by Dave Lindorff
Published: May 23, 2007
When the name Mumia Abu-Jamal comes up in local conversation, the debate immediately begins over whether he is guilty of a murder that has kept him on Pennsylvania's death row for 25 years. Rarely does it address the underlying question of whether he had a fair trial or appeal process.
Now, three 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges are mulling key elements that pertain to that very crucial question. They are also considering whether to uphold a 2001 decision by Federal District Judge William Yohn that overturned Abu-Jamal's death sentence for the Dec. 9, 1981, murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.
The key claim argued before the three-judge panel during a two-and-a-half-hour hearing last Thursday (May 17) in the packed Ceremonial Courtroom of the federal courthouse was whether the prosecutor at the 1982 trial, Joseph McGill, improperly removed potential qualified jurors because of race.
In 1995, the District Attorney's office admitted that McGill used 10 of 15 peremptory challenges requests to strike jurors from consideration, for which no reason has to be given to remove black jurors who otherwise met the requirements to be on the panel, including a willingness to vote for death. This means that, of 14 possible qualified African-American jurors, McGill eliminated 10. That compares to only five white jurors that he peremptorily dismissed out of a possible 25. And it left Abu-Jamal's jury with nine whites and three blacks in a city that was 44 percent black (the gap widened when a black juror was removed by the judge and replaced by a white alternate, with the enthusiastic endorsement of McGill).
On its face, that would seem to be prima facie evidence of racial discrimination that would normally warrant a hearing, but there is more: Over the course of six murder trials that he tried, McGill used his peremptory challenges to remove 74 percent of qualified black jurors, compared to only 25 percent of white jurors. Moreover, McGill's methods were part of a pattern prevailing during the two terms of McGill's boss, then D.A. Ed Rendell. Under Rendell, prosecutors barred 58 percent of all blacks via peremptory challenges, compared to just 22 percent of whites.
Abu-Jamal's lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, cited these statistics and noted that during jury questioning, McGill asked different questions of blacks than whites, and used different standards in deciding whom to remove.
Rather than contest the statistics and other evidence of racial discrimination in jury selection, Hugh Burns the head of the DA's appeals unit, he argued the state's case against Abu-Jamal claimed that Abu-Jamal had no right to raise the issue in federal court. Burns alleged that Abu-Jamal had missed his chance to do so in 1995, during his Post-Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) hearing, or subsequent appeal to the state supreme court.
The problem with the DA's argument? Much evidence of race-based jury selection did not come to light until 1998, a year after Abu-Jamal's final appeal had been decided. Since Abu-Jamal couldn't have had that evidence until his state appeal was over, it was first presented in his federal habeas appeal in 1999.
A second line of appeal by Abu-Jamal, briefly discussed at last week's hearing, was a statement made by McGill during his summation on the last day of the trial; he told jurors that if they had doubts about the defendant's guilt, they needn't worry, because, "If you find the defendant guilty of course there would be appeal after appeal and perhaps there could be a reversal of the case, or whatever, so that may not be final." (Juries are supposed to reach a guilty verdict only if the case was proven "beyond a reasonable doubt.") This was no slip by McGill, who used identical language in another case, which is why the state Supreme Court, in 1986, overturned that defendant's death sentence.
Now, Abu-Jamal is asking the appeals court to overturn his conviction on the same grounds. He seemed to have won some support from at least one judge, Robert Cowen.
When prosecutor Burns argued that McGill's statement could justify only overturning a sentence, not conviction, Cowen asked, "But isn't what the prosecutor said a denial of [the defendant's] right to a fair trial?"
There were many problems with Abu-Jamal's trial, his lawyers and supporters maintain. He was provided with almost no funds for ballistics or forensic experts. Records of interrogations show that prosecution witnesses were pressured by police over the course of six months to alter their testimony to comport with the prosecution's crime scenario. For example, white taxi driver Robert Chobert, who originally told police the shooter had fled the scene, later graphically described seeing Abu-Jamal do the shooting, execution-style. Chobert was uniquely vulnerable to pressure from prosecutors he had been driving on a license that had been suspended for a DWI conviction, and was also on five-years' probation for felony arson in the fire-bombing of an elementary school for money. Neither this information nor the fact that he had asked the DA to help him "fix" his license was allowed to go to the jury.
The point is that when people develop opinions about this controversial case, particularly in Philadelphia, they tend to base them on the fact of Abu-Jamal's conviction, and then, working on the assumption that the jury accepted the facts as presented at trial to be true, go on to proclaim him guilty of Faulkner's murder.
What if the conviction itself, however, was the result of a pre-selection of jurors inclined to believe the prosecutor, think Judge Albert Sabo was fair and believe police officers and prosecution witnesses? And if, moreover, those jurors were allowed to be assured by the prosecutor that the standard for conviction needn't be "proof beyond a reasonable doubt," then what certainty is there about any of the "facts" presented at the trial, or about the verdict?
This is why the appeal now being considered by the three judges of the 3rd Circuit Chief Judge Anthony Scirica, Judge Cowen and Judge Thomas Ambro is critical. If justice and the hallowed constitutional right to a fair trial are to have any real meaning in the United States, it is essential that juries be chosen in a manner that is fair, not stacked, and it is essential that if the resulting jury convicts especially in a capital case it be on the basis of "proof beyond a reasonable doubt."
As the arguments presented at the 3rd Circuit hearing made clear, there are solid reasons to doubt that either of those things happened in Abu-Jamal's case. Philadelphians need to be prepared to accept that if at least two judges on the appeals court panel reach that conclusion, there will be no way to convincingly argue that Abu-Jamal "did it," until the evidence is presented fairly at a new trial.
(editorial@citypaper.net)
Dave Lindorff, a Philadelphia-area investigative journalist and columnist, is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2004).
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Solidarity for Mumia in 6 U.S. cities, 8 countries
Published May 24, 2007 12:14 AM
In at least five U.S. cities outside Philadelphia and at least eight other countries demonstrations in solidarity with Mumia Abu-Jamal took place aimed at bringing attention to the latest court hearing May 17 and winning the political prisoner a new trial on the way toward freeing him.
In Ankara, Turkey’s capital and Istanbul, its biggest city, activists protested against the United States for imprisoning Mumia unfairly for 25 years. The group included academics, journalists, human rights activists and also correspondents of the daily Evrensel in front of the U.S. Embassy in Ankara and the Central Post office in Istanbul. They delivered a petition to the U.S. Embassy demanding a fair trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The Cleveland Lucasville Five Defense Committee demonstrated during rush hour downtown. Signs called for the freedom of Abu-Jamal and the Lucasville Five, innocent men who face execution in Ohio in relation to the 1993 Lucasville prison uprising, and demanded “Justice for Aaron Steele.” Steele, a 23-year old African-American bus mechanic, died May 8 after being shot multiple times by Cleveland police. Passersby grabbed hundreds of newsletters on Mumia’s case. Other Mumia supporters had held a protest during the morning rush hour.
Members of the San Diego International Action Center and the San Diego Mumia Coalition gathered at a busy community intersection and distributed newsletters and other material on Mumia’s case to workers on their way home from work in the evening commute. Several motorists pulled over to get more details on Mumia’s struggle. Poet Jim Moreno read his Ode to Mumia for the assembled activists.
Organized in only one week, a broad-base of labor and community activists joined to support a May 17 press conference and protest in Milwaukee demanding a new trial for political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Speakers from Africans on the Move, AFSCME Local 82, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), International Action Center-Milwaukee, the National Lawyers Guild, Pan African Revolutionary Socialist Party, Peace Action-Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Green Party spoke in downtown Milwaukee at the Henry Reuss Federal Plaza.
Prior to the May 17 action IAC-Milwaukee organizer Bryan G. Pfeifer was invited to speak about the struggle surrounding Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case on “The Eric Von” show hosted by African American- radio journalist Eric Von and “The Word Warriors Report,” hosted by African- American City Councilman Michael McGee Jr.
In Houston, in the execution capital of the country, where 16 executions are scheduled over the summer, anti-death penalty activists were fired up by the strong turnouts at two demonstrations. Outside the criminal courthouse, notorious for sending Shaka Sankofa, Frances Newton and Joseph Nichols to the execution chambers, demonstrators faced down a phalanx of cops in riot gear, mounted police and undercover cops everywhere that outnumbered the protesters 10-1. “Maybe they thought Mumia was joining us,” said one of the organizers.
In the afternoon from 4-6 p.m. there was another militant demonstration and rally, this one showing unity among young and older and Black, Latin@, Asian and white protesters from the Nation of Islam, the National Black United Front, the New Black Panther Party--whose youth distributed almost 600 of the Mumia newspapers--the Anarchist Black Cross, Code Pink, World Can’t Wait, gay activist/leader Ray Hill, the Revolutionary Communist Party, Zapatista supporters who just returned from meeting Zapatistas with La Otra Campana across the border, the director of S.H.A.P.E. Center where the Movement to Abolish the Death Penalty is based, the leader of the Venezuela Solidarity Committee and others as every group took the microphone.
In San Francisco over 300 people rallied in front of the federal building to demand that Mumia Abu-Jamal be set free, in an action sponsored by the locally-based Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal. A broad coalition of students, union members, community activists and prisoner advocates spoke out, including Rudy Corpuz, Jr. and other members of United Playaz, who linked the fight to free Mumia with the everyday reality of repression and racism in the Black and Brown communities of the Bay Area.
Kiilu Nyasha, a local activist and former Black Panther Party member, delivered a solidarity statement to the crowd on behalf of the San Francisco 8 who are former BPP members and community activists who were arrested this spring and charged with the 1971 killing of a San Francisco policeman. Cristina Gutierrez of Barrio Unido called upon the crowd to unite to “change this system. His freedom is our freedom. His life is our life.” Judy Greenspan spoke at the rally representing Workers World Party. Other speakers demanded a new trial and freedom for Mumia.
Native political prisoner Leonard Peltier’s statement to Mumia was read from the podium in Milwaukee, Houston and other cities.
Cihan Celik in Istanbul, Susan Danann, Bob McCubbin, Bryan G. Pfeifer, Gloria Rubac and Judy Greenspan contributed to this article.
In at least five U.S. cities outside Philadelphia and at least eight other countries demonstrations in solidarity with Mumia Abu-Jamal took place aimed at bringing attention to the latest court hearing May 17 and winning the political prisoner a new trial on the way toward freeing him.
In Ankara, Turkey’s capital and Istanbul, its biggest city, activists protested against the United States for imprisoning Mumia unfairly for 25 years. The group included academics, journalists, human rights activists and also correspondents of the daily Evrensel in front of the U.S. Embassy in Ankara and the Central Post office in Istanbul. They delivered a petition to the U.S. Embassy demanding a fair trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The Cleveland Lucasville Five Defense Committee demonstrated during rush hour downtown. Signs called for the freedom of Abu-Jamal and the Lucasville Five, innocent men who face execution in Ohio in relation to the 1993 Lucasville prison uprising, and demanded “Justice for Aaron Steele.” Steele, a 23-year old African-American bus mechanic, died May 8 after being shot multiple times by Cleveland police. Passersby grabbed hundreds of newsletters on Mumia’s case. Other Mumia supporters had held a protest during the morning rush hour.
Members of the San Diego International Action Center and the San Diego Mumia Coalition gathered at a busy community intersection and distributed newsletters and other material on Mumia’s case to workers on their way home from work in the evening commute. Several motorists pulled over to get more details on Mumia’s struggle. Poet Jim Moreno read his Ode to Mumia for the assembled activists.
Organized in only one week, a broad-base of labor and community activists joined to support a May 17 press conference and protest in Milwaukee demanding a new trial for political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Speakers from Africans on the Move, AFSCME Local 82, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), International Action Center-Milwaukee, the National Lawyers Guild, Pan African Revolutionary Socialist Party, Peace Action-Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Green Party spoke in downtown Milwaukee at the Henry Reuss Federal Plaza.
Prior to the May 17 action IAC-Milwaukee organizer Bryan G. Pfeifer was invited to speak about the struggle surrounding Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case on “The Eric Von” show hosted by African American- radio journalist Eric Von and “The Word Warriors Report,” hosted by African- American City Councilman Michael McGee Jr.
In Houston, in the execution capital of the country, where 16 executions are scheduled over the summer, anti-death penalty activists were fired up by the strong turnouts at two demonstrations. Outside the criminal courthouse, notorious for sending Shaka Sankofa, Frances Newton and Joseph Nichols to the execution chambers, demonstrators faced down a phalanx of cops in riot gear, mounted police and undercover cops everywhere that outnumbered the protesters 10-1. “Maybe they thought Mumia was joining us,” said one of the organizers.
