could decide to go to a
Philadelphia court and impanel a new jury to conduct just a
sentencing hearing, in hopes of winning a new death penalty. Such a
limited trial would not address guilt or innocence--only punishment.
Given fairer rules regarding jury selection, and the larger minority population in today's Philadelphia, and given that Abu-Jamal has better legal representation, it is hard to imagine the DA succeeding in convincing 12 fairly chosen Philadelphia jurors to sentence him to death for a crime for which he has already served 26 hard years' time. Moreover, because a defendant is entitled to subpoena witnesses in his defense, the DA would run the risk that Abu-Jamal could use such a trial to slip in new evidence of innocence, opening the door to further appeals of his underlying conviction. For these reasons,an effort to win a new death sentence seems unlikely.
The legal stymieing of Abu-Jamal's efforts to win a new trial comesat a time of growing questions regarding his guilt, or at least the veracity of the witnesses and the evidence used to convict him on a first-degree murder charge.
Last year, photos were discovered that had been taken by Pedro Polakoff, a freelance news photographer, of the crime scene on the south side of Locust Street at 13th Street in Philadelphia's Center City only minutes after police had arrived and after the wounded Abu-Jamal and the clinically dead Faulkner had been taken off to Jefferson Hospital. These photos show police tampering with evidence, including the both Abu-Jamal's and Faulkner's guns as well as the officer's police hat. Photos of the bloody spot on the sidewalk where Faulkner lay as he was shot by a bullet to the face at close range
show no sign of craters where three other shots Abu-Jamal is alleged to have fired from a position astride the officer and that missed should have left their marks in the concrete (this proved true even when a photo enhancement expert at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory subjected them to detailed enhancement!) . This lack of impact marks raises questions about the testimony of two alleged eyewitnesses to the shooting since the four high-velocity bullets Abu-Jamal was purported to have fired down at Faulkner simply could not have been fired without leaving marks--unless perhaps there is a "Mumia Exception" to the laws of physics too, and not just in law). Those same photos also show no taxicab parked behind Faulkner's parked squad car in the place one of those witnesses, Robert Chobert, claimed he had been stopped. The missing cab raises questions about the veracity of Chobert's claim to have witnessed Faulkner's murder.
Other witnesses are still coming forward since the trial, who also challenge the prosecution's story, but without a new trial, it is not
clear that their evidence will ever be heard.
Abu-Jamal's attorney says Abu-Jamal told him this morning that he was "disappointed" in the result, but that he "hopes the reversal of the
death penalty will help others on death row, and says, `The struggle
continues!'"
---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: MUMIA: news and comment
From: "calendrier militant"
Date: Wed, April 2, 2008 3:29 pm
To: Le Réseau
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