In the afternoon from 4-6 p.m. there was another militant demonstration and rally, this one showing unity among young and older and Black, Latin@, Asian and white protesters from the Nation of Islam, the National Black United Front, the New Black Panther Party--whose youth distributed almost 600 of the Mumia newspapers--the Anarchist Black Cross, Code Pink, World Can’t Wait, gay activist/leader Ray Hill, the Revolutionary Communist Party, Zapatista supporters who just returned from meeting Zapatistas with La Otra Campana across the border, the director of S.H.A.P.E. Center where the Movement to Abolish the Death Penalty is based, the leader of the Venezuela Solidarity Committee and others as every group took the microphone.
In San Francisco over 300 people rallied in front of the federal building to demand that Mumia Abu-Jamal be set free, in an action sponsored by the locally-based Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal. A broad coalition of students, union members, community activists and prisoner advocates spoke out, including Rudy Corpuz, Jr. and other members of United Playaz, who linked the fight to free Mumia with the everyday reality of repression and racism in the Black and Brown communities of the Bay Area.
Kiilu Nyasha, a local activist and former Black Panther Party member, delivered a solidarity statement to the crowd on behalf of the San Francisco 8 who are former BPP members and community activists who were arrested this spring and charged with the 1971 killing of a San Francisco policeman. Cristina Gutierrez of Barrio Unido called upon the crowd to unite to “change this system. His freedom is our freedom. His life is our life.” Judy Greenspan spoke at the rally representing Workers World Party. Other speakers demanded a new trial and freedom for Mumia.
Native political prisoner Leonard Peltier’s statement to Mumia was read from the podium in Milwaukee, Houston and other cities.
Cihan Celik in Istanbul, Susan Danann, Bob McCubbin, Bryan G. Pfeifer, Gloria Rubac and Judy Greenspan contributed to this article.
Immortal Technique Explains The Significance Of Mumia Abu Jamal
May 18th, 2007 | Author: Andreas Hale
(Author's note: I would like to personally thank Immortal Technique for taking the time between recording his upcoming album and constantly being an active part of this and the many struggles around the world to write this piece on Mumia Abu Jamal. Hopefully it will shed some light on a case that is getting little press in the media.)
For the past few years I have been working to support the efforts of the Free Mumia organizations that cover this country. Whether they be in NYC, Philly or on the West Coast. Recently I did a show on the 16th to raise awareness for the March and rally to support the presentation of oral arguments that will bring him either a new trial or the death penalty. This case has been mired, I dare say imbued, in corruption of the Philadelphia Police Dept. and the so called Justice Dept.
After the sheer amount of Racism, witness intimidation and ballistics evidence there is no other explanation for the detaining of Mumia in prison when he is not a danger to his community. But rather Mumia Abu-Jamal has spent his entire life defending that community. I had originally planned to be there on May 17th but due to my arrival back in NYC to return the borrowed car at 6AM and a meeting with some people who just flew into the country about funding an orphanage in Afghanistan, that was made impossible. But this doesn't stop my heart from going out to my brother Mumia Abu-Jamal and my support from being channeled in order to make sure that we do not allow this case to just slip into the memories of Americans forever.
I would like to thank the hundreds of people who showed up (Wednesday) to put forth their support financially and spiritually for our brother. The turnout was incredible and it showed the city of Philadelphia's solidarity with this cause.
As a journalist, his reporting shed light on so many things going on in the ghetto. It is my firm belief that his voice became so apparent as one of dissent to corporate controlled media, that when the opportunity arose it can be seen the way that government manipulated the case. In 1981 when he was charged with the murder of Daniel Faulkner, the evidence was tainted, and sometimes altogether disappeared, he was refused the right to defend himself and his request to have John Africa from the MOVE organization was denied as well.
The Philadelphia Police also punished his supporters brutally to the extent of a full scale military style raid on their home. It became a notorious mark of how police brutality and the governments blind eye to a racist double standard of treatment had not been corrected by mere legislation. Helicopters were even used to drop a sizable bomb of military grade C4 explosives on the home of the MOVE organization killing 11 people including 5 children. During the course of assaulting the house on 6221 Osage Ave. they used Shotguns, Uzi's, browning automatics, tear gas, water hoses, M-16's, M60's and a .50 caliber machine gun to fire almost 10,000 rounds into the house. The explosion of C4 and the gunfire set an entire city block a blaze, which the police allowed to burn, eventually consuming over 50 other homes.
The 1985 bombing of the MOVE home and murder of all these people has never been justified by the Justice Dept. They have scrambled for reasoning and the puppet mayor at the time who himself was a black man (Wilson Goode) made it clear to anyone that studies that power structure of politics that it doesn't matter what the figure head or the representative is, he doesn't dictate the policy of the establishment. Rather, he is there to present an example of what we need to assimilate to in terms of subservience in order to be allowed to remain in power.
Really though, the problems between the MOVE organization attempting to gain the economic control of their own neighborhood and the police locking the city down had started years before. In 1975, because of MOVE's pro black stance on equality, they became a full fledged target and the harassment became a part of life for them. And in 1976 they became the victims of viciously provoked attacks over a disturbing the peace complaint that wouldn't have been able to merit a ticket nowadays.The result was a violent beating given to MOVE supporters on the street who questioned the polices actions and an attack on two women one of whom, Janine Africa,was assaulted by police, thrown to the floor and stomped with her 3 week old baby in her arms resulting the death of her child, Life Africa.
In 1978 a raid on the MOVE headquarters ended violently with 9 people jailed for 30-100 years for the alleged shooting of police officer James Ramp. Sketchy evidence and numerous inconsistencies were abound but led to Judge Edwin Malmed's sentencing the 9 MOVE members regardless. Some have even said that Malmed was the catalyst for the police attack. When asked by Mumia after the trial "Who shot James Ramp?" Judge Edwin Malmed replied that he "didn't have the faintest idea" and stated that since the members of MOVE wanted to be tried together he sentenced them together. Even conservative white republicans in the area listening to the local talk radio show were disturbed by this response which unabashedly divulged the frivolous legality of what the court system was passing off as justice. It is this type of investigative reporting as I stated earlier that brought him to attention of authorities.
The story of Mumia was not a winding confusing series of events that no one has any remembrance of there are several witnesses to these atrocities. Those who insist on Mumia's guilt would do themselves a disservice by not asking of themselves that the reworking of evidence, attacking of witnesses and not granting someone a fair trial is not only a disservice to Mumia but also a disservice to the memory of the other person whose life was taken from them on that day, Daniel Faulkner.
The police have a brotherhood. A brotherhood they are rarely ever seen to betray. A code of silence where they do not testify against other officers. They believe anyone guilty of the murder of an officer should receive the death penalty- no questions asked. But a question comes to mind, if Mumia is not guilty and his coverage of the police raid of the home in 1978 already left him as a person of interest for the government, why was he under FBI surveillance since he was 14 years old? Ask yourself, is he on trial for what he allegedly did the night of December 9th because he is the person who would fit the description of who they would want to be responsible- a strong, articulate, self educated African man who would not deny his culture or watch his family and friends abused by a notoriously racist police dept? Is he the person who fits the description of what you need guilt to be in order to justify the way you see the world.
I ask this to those that would view this with skepticism because that skepticism created by the right wing to counterbalance reason does Daniel Faulkner a disservice as well as Mumia. It leaves his killer at large and destroys what's left of the credibility of the justice system. The harder they squeeze the more reality slips through their fingers and when it is all said and done, what is the legacy of this trial. Justice? Retribution? None of the above, it is simply the fact that for the past 26 years an innocent man has been behind bars and slowly but surely media outlets like our own BET have been pressured to maintain their distance from him. Black and Latino politicians have been pressured to stop bringing him up. The Murder of an officer is a serious crime, and so anyone that would add doubt to the government's version of the events is attacked by the right and abandoned by the left. An interesting transition of events that seems to repeat itself with other things and is why the Democratic party is so weak. But the management of this trial and the way that this government has run its police dept. leaves no question that they wouldn't go through all the trouble if they weren't hiding something.
* Footnote: Mumia was not a violent man, he was not a sadist like officer Geist who carried out the first assault on the MOVE home in 1978, and whose own wife shot him to death after years of merciless abuse. This occurred after the trial over the raid of the MOVE home in 1978 and was kept out of the court because officer Geist's wife was pressured not to speak on it by police.
No one asks to be a Revolutionary Martyr, no one asks to be Nelson Mandela, Mumia, Shaka Sankofa, or Hurricane Carter. Mumia Abu Jamal didn't leave his house that morning thinking "I'm going to spend the next quarter of a century in prison so that I may provide an example to the world of police corruption and injustice done in a land that professes to be the most advanced and civilized nation in the world." But when he left his house that day for work that's exactly what he became and unless you know your rights and unless you arm yourself intellectually and are able to understand the legal system and the changes that are occurring quietly but rapidly in our legal system asking questions can bring you the same fate.
Someone once told me that Pennsylvania was Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and Mississippi between them. I think having lived there and been incarcerated there, while I have not seen Mississippi and therefore cannot draw the comparison. But I will say there that it is a State of the Union in name only and still has pockets of confederate resistance all over the place. It's a state notorious for having a huge amount of hate groups. It is a place that we must take back before we even think of expanding anywhere else on the East.
Mumia represent a lot of things for different people, but to me he represents something very simple, not abandoning your brothers because of public pressure when you believe their cause to be true. When there were no WMD's found in Iraq that didn't stop the right wing. Dick Cheney claimed they were moved and there was a relationship between Al-Quaeda and Iraq. Sean Hannity, the man who is so far right he's approaching the justification for fascism in defense of democracy, claimed they were probably moved to Syria. But this is NOT the mirror image to their extreme dedication to a lie that has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the course of seeking out their self fulfilling prophecy of catastrophe. This is the story of an incident that was covered up on December 9th in 1981 where two people lost their lives. And in the interest of seeking a quick and easy decision against someone whose believe in self determination and struggle made him a likely candidate all other possibilities were stripped from the systems mind. "Black Militants want to kill us," kept being repeated. "Maybe Mumia was jealous of Officer Daniel Faulkner's freedom," because of course freedom is why people carry out world wars and terrorist attacks. Or maybe he was just speaking for the voiceless and his punishment for doing so was to be incarcerated on charges for a crime he didn't commit.
While there are those that will forget him, others will change their stance and claim his guilt to feel like they belong to the majority. There are people who will continue to fight for his release and a new fair trial without the racism, corrupted evidence and moral ambiguity of the government's tactics in 1981 and subsequently after. Which, if you think about it, was only 11 years after America granted Black People the right to vote.
So vote today and everyday with your actions, not for a president, but for Justice that must be done around you, and for the struggle of Mumia who is not forgotten in Harlem NYC or around the world.
Peace & Respect,
Immortal
Technique
(Author's note: I would like to personally thank Immortal Technique for taking the time between recording his upcoming album and constantly being an active part of this and the many struggles around the world to write this piece on Mumia Abu Jamal. Hopefully it will shed some light on a case that is getting little press in the media.)
For the past few years I have been working to support the efforts of the Free Mumia organizations that cover this country. Whether they be in NYC, Philly or on the West Coast. Recently I did a show on the 16th to raise awareness for the March and rally to support the presentation of oral arguments that will bring him either a new trial or the death penalty. This case has been mired, I dare say imbued, in corruption of the Philadelphia Police Dept. and the so called Justice Dept.
After the sheer amount of Racism, witness intimidation and ballistics evidence there is no other explanation for the detaining of Mumia in prison when he is not a danger to his community. But rather Mumia Abu-Jamal has spent his entire life defending that community. I had originally planned to be there on May 17th but due to my arrival back in NYC to return the borrowed car at 6AM and a meeting with some people who just flew into the country about funding an orphanage in Afghanistan, that was made impossible. But this doesn't stop my heart from going out to my brother Mumia Abu-Jamal and my support from being channeled in order to make sure that we do not allow this case to just slip into the memories of Americans forever.
I would like to thank the hundreds of people who showed up (Wednesday) to put forth their support financially and spiritually for our brother. The turnout was incredible and it showed the city of Philadelphia's solidarity with this cause.
As a journalist, his reporting shed light on so many things going on in the ghetto. It is my firm belief that his voice became so apparent as one of dissent to corporate controlled media, that when the opportunity arose it can be seen the way that government manipulated the case. In 1981 when he was charged with the murder of Daniel Faulkner, the evidence was tainted, and sometimes altogether disappeared, he was refused the right to defend himself and his request to have John Africa from the MOVE organization was denied as well.
The Philadelphia Police also punished his supporters brutally to the extent of a full scale military style raid on their home. It became a notorious mark of how police brutality and the governments blind eye to a racist double standard of treatment had not been corrected by mere legislation. Helicopters were even used to drop a sizable bomb of military grade C4 explosives on the home of the MOVE organization killing 11 people including 5 children. During the course of assaulting the house on 6221 Osage Ave. they used Shotguns, Uzi's, browning automatics, tear gas, water hoses, M-16's, M60's and a .50 caliber machine gun to fire almost 10,000 rounds into the house. The explosion of C4 and the gunfire set an entire city block a blaze, which the police allowed to burn, eventually consuming over 50 other homes.
The 1985 bombing of the MOVE home and murder of all these people has never been justified by the Justice Dept. They have scrambled for reasoning and the puppet mayor at the time who himself was a black man (Wilson Goode) made it clear to anyone that studies that power structure of politics that it doesn't matter what the figure head or the representative is, he doesn't dictate the policy of the establishment. Rather, he is there to present an example of what we need to assimilate to in terms of subservience in order to be allowed to remain in power.
Really though, the problems between the MOVE organization attempting to gain the economic control of their own neighborhood and the police locking the city down had started years before. In 1975, because of MOVE's pro black stance on equality, they became a full fledged target and the harassment became a part of life for them. And in 1976 they became the victims of viciously provoked attacks over a disturbing the peace complaint that wouldn't have been able to merit a ticket nowadays.The result was a violent beating given to MOVE supporters on the street who questioned the polices actions and an attack on two women one of whom, Janine Africa,was assaulted by police, thrown to the floor and stomped with her 3 week old baby in her arms resulting the death of her child, Life Africa.
In 1978 a raid on the MOVE headquarters ended violently with 9 people jailed for 30-100 years for the alleged shooting of police officer James Ramp. Sketchy evidence and numerous inconsistencies were abound but led to Judge Edwin Malmed's sentencing the 9 MOVE members regardless. Some have even said that Malmed was the catalyst for the police attack. When asked by Mumia after the trial "Who shot James Ramp?" Judge Edwin Malmed replied that he "didn't have the faintest idea" and stated that since the members of MOVE wanted to be tried together he sentenced them together. Even conservative white republicans in the area listening to the local talk radio show were disturbed by this response which unabashedly divulged the frivolous legality of what the court system was passing off as justice. It is this type of investigative reporting as I stated earlier that brought him to attention of authorities.
The story of Mumia was not a winding confusing series of events that no one has any remembrance of there are several witnesses to these atrocities. Those who insist on Mumia's guilt would do themselves a disservice by not asking of themselves that the reworking of evidence, attacking of witnesses and not granting someone a fair trial is not only a disservice to Mumia but also a disservice to the memory of the other person whose life was taken from them on that day, Daniel Faulkner.
The police have a brotherhood. A brotherhood they are rarely ever seen to betray. A code of silence where they do not testify against other officers. They believe anyone guilty of the murder of an officer should receive the death penalty- no questions asked. But a question comes to mind, if Mumia is not guilty and his coverage of the police raid of the home in 1978 already left him as a person of interest for the government, why was he under FBI surveillance since he was 14 years old? Ask yourself, is he on trial for what he allegedly did the night of December 9th because he is the person who would fit the description of who they would want to be responsible- a strong, articulate, self educated African man who would not deny his culture or watch his family and friends abused by a notoriously racist police dept? Is he the person who fits the description of what you need guilt to be in order to justify the way you see the world.
I ask this to those that would view this with skepticism because that skepticism created by the right wing to counterbalance reason does Daniel Faulkner a disservice as well as Mumia. It leaves his killer at large and destroys what's left of the credibility of the justice system. The harder they squeeze the more reality slips through their fingers and when it is all said and done, what is the legacy of this trial. Justice? Retribution? None of the above, it is simply the fact that for the past 26 years an innocent man has been behind bars and slowly but surely media outlets like our own BET have been pressured to maintain their distance from him. Black and Latino politicians have been pressured to stop bringing him up. The Murder of an officer is a serious crime, and so anyone that would add doubt to the government's version of the events is attacked by the right and abandoned by the left. An interesting transition of events that seems to repeat itself with other things and is why the Democratic party is so weak. But the management of this trial and the way that this government has run its police dept. leaves no question that they wouldn't go through all the trouble if they weren't hiding something.
* Footnote: Mumia was not a violent man, he was not a sadist like officer Geist who carried out the first assault on the MOVE home in 1978, and whose own wife shot him to death after years of merciless abuse. This occurred after the trial over the raid of the MOVE home in 1978 and was kept out of the court because officer Geist's wife was pressured not to speak on it by police.
No one asks to be a Revolutionary Martyr, no one asks to be Nelson Mandela, Mumia, Shaka Sankofa, or Hurricane Carter. Mumia Abu Jamal didn't leave his house that morning thinking "I'm going to spend the next quarter of a century in prison so that I may provide an example to the world of police corruption and injustice done in a land that professes to be the most advanced and civilized nation in the world." But when he left his house that day for work that's exactly what he became and unless you know your rights and unless you arm yourself intellectually and are able to understand the legal system and the changes that are occurring quietly but rapidly in our legal system asking questions can bring you the same fate.
Someone once told me that Pennsylvania was Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and Mississippi between them. I think having lived there and been incarcerated there, while I have not seen Mississippi and therefore cannot draw the comparison. But I will say there that it is a State of the Union in name only and still has pockets of confederate resistance all over the place. It's a state notorious for having a huge amount of hate groups. It is a place that we must take back before we even think of expanding anywhere else on the East.
Mumia represent a lot of things for different people, but to me he represents something very simple, not abandoning your brothers because of public pressure when you believe their cause to be true. When there were no WMD's found in Iraq that didn't stop the right wing. Dick Cheney claimed they were moved and there was a relationship between Al-Quaeda and Iraq. Sean Hannity, the man who is so far right he's approaching the justification for fascism in defense of democracy, claimed they were probably moved to Syria. But this is NOT the mirror image to their extreme dedication to a lie that has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the course of seeking out their self fulfilling prophecy of catastrophe. This is the story of an incident that was covered up on December 9th in 1981 where two people lost their lives. And in the interest of seeking a quick and easy decision against someone whose believe in self determination and struggle made him a likely candidate all other possibilities were stripped from the systems mind. "Black Militants want to kill us," kept being repeated. "Maybe Mumia was jealous of Officer Daniel Faulkner's freedom," because of course freedom is why people carry out world wars and terrorist attacks. Or maybe he was just speaking for the voiceless and his punishment for doing so was to be incarcerated on charges for a crime he didn't commit.
While there are those that will forget him, others will change their stance and claim his guilt to feel like they belong to the majority. There are people who will continue to fight for his release and a new fair trial without the racism, corrupted evidence and moral ambiguity of the government's tactics in 1981 and subsequently after. Which, if you think about it, was only 11 years after America granted Black People the right to vote.
So vote today and everyday with your actions, not for a president, but for Justice that must be done around you, and for the struggle of Mumia who is not forgotten in Harlem NYC or around the world.
Peace & Respect,
Immortal
Technique
Mumia Case on Hold as Appellate Judges Deliberate
Mumia Case on Hold as Appellate Judges Deliberate
by Dave Lindorff
http://www.opednews.com
Momentous decisions are ahead in the 25-year-long case of Philadelphia death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, following a hearing before a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia Thursday.
Burns, who has been the lead attorney for the Philadelphia DA on this case since at least 1995, and who heads the appeals unit, went up against San Francisco death penalty appellate attorney Robert R. Bryan, who assumed the role of lead attorney for Abu-Jamal in 2003.
Abu-Jamal, who was not present at the packed hearing in the ceremonial courtroom of the Federal Courthouse across from the Liberty Bell museum in Philadelphia, had three claims before the Appellate Court, all challenging his conviction for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Judith Ritter, Abu-Jamal's local counsel, argued argued against a claim by the District Attorney to overturn a 2001 decision by a lower federal court which threw out his death sentence. Christina Swarns, a counsel with the NAACP Legal defense Fund, argued in support of Abu-Jamal's appeal as a "friend of the court."
The two-and-a-half-hour hearing began with prosecutor Burns tryng to make the case that Federal District Judge William Yohn had erred in vacating Abu-Jamal's death sentence. Judge Yohn had ruled in 2001 that an ambiguous and poorly worded jury verdict form, and an even more ambiguous instruction from the judge in the case, Albert Sabo, had left jurors believing, wrongly, that they had to all agree on any mitigating circumstances before weighing them in their decision as to the death penalty. In fact, any one juror can find a mitigating circumstance, while a death penalty decision must be unanimous. Burns claimed that Yohn's basis for his ruling was flawed. But all three of the judges—Chief Judge Anthony Scirica and Judge Robert Cowen, both Reagan appointees, and Thomas Ambro, a Clinton appointee—seemed to take a dim view of Burns' arguments. Judging from their challenging questions to Burns, and their generally favorable questions to Abu-Jamal's attorneys, it seemed likely that they would, in the end, uphold Yohn's decision.
If they do, Abu-Jamal's death sentence would be lifted once and for all. At that point, the DA would have 180 days to decide whether to seek a retrial on just his sentence (not guilt). Several years ago, in an interview with this reporter, Joseph McGill, the original prosecutor at Abu-Jamal's trial, said the DA's office had apparently not decided whether it would seek a retrial on the death penalty if Yohn was upheld on appeal, as this would require impaneling a new jury, and essentially retrying the case, since a new jury would not know the issues leading to conviction. The DA has to realize that a death sentence would be much harder to win in today's Philadelphia, where it would be much harder for the prosecution to obtain a jury of 10 whites and two blacks, as it managed to do for the trial in 1982. Also, in 1982, Jamal had an attorney who had never handled a death penalty case before, and he didn't even attempt to bring in witnesses to offer mitigating evidence against a death sentence.
A definitive end to Abu-Jamal's death sentence, even if his conviction remained in place or on appeal, would mean a major change in his status. For one thing, the DA's office would no longer be able, as it has done since 2001, be able to pressure the courts into keeping him locked away in solitary confinement on the state's super-max death row outside Pittsburgh.
On the conviction issues, the court and Abu-Jamal's attorneys focused on a claim that his jury had been unconstitutionally purged of African Americans by a prosecutor who had a history of removing blacks from capital juries—a so-called Batson claim (after the US Supreme Court decision in 1986). The main presentation of the case by attorney Bryan was hampered by frequent questions from the judges, who kept asking for more evidence than just the undisputed fact that prosecutor McGill had used peremptory challenges to remove 10 otherwise qualified black jurors from the jury, compared with only five whites. Bryan pointed out that McGill had made his concern about black jurors clear when, during the trial, he raised an alarm that a black judge had entered the courtroom and sat near Abu-Jamal's supporters in the spectators' gallery. Reading from the court transcript, Bryan noted that McGill had said, "If the court pleases, the two black jurors may know him." (Of course, as Abu-Jamal's then attorney Anthony Jackson noted, there was an equal chance any of the white jurors might have known the judge, but McGill didn't seem to care about them.) In his written brief to the court, Bryan also notes that McGill, over the course of six capital trials including Abu-Jamal's, used peremptory challenges to strike 74 percent of qualified black jurors, compared to only 25 percent of white jurors. That brief also notes that over Ed Rendell's two terms as Philadelphia district attorney, when the man who is now Pennsylvania's governor was McGill's boss, the DA's office struck black jurors in capital cases 58 percent of the time, compared to only 22 percent of the time for whites. (Indeed, in 1982, and until the high court's Batson ruling in 1986, the Philadelphia DA actually followed a state supreme court decision called Henderson, which ruled that it was permissible for prosecutors to strike blacks from a jury if they thought they might tend to favor a defendant of the same race.)
DA prosecutor Burns, for his part, focused on an argument that Abu-Jamal's jury bias claim had been forfeited on procedural grounds because he allegedly had not made it soon enough—either during his trial or in the early stages of his state court appeal. This argument was weakened by the fact that the Supreme Court only made race-based jury selection clearly illegal in 1986, well after Abu-Jamal's trial, and by the fact that documentary scientific evidence of the Philadelphia prosecutor's systematic rejection of black jurors did not come to light until after 1997, after Abu-Jamal's state appeal had been exhausted.
At least one judge, Ambro, seemed clearly sympathetic with Abu-Jamal's Batson claim. The other two judges were harder to read, as they asked tough questions of both Bryan and Burns. One judge, Cowen, on several occasions suggested the improbable possibility that since nobody knew the racial mix of the Abu-Jamal jury pool, it "might have been" majority African-American, "in which case the prosecutor's peremptory challenges might be seen as having been biased against whites." This view is clearly preposterous in a city where the court system had been--and to some extent still is--struggling to obtain an appropriate representation of African Americans on juries. Indeed, back in 1982, the city was still using only voter registration lists to call people to jury duty, and blacks at that time, while constituting 40 percent of the city's population, were notoriously under-represented on the voter rolls. Years later, following a federal lawsuit, the city has changed its method for compiling jury pools, but a lawyer long familiary with the issue says it would have been "almost inconceivable" for there to have been a majority black jury pool in 1982 under the old system.
If at least two of the three judges on the Third Circuit panel were to find prima facie evidence of a Batson violation in Abu-Jamal's trial, they would likely send the case back to the Federal District Court, where Judge Yohn would be ordered to hold a full evidentiary hearing on the issue. In general, courts have held that the threshold for proving a prima facie case of a Batson violation--and thus winning an evidentiary hearing--is fairly low, while proving an actual case of bias--and winning a new trial--can be much harder.
The second appeal claim by Abu-Jamal--that his trial had been unconstitutionally tainted by a summation statement to the jury by prosecutor McGill in which he told jurors their guilty verdict would "not be final" because Abu-Jamal would have "appeal after appeal," was given relatively short shrift at the hearing, because of the time spent on the Batson issue. Nonetheless it won support from a surprising quarter.
Prosecutor Burns argued to the court that they should not even be considering the issue, since the US Supreme Court has never ruled that such clearly improper language by a prosecutor should undo a conviction--only a death sentence. But Judge Cowen, looking incredulous, asked Burns, "Isn't saying that undermining a defendant's right to a fair trial?"
If Cowen took that question seriously--and feels that telling jurors that their judgment isn't really final, could undermine the concept of "proof beyond a reasonable doubt"—then he could be considering overturning the guilty verdict. If a second judge went along with his view, that would mean a new trial for Abu-Jamal--except for the fact that the DA would certainly appeal such a decision to the US Supreme Court, (which would be bound to consider it, because of such a ruling's far-reaching implications).
There was no discussion of Abu-Jamal's third claim, which was that his post-conviction hearing had been constitutionally flawed because of a pro-prosecution bias on the part of Judge Albert Sabo, the same judge who had presided over his trial. The fact that there was no argument on this claim by either side doesn't matter much, since both sides have filed detail briefs with the court, as they also did on the other claims. Apparently, the three judges had no major questions for either side regarding their respective arguments.
There is no specific timetable for the court to decide on the four claims before it, though some attorneys predict a decision can probably be expected in one or two months.
Outside the courtroom, in the plaza in front of the courthouse, and along 6th Street, several hundred pro-Abu-Jamal demonstrators, many carrying "Free Mumia" signs, staged a spirited demonstration. Inside the courtroom, Abu-Jamal supporters filled most of the seats reserved for spectators. Near the front sat Officer Faulkner's widow, Maureen, and several family members and supporters, who were allowed to enter the courtroom via a private entrance while other spectators had to go through security gates and line up at the courthouse's main entrance.
Prosecutor McGill was also in attendance.
by Dave Lindorff
http://www.opednews.com
Momentous decisions are ahead in the 25-year-long case of Philadelphia death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, following a hearing before a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia Thursday.
Burns, who has been the lead attorney for the Philadelphia DA on this case since at least 1995, and who heads the appeals unit, went up against San Francisco death penalty appellate attorney Robert R. Bryan, who assumed the role of lead attorney for Abu-Jamal in 2003.
Abu-Jamal, who was not present at the packed hearing in the ceremonial courtroom of the Federal Courthouse across from the Liberty Bell museum in Philadelphia, had three claims before the Appellate Court, all challenging his conviction for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Judith Ritter, Abu-Jamal's local counsel, argued argued against a claim by the District Attorney to overturn a 2001 decision by a lower federal court which threw out his death sentence. Christina Swarns, a counsel with the NAACP Legal defense Fund, argued in support of Abu-Jamal's appeal as a "friend of the court."
The two-and-a-half-hour hearing began with prosecutor Burns tryng to make the case that Federal District Judge William Yohn had erred in vacating Abu-Jamal's death sentence. Judge Yohn had ruled in 2001 that an ambiguous and poorly worded jury verdict form, and an even more ambiguous instruction from the judge in the case, Albert Sabo, had left jurors believing, wrongly, that they had to all agree on any mitigating circumstances before weighing them in their decision as to the death penalty. In fact, any one juror can find a mitigating circumstance, while a death penalty decision must be unanimous. Burns claimed that Yohn's basis for his ruling was flawed. But all three of the judges—Chief Judge Anthony Scirica and Judge Robert Cowen, both Reagan appointees, and Thomas Ambro, a Clinton appointee—seemed to take a dim view of Burns' arguments. Judging from their challenging questions to Burns, and their generally favorable questions to Abu-Jamal's attorneys, it seemed likely that they would, in the end, uphold Yohn's decision.
If they do, Abu-Jamal's death sentence would be lifted once and for all. At that point, the DA would have 180 days to decide whether to seek a retrial on just his sentence (not guilt). Several years ago, in an interview with this reporter, Joseph McGill, the original prosecutor at Abu-Jamal's trial, said the DA's office had apparently not decided whether it would seek a retrial on the death penalty if Yohn was upheld on appeal, as this would require impaneling a new jury, and essentially retrying the case, since a new jury would not know the issues leading to conviction. The DA has to realize that a death sentence would be much harder to win in today's Philadelphia, where it would be much harder for the prosecution to obtain a jury of 10 whites and two blacks, as it managed to do for the trial in 1982. Also, in 1982, Jamal had an attorney who had never handled a death penalty case before, and he didn't even attempt to bring in witnesses to offer mitigating evidence against a death sentence.
A definitive end to Abu-Jamal's death sentence, even if his conviction remained in place or on appeal, would mean a major change in his status. For one thing, the DA's office would no longer be able, as it has done since 2001, be able to pressure the courts into keeping him locked away in solitary confinement on the state's super-max death row outside Pittsburgh.
On the conviction issues, the court and Abu-Jamal's attorneys focused on a claim that his jury had been unconstitutionally purged of African Americans by a prosecutor who had a history of removing blacks from capital juries—a so-called Batson claim (after the US Supreme Court decision in 1986). The main presentation of the case by attorney Bryan was hampered by frequent questions from the judges, who kept asking for more evidence than just the undisputed fact that prosecutor McGill had used peremptory challenges to remove 10 otherwise qualified black jurors from the jury, compared with only five whites. Bryan pointed out that McGill had made his concern about black jurors clear when, during the trial, he raised an alarm that a black judge had entered the courtroom and sat near Abu-Jamal's supporters in the spectators' gallery. Reading from the court transcript, Bryan noted that McGill had said, "If the court pleases, the two black jurors may know him." (Of course, as Abu-Jamal's then attorney Anthony Jackson noted, there was an equal chance any of the white jurors might have known the judge, but McGill didn't seem to care about them.) In his written brief to the court, Bryan also notes that McGill, over the course of six capital trials including Abu-Jamal's, used peremptory challenges to strike 74 percent of qualified black jurors, compared to only 25 percent of white jurors. That brief also notes that over Ed Rendell's two terms as Philadelphia district attorney, when the man who is now Pennsylvania's governor was McGill's boss, the DA's office struck black jurors in capital cases 58 percent of the time, compared to only 22 percent of the time for whites. (Indeed, in 1982, and until the high court's Batson ruling in 1986, the Philadelphia DA actually followed a state supreme court decision called Henderson, which ruled that it was permissible for prosecutors to strike blacks from a jury if they thought they might tend to favor a defendant of the same race.)
DA prosecutor Burns, for his part, focused on an argument that Abu-Jamal's jury bias claim had been forfeited on procedural grounds because he allegedly had not made it soon enough—either during his trial or in the early stages of his state court appeal. This argument was weakened by the fact that the Supreme Court only made race-based jury selection clearly illegal in 1986, well after Abu-Jamal's trial, and by the fact that documentary scientific evidence of the Philadelphia prosecutor's systematic rejection of black jurors did not come to light until after 1997, after Abu-Jamal's state appeal had been exhausted.
At least one judge, Ambro, seemed clearly sympathetic with Abu-Jamal's Batson claim. The other two judges were harder to read, as they asked tough questions of both Bryan and Burns. One judge, Cowen, on several occasions suggested the improbable possibility that since nobody knew the racial mix of the Abu-Jamal jury pool, it "might have been" majority African-American, "in which case the prosecutor's peremptory challenges might be seen as having been biased against whites." This view is clearly preposterous in a city where the court system had been--and to some extent still is--struggling to obtain an appropriate representation of African Americans on juries. Indeed, back in 1982, the city was still using only voter registration lists to call people to jury duty, and blacks at that time, while constituting 40 percent of the city's population, were notoriously under-represented on the voter rolls. Years later, following a federal lawsuit, the city has changed its method for compiling jury pools, but a lawyer long familiary with the issue says it would have been "almost inconceivable" for there to have been a majority black jury pool in 1982 under the old system.
If at least two of the three judges on the Third Circuit panel were to find prima facie evidence of a Batson violation in Abu-Jamal's trial, they would likely send the case back to the Federal District Court, where Judge Yohn would be ordered to hold a full evidentiary hearing on the issue. In general, courts have held that the threshold for proving a prima facie case of a Batson violation--and thus winning an evidentiary hearing--is fairly low, while proving an actual case of bias--and winning a new trial--can be much harder.
The second appeal claim by Abu-Jamal--that his trial had been unconstitutionally tainted by a summation statement to the jury by prosecutor McGill in which he told jurors their guilty verdict would "not be final" because Abu-Jamal would have "appeal after appeal," was given relatively short shrift at the hearing, because of the time spent on the Batson issue. Nonetheless it won support from a surprising quarter.
Prosecutor Burns argued to the court that they should not even be considering the issue, since the US Supreme Court has never ruled that such clearly improper language by a prosecutor should undo a conviction--only a death sentence. But Judge Cowen, looking incredulous, asked Burns, "Isn't saying that undermining a defendant's right to a fair trial?"
If Cowen took that question seriously--and feels that telling jurors that their judgment isn't really final, could undermine the concept of "proof beyond a reasonable doubt"—then he could be considering overturning the guilty verdict. If a second judge went along with his view, that would mean a new trial for Abu-Jamal--except for the fact that the DA would certainly appeal such a decision to the US Supreme Court, (which would be bound to consider it, because of such a ruling's far-reaching implications).
There was no discussion of Abu-Jamal's third claim, which was that his post-conviction hearing had been constitutionally flawed because of a pro-prosecution bias on the part of Judge Albert Sabo, the same judge who had presided over his trial. The fact that there was no argument on this claim by either side doesn't matter much, since both sides have filed detail briefs with the court, as they also did on the other claims. Apparently, the three judges had no major questions for either side regarding their respective arguments.
There is no specific timetable for the court to decide on the four claims before it, though some attorneys predict a decision can probably be expected in one or two months.
Outside the courtroom, in the plaza in front of the courthouse, and along 6th Street, several hundred pro-Abu-Jamal demonstrators, many carrying "Free Mumia" signs, staged a spirited demonstration. Inside the courtroom, Abu-Jamal supporters filled most of the seats reserved for spectators. Near the front sat Officer Faulkner's widow, Maureen, and several family members and supporters, who were allowed to enter the courtroom via a private entrance while other spectators had to go through security gates and line up at the courthouse's main entrance.
Prosecutor McGill was also in attendance.
London Protests Call for Mumia's Freedom
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the racist death penalty! Mumia is innocent! were among the chants from a 100-strong crowd outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square.
Protests took place internationally on Thursday 17 May, the day Mumia's case was heard before three judges in the US Court of Appeals of the Third Circuit – just below the Supreme Court. A decision is expected within 90 days.
Greetings were read to the London rally from the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal in Philadelphia,along with a statement from William Singletary, a witness to the 9 December 1981 events, who asserts that Mumia did not arrive on the scene until several minutes after police officer Faulkner had been shot.
Contributions to an open mic were made by supporters of MOVE, Friends of Africa, the Partisan Defense Committee, the International Bolshevik Tendency, the Spartacist League, Legal Action for Women and individual Mumia activists. A collection for Mumia's legal defence raised £40.
Just before the protest began, Colourful Radio interviewed Mumia campaigner Michael W.
For more pictures of the demonstration see: http://www.freemumia.multiservers.com/
For the latest news from the court hearing, see this interview with Mumia's attorney Robert Bryan.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/18/1429203
Protests took place internationally on Thursday 17 May, the day Mumia's case was heard before three judges in the US Court of Appeals of the Third Circuit – just below the Supreme Court. A decision is expected within 90 days.
Greetings were read to the London rally from the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal in Philadelphia,along with a statement from William Singletary, a witness to the 9 December 1981 events, who asserts that Mumia did not arrive on the scene until several minutes after police officer Faulkner had been shot.
Contributions to an open mic were made by supporters of MOVE, Friends of Africa, the Partisan Defense Committee, the International Bolshevik Tendency, the Spartacist League, Legal Action for Women and individual Mumia activists. A collection for Mumia's legal defence raised £40.
Just before the protest began, Colourful Radio interviewed Mumia campaigner Michael W.
For more pictures of the demonstration see: http://www.freemumia.multiservers.com/
For the latest news from the court hearing, see this interview with Mumia's attorney Robert Bryan.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/18/1429203
Radio interviews at Mumia's court hearing
More audio from the actions around Mumia's court hearing, from Hans Bennett who spoke with a number of those present in the courtroom about their reflections on the procedure, including MOVE member Ramona Africa, scholar and activist Ward Churchill, German legislator Volker Ratzmann and Mark Taylor of Educators for Mumia.
Listen to the interviews here
Listen to the interviews here
May 17 Oral Arguments - The People Gather in Solidarity
Thank you to all who showed support on May 17th for Mumia's Oral Arguments which were heard before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. In the next coming months we will receive word on the court's decision which could be anything from granting Mumia a new trial, to an execution date.
CLICK HERE for radio interviews at Mumia's court hearing with Ward Churchill, Ramona Africa and others.
CLICK HERE for pictures taken by Eroc of the Foundation Movement on May 17th in Philly.
CLICK HERE for more pictures!
Statement by William Singletary, a witness in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal
Following is a Statement by William Singletary, a witness in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (1995 PCRA hearing). This statement was sent to the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, in order that it be read at rallies held in solidarity with death-row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, on the day of what likely is his last appeal hearing--before a panel of the Third Circuit federal court in Philadelphia, PA, May 17th 2007.
Singletary says he is perhaps the only true witness to the events of the early morning hours of December 9th, 1981, at 13th and Locust streets in Philadelphia, at which radio journalist and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal was beaten, and fingered by police for the murder of a police officer. Singletary was never called to testify at the rigged and racist charade, which is sometimes referred to as Mumia's1982 trial.
Singletary insists that Mumia Abu-Jamal did not even arrive on the scene until after the officer was shot, and did not in any way participate in the shooting. Mumia himself was a victim, having been shot and then viciously attacked by white Philadelphia cops.
The hearing on May 17th may be Mumia's last. It concerns only a few issues out of a great many outstanding questions in this case, most of which have never been heard in court. The evidence shows that Mumia is innocent, and the statement below is just one of the many proofs of that fact. Rallies in solidarity with Mumia Abu-Jamal are being held in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, San Francsco and San Jose California, as well as London, Toronto, Amsterdam, and others internationally.
(for a photocopy of the original signed statement, send a request by email to: LACFreeMumia@aol.com.)
Good-morning/Afternoon;
My name is William Singletary. I am an eye-witness to the murder or assassination of Police Officer Daniel Faulkner on December 9, 1981, in the early morning hours at 13th and Locust Street in Philadelphia, PA.
Mumia Abu-Jamal did not shoot Daniel Faulkner. I stood as close as 12 to 15 feet when Officer Faulkner was killed. When two bullets were viciously pumped into Officer Faulkner, the shooter then looked into my direction.
We locked eyes for a few seconds. His stare was like a thousand ice picks aiming for my heart. I slowly backed up; we never unlocked eyes until he flung the 22 caliber pistol to the right rear wheel of the Volkswagen.
That's the type of weapon that killed the officer. I saw it and I told the cops where to retrieve the weapon.
This story has had many twists and turns, according to the police, D.A., and prosecutor's office. None of what they stated is true. As I said, I saw the whole thing as it happened and it was not the way they said. They concocted a story, and put it on paper and the whole world believed what they said. I was told to keep quiet by the police, by Mr. Jamal's attorneys, and people on the street that I had always confided in. No one wanted to lose their business or their jobs. So I was left alone, by myself with this burden of "who will listen to me?" In the city of Philly I was a loner or the "Crazy Nigger" that won't shut up. But when we would be alone or with some brothers that truly believed that Mumia was innocent, guided me through turbulent times.
I came through by moving time after time and taking low-paying jobs to support my family. My family even turned their backs. I lost everything I owned just for telling the truth. I never knew people could be so mean; I am talking about professional people. I watched those cops turn into pure animals when they did their dance around Mr. Jamal. They beat him and kicked him, spit on him, called him nigger and violated all of his civil rights. Every one of those cops on the scene took part in the beating and the little dirty dance they did.
Mr. Jamal cried and begged them to stop because he had been shot, but they continued to punch, kick, and beat him with their blackjacks until he was unable to move on his own power. They then picked him up and tried to split his body on a "No Parking" sign. At this point he was too weak to say anything. The cops kept chanting, "Ramp, Ramp, Ramp" in reference to an officer that was slain at an early Move confrontation. This was a retribution for his reporting of that incident.
I don't know about all the ins and outs of this case. But what I do know is that Mumia Abu-Jamal did not shoot Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Mr. Jamal was savagely beaten by the Philadelphia police. The whooping of Mr. Jamal makes Rodney King's beating look like a picnic. I mean I have traveled the world, been in a war zone, and come home to witness this barbaric, savage, animal-like beating of another human being. These are sworn officers of the law, all white, not one black. They know what I saw and I've been threatened ever since. Not to the point of bodily harm, but to the point of the loss of my businesses and all my friends.
When I speak of this I sometimes shiver to think of all the pain he suffered at the hands of people who were sworn to serve and protect. I would just like to say I am not crazy or fantasizing about anything. What I said is the whole truth. I am glad to have you all listen and speak to whomever to give this man a new trial. I was never called to the first trial so maybe I will be called to the next one. I am a Vietnam Veteran; I did receive a purple heart for wounds received in combat. I received an honorable discharge. I successfully ran legit businesses in Philly before I was "ran out of town."
Hopefully there is someone within the sound of my voice that can reach out and help these twenty-five years of hell to be brought to some kind of closure. As I said and keep saying, "Mumia Abu-Jamal is an innocent man."
I was there and I said what I saw. So please continue to support him however you may.
Thank you. "Peace brothers and sisters"
Signed,
William Singletary
Singletary says he is perhaps the only true witness to the events of the early morning hours of December 9th, 1981, at 13th and Locust streets in Philadelphia, at which radio journalist and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal was beaten, and fingered by police for the murder of a police officer. Singletary was never called to testify at the rigged and racist charade, which is sometimes referred to as Mumia's1982 trial.
Singletary insists that Mumia Abu-Jamal did not even arrive on the scene until after the officer was shot, and did not in any way participate in the shooting. Mumia himself was a victim, having been shot and then viciously attacked by white Philadelphia cops.
The hearing on May 17th may be Mumia's last. It concerns only a few issues out of a great many outstanding questions in this case, most of which have never been heard in court. The evidence shows that Mumia is innocent, and the statement below is just one of the many proofs of that fact. Rallies in solidarity with Mumia Abu-Jamal are being held in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, San Francsco and San Jose California, as well as London, Toronto, Amsterdam, and others internationally.
(for a photocopy of the original signed statement, send a request by email to: LACFreeMumia@aol.com.)
Good-morning/Afternoon;
My name is William Singletary. I am an eye-witness to the murder or assassination of Police Officer Daniel Faulkner on December 9, 1981, in the early morning hours at 13th and Locust Street in Philadelphia, PA.
Mumia Abu-Jamal did not shoot Daniel Faulkner. I stood as close as 12 to 15 feet when Officer Faulkner was killed. When two bullets were viciously pumped into Officer Faulkner, the shooter then looked into my direction.
We locked eyes for a few seconds. His stare was like a thousand ice picks aiming for my heart. I slowly backed up; we never unlocked eyes until he flung the 22 caliber pistol to the right rear wheel of the Volkswagen.
That's the type of weapon that killed the officer. I saw it and I told the cops where to retrieve the weapon.
This story has had many twists and turns, according to the police, D.A., and prosecutor's office. None of what they stated is true. As I said, I saw the whole thing as it happened and it was not the way they said. They concocted a story, and put it on paper and the whole world believed what they said. I was told to keep quiet by the police, by Mr. Jamal's attorneys, and people on the street that I had always confided in. No one wanted to lose their business or their jobs. So I was left alone, by myself with this burden of "who will listen to me?" In the city of Philly I was a loner or the "Crazy Nigger" that won't shut up. But when we would be alone or with some brothers that truly believed that Mumia was innocent, guided me through turbulent times.
I came through by moving time after time and taking low-paying jobs to support my family. My family even turned their backs. I lost everything I owned just for telling the truth. I never knew people could be so mean; I am talking about professional people. I watched those cops turn into pure animals when they did their dance around Mr. Jamal. They beat him and kicked him, spit on him, called him nigger and violated all of his civil rights. Every one of those cops on the scene took part in the beating and the little dirty dance they did.
Mr. Jamal cried and begged them to stop because he had been shot, but they continued to punch, kick, and beat him with their blackjacks until he was unable to move on his own power. They then picked him up and tried to split his body on a "No Parking" sign. At this point he was too weak to say anything. The cops kept chanting, "Ramp, Ramp, Ramp" in reference to an officer that was slain at an early Move confrontation. This was a retribution for his reporting of that incident.
I don't know about all the ins and outs of this case. But what I do know is that Mumia Abu-Jamal did not shoot Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Mr. Jamal was savagely beaten by the Philadelphia police. The whooping of Mr. Jamal makes Rodney King's beating look like a picnic. I mean I have traveled the world, been in a war zone, and come home to witness this barbaric, savage, animal-like beating of another human being. These are sworn officers of the law, all white, not one black. They know what I saw and I've been threatened ever since. Not to the point of bodily harm, but to the point of the loss of my businesses and all my friends.
When I speak of this I sometimes shiver to think of all the pain he suffered at the hands of people who were sworn to serve and protect. I would just like to say I am not crazy or fantasizing about anything. What I said is the whole truth. I am glad to have you all listen and speak to whomever to give this man a new trial. I was never called to the first trial so maybe I will be called to the next one. I am a Vietnam Veteran; I did receive a purple heart for wounds received in combat. I received an honorable discharge. I successfully ran legit businesses in Philly before I was "ran out of town."
Hopefully there is someone within the sound of my voice that can reach out and help these twenty-five years of hell to be brought to some kind of closure. As I said and keep saying, "Mumia Abu-Jamal is an innocent man."
I was there and I said what I saw. So please continue to support him however you may.
Thank you. "Peace brothers and sisters"
Signed,
William Singletary
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Tyrants hate free speech
by Hans Bennett
Wednesday, 09 May 2007
Police intimidate Mumia supporters as May 17 court date looms
"I received nothing less than 10 or 15 death threats over the last four weeks from so-called Philadelphia police officers. I assured them that I would show up today, so they would have an opportunity to kill me. They've intimidated and scared folks. They've done what the Ku Klux Klan has always done in America: terrified Black people, poor people, immigrants and good white people" into stepping down and not confronting racism, declared Sgt. DeLacy Davis, of Black Cops Against Police Brutality.
Davis was speaking at an April 24 event in Philadelphia organized by supporters of Black death-row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal. Widely considered to be a political prisoner, Abu-Jamal was convicted of killing white Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in a 1982 trial that Amnesty International has declared a "violation of minimum international standards that govern fair trial procedures and the use of the death penalty,"
Hundreds had gathered in Philadelphia on April 24 to celebrate Abu-Jamal's birthday and to publicize his upcoming oral argument before the federal 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia on May 17.
The event was met by a counter-demonstration of over a hundred plainclothes police officers - a culmination of recent intimidation tactics by the Fraternal Order of Police, who have long been key opponents of a new trial for Abu-Jamal.
Condemning both the police counter-demonstration and the death threats he had reported, Sgt. Davis passionately declared that "the behavior and tactics" he had observed from police outside was "exactly" what he had witnessed from the Ku Klux Klan. "It is that intimidation factor that we have to address and deal with."
Other guest speakers on April 24 criticized the recent FOP intimidation. Emphasizing the long history of resistance to U.S. racism, Philadelphia journalist Linn Washington told the crowd that "this struggle today around Mumia is not new."
Washington then cited the 19th century Black journalist and abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, who observed, "Tyrants hate free speech." Pointing to the large police counter-protest outside the building, he asked, "If the evidence against Mumia is as overwhelming as it is claimed to be, why is there such a shrill reaction" to someone questioning the evidence?
In his column written the previous week in the Black Philadelphia Tribune newspaper, Washington documented how the April 24 event had to change locations after police intimidation of the previous Clef Club venue. He wrote that the "anti-Abu-Jamal barrage of emails and telephone calls unleashed on the Clef Club included declarations perilously close to terroristic threats."
Earlier that month, an April 15 hip hop concert and fundraiser for Mumia organized by youth in New York City was also forced to relocate when police intimidated the owner of the Remote Lounge. The Amsterdam News, the venerable Black Harlem-based paper, reported that "after receiving 16 citations, thousands of dollars in fines and allegedly malicious threats, the night club owner canceled the concert, two days before the scheduled event."
Acting as the NYC Free Mumia Coalition's legal representative, attorney Michael Tarif Warren later declared at a press conference outside City Hall that "the police engaged in a conspiracy to close this event to prevent a worthy cause." Quoted by Amsterdam News, Warren called for "a fair hearing to air the legal improprieties" of the NYPD.
Comments posted by police officers on the infamous NYPD "RANT" blog website detailed the intimidation campaign. One post stated, "This f--ker should be dead, we should ruin this event and make life miserable for every f-ing Hollywood liberal scum liker that shows up, fry Mumia."
Other posts threatened to send the violent Hells Angels motorcycle gang into the Remote Lounge, set up road blocks, send in undercover police, lure people with prostitutes, write up tickets, throw citations on the club and more.
After the event was forced to relocate, an April 15 thread on the "RANT" site was titled "NY Mumia Hip Hop Benefit Rally Gets Bitch Slapped." One post under the name "Philadelphia Police Highway Patrol" said: "A sincere thank you to all of my NYPD brothers and sisters. You men and women are truly the best!"
Several other posts continued to boast of their actions with comments like "good job guys , f--k you mumia you dirty savage," "I'm shocked, amazed, and feel a warm glow! Great work. Outstanding!!!," "16 citations - and guess what the hits are gonna keep coming you f--k wad," "Does anyone sell Mumia targets, so I can keep his cause alive in spirit?"
Another wrote: "Everything I know about islam I learned on 9/11."
One post used imagery that explicitly drew the connection to the brutal history of U.S. lynchings, where Black victims of racist white mobs were literally burned alive, stating that "I'm waiting for Mumia to be well done on the rotisserie."
Yet another post used the racist "Sambo" dialect attributed to African Americans for so many years in mainstream culture: "OH SNAP!!! da venue be changed? i hopez publik transpotation be making itz way ova dere fo me!"
Mobilizing for May 17
Pam Africa is the coordinator of The International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal. She's asking people to come to Philadelphia on May 17 and "show that the whole world is watching these oral arguments."
And she urges people to organize local events if they are unable to travel. "We need public pressure to ensure the court's fairness."
"I believe Mumia is innocent and am personally calling for his immediate release. However, I'll work with anyone supporting a fair trial. By demanding a new trial, we can work with those who know the trial was rotten but are unsure of Mumia's innocence.
"Mumia can still be executed. Further, since the Supreme Court is unlikely to hear his case, this is realistically his last chance to get a new trial. We understand that they're getting ready to kill another Black revolutionary who has refused to bow down and suck up to his oppressor. His case represents all that is wrong with this system. We must take action now before it's too late."
On Thursday, May 17, the day of the hearing, San Franciscans will show the world is watching by rallying in support of Mumia in front of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, 95 Seventh St., near Market, at 4-6 p.m. For more information and to get involved in saving and freeing Mumia, call (415) 255-1085.
Hans Bennett (insubordination.blogspot.com) is a Philadelphia-based photojournalist documenting the movement to free Mumia and all political prisoners, and is co-founder of "Journalists for Mumia" whose new website is: Abu-Jamal-News.com
Wednesday, 09 May 2007
Police intimidate Mumia supporters as May 17 court date looms
"I received nothing less than 10 or 15 death threats over the last four weeks from so-called Philadelphia police officers. I assured them that I would show up today, so they would have an opportunity to kill me. They've intimidated and scared folks. They've done what the Ku Klux Klan has always done in America: terrified Black people, poor people, immigrants and good white people" into stepping down and not confronting racism, declared Sgt. DeLacy Davis, of Black Cops Against Police Brutality.
Davis was speaking at an April 24 event in Philadelphia organized by supporters of Black death-row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal. Widely considered to be a political prisoner, Abu-Jamal was convicted of killing white Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in a 1982 trial that Amnesty International has declared a "violation of minimum international standards that govern fair trial procedures and the use of the death penalty,"
Hundreds had gathered in Philadelphia on April 24 to celebrate Abu-Jamal's birthday and to publicize his upcoming oral argument before the federal 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia on May 17.
The event was met by a counter-demonstration of over a hundred plainclothes police officers - a culmination of recent intimidation tactics by the Fraternal Order of Police, who have long been key opponents of a new trial for Abu-Jamal.
Condemning both the police counter-demonstration and the death threats he had reported, Sgt. Davis passionately declared that "the behavior and tactics" he had observed from police outside was "exactly" what he had witnessed from the Ku Klux Klan. "It is that intimidation factor that we have to address and deal with."
Other guest speakers on April 24 criticized the recent FOP intimidation. Emphasizing the long history of resistance to U.S. racism, Philadelphia journalist Linn Washington told the crowd that "this struggle today around Mumia is not new."
Washington then cited the 19th century Black journalist and abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, who observed, "Tyrants hate free speech." Pointing to the large police counter-protest outside the building, he asked, "If the evidence against Mumia is as overwhelming as it is claimed to be, why is there such a shrill reaction" to someone questioning the evidence?
In his column written the previous week in the Black Philadelphia Tribune newspaper, Washington documented how the April 24 event had to change locations after police intimidation of the previous Clef Club venue. He wrote that the "anti-Abu-Jamal barrage of emails and telephone calls unleashed on the Clef Club included declarations perilously close to terroristic threats."
Earlier that month, an April 15 hip hop concert and fundraiser for Mumia organized by youth in New York City was also forced to relocate when police intimidated the owner of the Remote Lounge. The Amsterdam News, the venerable Black Harlem-based paper, reported that "after receiving 16 citations, thousands of dollars in fines and allegedly malicious threats, the night club owner canceled the concert, two days before the scheduled event."
Acting as the NYC Free Mumia Coalition's legal representative, attorney Michael Tarif Warren later declared at a press conference outside City Hall that "the police engaged in a conspiracy to close this event to prevent a worthy cause." Quoted by Amsterdam News, Warren called for "a fair hearing to air the legal improprieties" of the NYPD.
Comments posted by police officers on the infamous NYPD "RANT" blog website detailed the intimidation campaign. One post stated, "This f--ker should be dead, we should ruin this event and make life miserable for every f-ing Hollywood liberal scum liker that shows up, fry Mumia."
Other posts threatened to send the violent Hells Angels motorcycle gang into the Remote Lounge, set up road blocks, send in undercover police, lure people with prostitutes, write up tickets, throw citations on the club and more.
After the event was forced to relocate, an April 15 thread on the "RANT" site was titled "NY Mumia Hip Hop Benefit Rally Gets Bitch Slapped." One post under the name "Philadelphia Police Highway Patrol" said: "A sincere thank you to all of my NYPD brothers and sisters. You men and women are truly the best!"
Several other posts continued to boast of their actions with comments like "good job guys , f--k you mumia you dirty savage," "I'm shocked, amazed, and feel a warm glow! Great work. Outstanding!!!," "16 citations - and guess what the hits are gonna keep coming you f--k wad," "Does anyone sell Mumia targets, so I can keep his cause alive in spirit?"
Another wrote: "Everything I know about islam I learned on 9/11."
One post used imagery that explicitly drew the connection to the brutal history of U.S. lynchings, where Black victims of racist white mobs were literally burned alive, stating that "I'm waiting for Mumia to be well done on the rotisserie."
Yet another post used the racist "Sambo" dialect attributed to African Americans for so many years in mainstream culture: "OH SNAP!!! da venue be changed? i hopez publik transpotation be making itz way ova dere fo me!"
Mobilizing for May 17
Pam Africa is the coordinator of The International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal. She's asking people to come to Philadelphia on May 17 and "show that the whole world is watching these oral arguments."
And she urges people to organize local events if they are unable to travel. "We need public pressure to ensure the court's fairness."
"I believe Mumia is innocent and am personally calling for his immediate release. However, I'll work with anyone supporting a fair trial. By demanding a new trial, we can work with those who know the trial was rotten but are unsure of Mumia's innocence.
"Mumia can still be executed. Further, since the Supreme Court is unlikely to hear his case, this is realistically his last chance to get a new trial. We understand that they're getting ready to kill another Black revolutionary who has refused to bow down and suck up to his oppressor. His case represents all that is wrong with this system. We must take action now before it's too late."
On Thursday, May 17, the day of the hearing, San Franciscans will show the world is watching by rallying in support of Mumia in front of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, 95 Seventh St., near Market, at 4-6 p.m. For more information and to get involved in saving and freeing Mumia, call (415) 255-1085.
Hans Bennett (insubordination.blogspot.com) is a Philadelphia-based photojournalist documenting the movement to free Mumia and all political prisoners, and is co-founder of "Journalists for Mumia" whose new website is: Abu-Jamal-News.com
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Mumia Teach-In May 16
EMAJ
EDUCATORS FOR MUMIA ABU-JAMAL
12 Years Educating and Organizing for Abu-Jamal and Justice
Contacts:
Professor Mark Taylor, Princeton Theological Seminary, 845 893-5721, at mark.taylor @ ptsem.edu;
Prof. Johanna Fernandez (Carnegie Mellon), jfernan1 @ andrew.cmu.edu;
Tameka L. Cage, (Bucknell Univ), tlc022 @ bucknell.edu
Institutions for identification purposes only.
EDUCATORS TO HOLD TEACH-IN ON MUMIA ABU-JAMAL
SCHOLARS OF HISTORY, LAW, JOURNALISM, LITERATURE, AND RELIGION GATHER IN PHILLY
May 16 Teach-In on
Eve of Key Arguments in Courthouse on May 17
Princeton, NJ. May 11, 2007. Key scholars from Pennsylvania and around the country will meet in Philadelphia on Wednesday night, May 16, to conduct a Teach-In on the controversial case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Abu-Jamal was convicted in 1982 for the shooting death of Philadelphia police officer, Daniel Faulkner, in a trial so controversial that public outcries for Abu-Jamal's new trial, and even release, have become ever more frequent in human rights communities. Amnesty International wrote that "justice would be best served by a new trial."
One of the Teach-In organizers, Mark Taylor of Princeton, said, "It is important that the U.S. Third Circuit Court will be hearing, on May 17, three of Mumia's claims about his denial of due process in the original trial." Another organizer of the EMAJ conference, Johanna Fernandez of Carnegie Mellon University, added, "In his case, the pillars that guarantee a fair trial were terribly broken: The presiding judge was openly racist, and Abu-Jamal was convicted without hard evidence."
Present at the Teach-In will be German literature professor, Michael Schiffman of the University of Heidelberg, who has published information on photos taken early at the crime scene, potentially exculpatory for Abu-Jamal, which were not used by police and prosecutors at the original trial. Also present will be Kathleen Cleaver (law professor, Emory University), Linn Washington (journalism, Temple University), Joy James (Africana Studies, Williams College), Tameka L. Cage (English, Bucknell University, also on the EMAJ advisory council) and Dave Lindorff (independent journalist)
______________________
DREXEL UNIVERSITY, Matheson Hall, Rm. 109. 32nd & Market Streets, Philadelphia
EDUCATORS FOR MUMIA ABU-JAMAL
12 Years Educating and Organizing for Abu-Jamal and Justice
Contacts:
Professor Mark Taylor, Princeton Theological Seminary, 845 893-5721, at mark.taylor @ ptsem.edu;
Prof. Johanna Fernandez (Carnegie Mellon), jfernan1 @ andrew.cmu.edu;
Tameka L. Cage, (Bucknell Univ), tlc022 @ bucknell.edu
Institutions for identification purposes only.
EDUCATORS TO HOLD TEACH-IN ON MUMIA ABU-JAMAL
SCHOLARS OF HISTORY, LAW, JOURNALISM, LITERATURE, AND RELIGION GATHER IN PHILLY
May 16 Teach-In on
Eve of Key Arguments in Courthouse on May 17
Princeton, NJ. May 11, 2007. Key scholars from Pennsylvania and around the country will meet in Philadelphia on Wednesday night, May 16, to conduct a Teach-In on the controversial case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Abu-Jamal was convicted in 1982 for the shooting death of Philadelphia police officer, Daniel Faulkner, in a trial so controversial that public outcries for Abu-Jamal's new trial, and even release, have become ever more frequent in human rights communities. Amnesty International wrote that "justice would be best served by a new trial."
One of the Teach-In organizers, Mark Taylor of Princeton, said, "It is important that the U.S. Third Circuit Court will be hearing, on May 17, three of Mumia's claims about his denial of due process in the original trial." Another organizer of the EMAJ conference, Johanna Fernandez of Carnegie Mellon University, added, "In his case, the pillars that guarantee a fair trial were terribly broken: The presiding judge was openly racist, and Abu-Jamal was convicted without hard evidence."
Present at the Teach-In will be German literature professor, Michael Schiffman of the University of Heidelberg, who has published information on photos taken early at the crime scene, potentially exculpatory for Abu-Jamal, which were not used by police and prosecutors at the original trial. Also present will be Kathleen Cleaver (law professor, Emory University), Linn Washington (journalism, Temple University), Joy James (Africana Studies, Williams College), Tameka L. Cage (English, Bucknell University, also on the EMAJ advisory council) and Dave Lindorff (independent journalist)
______________________
DREXEL UNIVERSITY, Matheson Hall, Rm. 109. 32nd & Market Streets, Philadelphia
Friday, May 11, 2007
INTERVIEW: Linn Washington, Jr. on Mumia, MOVE, and the Philly Media
Dissecting May 13, 1985, Mumia Abu-Jamal’s May 17 oral arguments, the FOP, racism, police brutality, and mainstream media bias
"I think the level of fanaticism with Mumia’s case is a reaction to the level of support that he has received internationally. Further, I think the intense reactions revolve around race, specifically racism…plus Abu-Jamal’s identification with the Black Panther Party and MOVE. 'Law & Order' types hate the Black Panthers. And Philly police hate MOVE. Focusing anger on Abu-Jamal gives police a counter to criticism directed against them for persistent police brutality."
---Linn Washington, Jr.
The full text transcript and audio of the interview are available at Hans Bennett's blog, Insubordination
Interview by Hans Bennett
“Attention, MOVE: This Is America!” Philadelphia Police Commissioner Sambor declared through a loudspeaker 22 years ago, minutes before the May 13, 1985 police assault on the revolutionary MOVE organization’s home. This assault killed 5 children and 6 adults, including MOVE founder John Africa. After police shot over 10,000 rounds of bullets into their West Philadelphia home, a State Police helicopter dropped a C-4 bomb, illegally supplied by the FBI, on MOVE’s roof. The bomb started a fire that eventually destroyed 60 homes: the entire block of a middle-class black neighborhood. Carrying the young Birdie Africa, the only other survivor, Ramona Africa dodged gunfire and escaped from the fire with permanent burn scars.
The 1985 police bombing was the culmination of many years of political repression by Philadelphia authorities. At the time of the 1985 confrontation, MOVE was working to publicize the imprisonment of the “MOVE 9”: Janine, Debbie, Janet, Merle, Delbert, Mike, Phil, Eddie, and Chuck Africa. These nine MOVE members were jointly sentenced in the 1978 killing of Officer James Ramp after a year-long police stakeout of MOVE’s Powelton Village home. Their parole hearings come up in August, 2008.
In this interview, veteran black journalist Linn Washington, Jr. talks about reporting on the city of Philadelphia’s confrontations with MOVE, mostly focusing on the August 8, 1978 standoff, and the subsequent evidence used to convict the MOVE 9 prisoners. Washington passionately critiques the mainstream Philadelphia media’s bias against MOVE: “when you look at the media coverage of MOVE, everything that was perceived as MOVE doing something wrong, was publicized. In contrast, the attacks on MOVE, the injustices, and the deprivations that they endured never found any coverage in the mainstream media.”
On May 17, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in the case of Linn Washington’s former colleague, black death-row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal. Widely considered to be a political prisoner, Abu-Jamal was convicted of killing white Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in a 1982 trial that Amnesty International has declared a "violation of minimum international standards that govern fair trial procedures and the use of the death penalty."
Abu-Jamal is a longtime supporter of the MOVE organization, dating back to his days as a Philadelphia journalist in the 1970s. Since his imprisonment, MOVE has spearheaded the international support network for Abu-Jamal that is now organizing for a new trial.
Concerning the injustice in Abu-Jamal’s case, Washington is just as passionate in calling for a new trial, and in this interview, he documents the bias of the Philadelphia media: “It’s not for the press to take a position one way or the other, but it is the responsibility of the press to scrutinize all sides with the same rigor. One side (the Danny Faulkner side) can say anything they want, even if it makes no sense at all, yet it gets credibility and traction in the media. On the other side, Abu-Jamal’s side can say anything they want, and irrespective of the substance and factual accuracy, and they get no coverage at all.”
Washington concludes: “Where’s the journalistic fairness, balance, and accuracy? These are the three things that are supposed to be fundamental to journalism. Are they happening in this case? No, they are not.”
Linn Washington, Jr. is currently a columnist for the Philadelphia Tribune newspaper and a freelance journalist for publications nationwide. He writes extensively on matters involving the criminal justice system and racism. An Assistant Professor in the Journalism Department at Temple University in Philadelphia, he holds a Master Degree from the Yale Law School and a B.S. in Communications from Temple University.
This interview was conducted on May 8, 2007.
Hans Bennett: You recently traveled to France with recently exonerated death-row prisoner Harold Wilson and others?
Linn Washington, Jr.: I was over there for the one year anniversary of the naming of a street for Mumia, Rue Mumia Abu-Jamal, in St. Denis, just outside of Paris.
HB: How did that go?
LW: First, it was fascinating to me to actually see the street, considering the fact that the Philadelphia City Council, Pennsylvania State Senate, and US Congress were so outraged. This is the same US Congress that does nothing about global warming, health care for people without insurance, the Iraq war, etc., but it could take the time to order a town 3500 miles away to take a name off a street.
The incredible thing is that this street is about 150 paces long and sits between two one-way streets in a secluded section of St. Denis. This is not a place that The Tour de France or any tour buses will be going through because the streets are so small that you could not get a tour bus to the area. For this to cause so much consternation I think takes absurd into the level of obscene. The significance of the street for people in St. Denis is not its size but the symbolism of it standing for the notions of equal justice and a fair trial as represented in Abu-Jamal's struggle. So that’s my personal reaction.
In terms of the overall visit, there was a brief ceremony with 20-30 people that included the current Mayor of St. Denis and the previous Mayor who is now the equivalent of a congressman of that whole area, also one of the deputy Mayors, in a little park about a block away from the street. They were reaffirming why they had dedicated the street, and explained that they feel Mumia has not received a fair trial and they are calling on the United States to live up to the constitutional mandate that everyone receive a fair trial.
The US contingent included Suzanne Ross from the NYC Free Mumia Coalition, and Sundiata Sadiq, who is the President of the Ossining, NY chapter of the NAACP. Sadiq was the one that spearheaded the efforts that led to the national NAACP adopting a resolution calling on all of its chapters around the country to support Mumia getting a new trial. Curiously, for a civil rights organization that prides itself on being progressive, the President of the NY state chapter, Hazel Dukes, filed some very specious reason to suspend the Ossining chapter, which again takes absurdity into obscene dimensions.
HB: How do you explain such an intense reaction here at home?
LW: It typifies US arrogance where we can tell everyone what to do but we don’t actually practice what we preach. We are all over the world “installing democracy” literally at the barrel of a gun, or at the tip of a cruise missile, depending on which goes in first, yet we do not practice democracy here at home.
A couple examples:
There are strong reactions to this street and very little concern about what the case represents. There are fundamental flaws in our criminal justice system. Not only from the perspective of the death penalty, but all the way down to minor crimes like “breaking and entering,” where justice is not fair. Justice in America is a matter of how much money you have, where there is not “equal justice under the law” (which is THE PHRASE chiseled in stone at the entrance to the Supreme Court in Washington).
We don’t have equal justice under the law. There are some people who commit crimes and get virtually no criminal penalties, if they face any at all. Meanwhile, others get severe penalties for the same crimes committed under similar circumstances.
Let me give you an example close to home.
May 13, 1985, what happened? Police conducted a raid in the 6200 block of Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia. Essentially to fulfill misdemeanor warrants, the Police Commissioner authorized the dropping of a bomb that caused a fire, and the Ppolice Commissioner gave the unconscionable order to let the fire burn. MOVE members attempted to exit the building with temperatures as high as 2000 degrees, according to subsequent investigations, but were shot at and forced back inside. In the end, 11 people in the house were incinerated, including 5 children. 61 homes were completely destroyed and 250 people were homeless.
Not a single police officer or city official even faced any kind of criminal prosecution. Note that this is totally separate from whether they should have been convicted of crimes committed that day. Given the fact that there were a series of crimes committed, they should have at least faced their day in court. That is equal justice where no one is above the law. The District Attorney, Ed Rendell (now Governor) initially refused to do a Grand Jury investigation. That was a dereliction of duty. The subsequent DA, Ron Castille, who now sits on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, did do an investigation and just white-washed it. He claimed nobody that day had criminal intent that day, which is a very specious argument.
However, there are crimes that could have been brought against the Police and Fire Commissioners which were not “intent based” crimes. Maybe murder and arson are intent based, but “risking catastrophe” and “reckless endangerment” are based on what happened as a result of the actions.
This grand jury, under the control of the DA’s office issued a report written by the DA’s office stating that charges won’t even be brought against police officers, who had been caught lying to the grand jury. Lying to a grand jury is a crime called perjury, and perjury is a crime all day and every day. The Grand Jury Report stated it would be unfair to bring perjury charges against low-ranking police officers, when, in fact, top city officials were at least morally responsible for what had happened on Osage Ave. on May 13th.
Well a crime is a crime, and equal justice would mean that you bring charges against all who committed crimes…particularly since most major investigations begin with charges against lowly folks who provide evidence on higher ups. So, on many levels, America doesn’t practice what it preaches. So that is under girding the reaction to Rue Mumia.
Let me give you another example.
In the early 90’s in New York City an Irish Republican Army operative, named Joe Doherty, was being held at a jail in NYC. He had been convicted in Northern Ireland of murdering a British Special Forces officer during one of the IRA’s clashes with the British. Set aside for the moment the propriety of what was going on there, and whether the IRA were actually terrorists or were fighting for their homeland. The fact of the matter is that Britain is a major US ally and Dogherty had been convicted of murdering a British military officer. He escapes from Northern Ireland and comes to the US as a fugitive, hides out a couple years and is eventually arrested, and is being held in a federal detention facility. Efforts by the US government to deport him and send him back, were countered by officials in NYC and about 100 members of Congress.
They’re standing up for this convicted murderer on the claim that he did not receive a fair trial in Northern Ireland. In 1990, as a part of this effort to Free Joe Doherty, his supporters authorized the renaming of the street in front of the federal prison in Manhattan, and renamed it to Joe Doherty Corner.
Here you have officials rename a street for a convicted murderer, but then people are outraged when France does the same thing for an alleged cop-killer on the same basis, that they don’t feel that Abu-Jamal received a fair trial. Hypocrisy, contradictions, double-standards of justice, you choose the name.
HB: What do you think it is about Mumia’s case in particular that causes such a fanatical reaction?
LW: I think the level of fanaticism with Mumia’s case is a reaction to the level of support that he has received internationally. Further, I think the intense reactions revolve around race, specifically racism…plus Abu-Jamal’s identification with the Black Panther Party and MOVE. “Law & Order” types hate the Black Panthers. And Philly police hate MOVE. Focusing anger on Abu-Jamal gives police a counter to criticism directed against them for persistent police brutality.
The police are taking it on the chin all the time for continuing brutality, and this is the case that they have decided to dig in on. You get all this police rage against Abu-Jamal despite the fact that he’s not the only person that allegedly shot and killed a police officer in US history. There were at least three police officers shot and killed in Philadelphia in 1981, do you know about that?
HB: Yes, you’ve been researching that, and the two others in Philadelphia were black police officers?
LW: Yes.
HB: Do you feel that the Fraternal Order of Police’s behavior is racially motivated?
LW: Yes, and it has always been racially motivated. This is one of the most outrageous aspects of it, because that organization is racist. I became a full time reporter in Philadelphia in October of 1975. One of the first big stories that I covered was a protest in front of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) headquarters, by members of the black police officer organization, The Guardian Civic League. Some of the people who participated in that demonstration are now State Rep Harold James, who was a police officer at the time, and also the current Sheriff of the City of Philadelphia, John Greene.
Why were these black police officers out in front of the FOP headquarters?
Because there is a bar in the basement of the FOP building, and black police officers (including ones there with their wives) would receive racist treatment when they went to the bar at their union headquarters and they were protesting against that. That type of racism didn’t end in the 1970s. Do a lot of officers find themselves treated badly on a bureaucratic level within the PPD? Yes, but who does the FOP stand up for?
Invariably, it’s white police officers.
One example, a couple years ago, the FOP made some public statements about the unfairness of the police departments in terms of their refusal to allow a police officer, I think his name is Flemming, to move up to become a detective. Flemming has cost the City of Philadelphia over one million dollars in legal settlements because of police brutality. Just a year or so before this controversy about his being promoted to detective, the City had to pay out $750,000 because Flemming beat up a man at the airport without provocation. So here’s the FOP standing up for a chronically brutal cop, instead of saying, “No, this isn’t the type of behavior that we as an organization want to endorse.”
But, it gets worse.
This officer Flemming also beat up a former police officer in 1995, an ex-cop named Gary Wakshul, days before that officer became a witness for the prosecution during the appeals hearing for Mumia Abu-Jamal. Flemming and one of his partners on the police force beat the stuffings out of Gary Wakshul in the hallway of Philadelphia’s Criminal Justice Center, beating him so bad that he sustained multiple injuries. Wakshul subsequently sued the City for the beating and got $60,000 for it.
As you know, Wakshul was a police officer involved in the Mumia Abu-Jamal case. He was the one who brought Abu-Jamal from the scene to the hospital on the morning of Dec. 9, 1981 and Wakshul stayed with him until he was brought in for surgery. Initially, Wakshul filed an official report stating that “the negro male made no comment.” Two months later, he came out and said that he had heard Abu-Jamal confess. Then, when the police asked him about the contradiction between his official report and the later confession claim, Wakshul came up with the absurd response that he “didn’t know the confession had any importance until today.”
Now, why was Wakshul working for the court system in 1995?
Because, in 1984 Wakshul almost beat a man to death in a hospital emergency room, and he was fired. When he was put on trial for this, the judge said, “Well, I think Wakshul’s a good guy and since this happened in the heat of battle,” he chose to acquit him of this unjustified beating. Now, the man he almost killed was in handcuffs, so there wasn’t any battle. And then, guess what? The FOP tried to get Wakshul’s job back.
I will raise the question: what type of law enforcement does the FOP represent? Good lawful law enforcement, or does it support unlawful acts of brutality, many of which are tinged, if not saturated, with racism?
HB: Going back to the Wakshul beating, what do you think was going on there just days before his testimony at Mumia’s PCRA hearing?
LW: The short answer is that I don’t know.
There’s been speculation that the beating was meant to send a message to Wakshul, not to deviate from his testimony that Abu-Jamal actually confessed.
Given all the solid and verifiable facts in Abu-Jamal’s case, I feel that it’s counter-productive and detrimental to engage in a lot of speculation. The factual record is this: Wakshul was beaten up and came to court and gave absurd testimony. The importance is this: Judge Sabo’s 153 page opinion rejected all of Abu-Jamal’s appeal items including claims that Wakshul lied. Incredibly Sabo’s opinion was issued just three days after the hearing, and incredibly Sabo’s opinion was a verbatim copy of the DA’s finding of facts that had been submitted (including grammatical and factual errors).
Sabo ruled that there was no such thing as police brutality in Philadelphia, and that in making that claim, Abu-Jamal was making one more absurd claim to deflect his guilt. Here we have a former police officer who testified for the prosecution during the hearing, who was a victim of police brutality within days of the hearing. That just is yet another
example of the manifest unfairness and factual distortion in Sabo’s ruling and his entire presence throughout the case.
HB: Sabo’s fairness in the PCRA hearings is one of the issues being considered on May 17 by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Any thoughts on next week’s oral arguments?
Clearly Mumia deserves a new trial and I think it is bogus for people to argue that he doesn’t deserve a fair trial because he disrupted his original trial. If you look, his disruptions occurred after it was clear that Sabo in collusion with Prosecutor McGill was intent on violating all of his rights, not just the right to self-representation.
They also hamstrung his attorney by not providing adequate resources, and they tried to sabotage his efforts at every turn. That is when Abu-Jamal started “acting out.” Did he take the right tact in doing that? It’s arguable, but the fact is that everyone is entitled to a fair trial.
In 1959, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a ruling in a murder case from Philadelphia where a guy pled guilty to the murder, and the judge and prosecutor tried to cut corners. The court said that even with evidence of guilt piled as high as Mount Everest, everybody is entitled to a fair trial.
Now, with the hearing coming up on May 17, I think it’s interesting to note that there are a couple of items that this court wanted to hear in oral arguments that the federal District Court Judge had not certified for appeal. One of the items is the bias of Sabo in the 1995 hearing.
Here’s something interesting.
Sabo’s bias has always been obvious and objectionable to anyone with their eyes open, but in 1995, Sabo was so bad that both the Daily News and Philadelphia Inquirer harshly criticized his behavior. The New York Times criticized Sabo’s behavior and was joined by other national publications like the Christian Science Monitor and also an article came out in the American Lawyer, where a lawyer/journalist named Stuart Taylor observed the entire proceedings and concluded that Sabo was thoroughly biased and also concluded that he thought Abu-Jamal did it, but did not receive a fair trial.
There is this incredible record of Sabo’s biases, and the importance of the criticism from the Philly media about Sabo’s bias is that normally these people are rabidly anti-Abu-Jamal and they felt that because of Sabo’s continuing presence on this case and his obvious and detestable bias, that it would undermine any credibility of a fair trial. By undermining that, it would give further credence to criticism that Abu-Jamal did not receive a fair trial.
They were saying, “Take this clown off the case so you don’t give more ammunition to the Mumidiots.” So when it got to the State Supreme Court and when that Court issued their rejection of Abu-Jamal’s appeal in Oct. 1998, there was a paragraph in there talking about Sabo’s bias, and it said the opinions of a handful of journalists “do not convince us” that Sabo was biased. The court said yes, he was intemperate, and made remarks he shouldn’t have, etc., but the Court declared that Sabo wasn’t biased.”
The law and the logic that has been used consistently by the Pa Supreme Court in their rulings on this case would make a Philly pretzel look straight. The Court has bent and broken law and legal precedents in their rulings on the Abu-Jamal case.
HB: Given all of this that you lay out, how is it today that the media is still so biased and does not report the key facts that expose all this injustice?
LW: Because the media of today is like the mainstream white media has always been in this country. They accept a basic narrative and do not deviate from that.
You have to understand that in 1970, a group published a report on the Philly media and it said they reflexively take the side of the police and the prosecutors anytime there is an allegation of police brutality. This is 1970. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that Philadelphia’s media started covering police brutality. The local white media started reporting on brutality after the Inquirer started reporting on it. The Inquirer subsequently won a Pulitzer Prize for that coverage. But before that, they ignored it.
Now I’m not just telling you that from scholarly research and examination. I’m telling you what I know from experience.
From 1975 on, I worked as a reporter covering police brutality. From 1975-78 when I worked for the Philadelphia Tribune (a black newspaper), almost every other day people would come into our office beaten and bloody. The blood was dried on their faces and clothes.
The police refused to allow these brutality victims to file brutality complaints. They would go to the Inquirer in an attempt to talk to a reporter, but they couldn’t get through the door. The Daily News was the same way. Then, they’d go across town to the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, and still couldn’t get through the door. Finally they’d come to the Philadelphia Tribune and they would get through the door. So, I know from personal experience that the mainstream Philadelphia media refused to cover police brutality and really many other issues involving race. They’ll only write about it superficially.
Listen. Why is it that the media in Philadelphia can occasionally cover issues involving police brutality, but never say that there is a pattern and practice of it? Why do they treat these incidents of police brutality as “isolated incidents” instead of examples of an endemic problem?
The Inquirer also won a Pulitzer Prize writing a story about a man who had been falsely convicted of murder, and their coverage got him out of jail and others. So all these examples they’ve written about people being falsely incarcerated, mistreated by police and prosecutors—which shows a pattern—why is it, then, that they stop and say “Yes, all these improprieties have happened, but it doesn’t have any effect at all on the Mumia Abu-Jamal case.”
HB: You and Mumia both covered the MOVE 9 trial. Looking back at it, what
things about the trial remain most vivid in your mind?
LW: To clarify, I covered the preliminary aspects of the MOVE 9 trial, but I did not cover the trial itself. I covered a few parts of the trial when MOVE was actually representing itself. That right of self-representation was revoked, and I think correctly because MOVE was not really trying to represent themselves, but rather to “put the system on trial.” That may be okay, but when your body is in danger of going to jail for a long time, I think you should direct your attention to the evidence (or lack thereof ) and try to get yourself off.
One of my most vivid memories was of MOVE’s house being destroyed around 1:30 that afternoon, just hours after MOVE’s arrest. The shoot out had stopped around 10:30, and the last MOVE person was out around 11:00.
The police had dumped 250,000 gallons of water into the basement. I know this because I was hiding behind the pumping truck that they used for the water cannon when the shooting started. I was talking to the guy as he was pumping the water in. So I know how much water went into that basement. It was a darkened basement filled with water and tear gas, and you can not adequately do an investigation of that within a few hours. Yet police claimed they conducted a thorough investigation and then they tore the compound down.
So, the destruction of evidence alone raises serious questions about the propriety of the evidence used for the charges against them.
HB: Why do you think they destroyed it?
LW: I think they tore down the house in part because they wanted to destroy evidence. Mayor Frank “the racist” Rizzo’s administration and Police Commissioner O’Neill claimed they tore it down because they didn’t want it to become a shrine for MOVE and they felt that they could not maintain security around the house to prevent MOVE people from occupying it again.
The patent absurdity of that is shown by this: From the beginning of March to around the middle of April, 1978, the police enacted a starvation blockade around the house where they sealed off a whole section of Powelton Village, and did not let anyone in or out. People that lived there had to have special passes like in South Africa to get in and out of their homes. So the notion that police couldn’t adequately secure the house is absolutely absurd.
One point of view is that the destruction of evidence destroyed any semblance of a fair trial.
You asked about “vivid memories,” and I remember covering one of the early preliminary hearings. It was held in prison, where they brought in a mini-courtroom and a presiding judge (who was later fired for corruption). I remember vividly when the medical examiner came in and gave his testimony based on the autopsy report related to James Ramp, the officer who was killed.
The medical examiner testified to one thing, in terms of how the bullet entered the body and such. Then, when the prosecutor was getting ready to introduce the medical examiner’s report as evidence, he looked at the first couple paragraphs, and said “Oh, your honor, the medical report here does not conform with the testimony you just heard, let me correct it right here.” This dude pulled out a pencil and changed the damn report right in the courtroom, and then introduced it as evidence. Unbelievably, the judge accepted it!
Once again, this was a very fundamental and egregious violation of procedures. I left the courtroom and called my boss at the Philadelphia Journal, where I was working at the time. I was told, “Yeah, okay, well, we’ll talk about it when you get back.” I was also covering it for the United Press International (UPI) news service, so I called them up, but they told me they weren’t interested.
I said, “Wait a minute. This whole confrontation between the city of Philadelphia and MOVE, starting from 1972, has been about double-standards of justice and violations of
rules and procedures. Here you have a clear example of one, and it’s not newsworthy?” UPI answered: “No. It’s not newsworthy, Linn. If you find something else out, give me a call back.”
HB: So, did anybody use your story?
LW: No!
Nobody used it because they didn’t think it was important. This is a separate argument from whether MOVE is right or wrong, but when you look at the media coverage of MOVE, everything that was perceived as MOVE doing something wrong, was publicized. In contrast, the attacks on MOVE, the injustices, and the deprivations that they endured never found any coverage in the mainstream media. I know it was covered in the Tribune because I was covering for them. It was also on black radio stations because there were black reporters that believed that you should be fair and balanced, and we were criticized for it, Mumia being one of them. This was just because we felt that there were two sides to the story. We weren’t taking MOVE’s side, but we felt they had a legitimate side that needed to be accurately presented.
If they’re getting beaten up, the women getting kicked in the vagina and having miscarried babies, that should be a news story.
February of 1978, there were MOVE members being held in the Philadelphia prisons. The guards jumped on these guys and beat them horribly and then turned around and charged them with assault on the prison guards.
Now, MOVE would normally say, “No, we don’t participate in any kind of cooperation with the system, because we know the system is corrupt.” But, in this particular instance, they said “We’ll cooperate just to show that even if we do cooperate, it won’t mean anything.” So they cooperated with the DA’s office (then headed by Ed Rendell), and after a lengthy investigation, the DA concluded that the victims had indeed been MOVE, who had been attacked by the guards.
So, that meant that the prison guards should have been charged with assault and other crimes. However, Rendell’s office concluded that the appropriate action was not to take any action against the guards, but rather to simply drop the false charges against the MOVE members.
Now, filing a false police report is a crime, as well as lying about something in the report. There are many crimes short of assault (that had been proven in the investigation) that could have been brought against them, but they didn’t do anything.
And, you know what? Little of this that I just told you about that confrontation at the prison ever got into the news media.
HB: In the recent documentary on MOVE, you cite your sources within the police
department who told you that the police know Ramp was killed by police gunfire. Can you say anything more about this?
LW: I will confirm that I was told that by my sources in the police department. However, I have never identified the sources to MOVE, and I will never identify them to anyone else.
But I will tell you this.
Officer Ramp was allegedly shot and killed by a bullet that came from a weapon that fired a .223 caliber round. .223 is the same caliber used in an M-16. Inside MOVE’s house, police claimed that they found four carbines called Mini-14’s, made by Ruger and they fired this .223 round.
The day immediately after the shootout, police were claiming that not a single officer out there that day carried that particular type of weapon. About three weeks later, during the pre-trial proceedings, the police department began to acknowledge the fact that there were police officers who had the Mini-14s firing the .223 rounds. They first said that they had just been out there, but not near the scene. Then, subsequent reports put the officers with those guns closer to the scene, however the official version was “Yes, they were part of the assault, but no, they never fired their weapon.”
So, if in fact, there were no improprieties, why the constantly changing stories and why the heavy-handed cover-up?
There’s another thing, and this is where the destruction of the property precluded a thorough examination, as well as how the trial was handled by MOVE and when the court-appointed attorneys came in, it really became a circus.
But let’s think about this for a minute. You don’t have to be a ballistician to figure this one out. It’s just common sense. You’ve got four male MOVE members in the basement allegedly armed, according to police testimony. A basement by its very nature means it’s below ground level. They’re allegedly firing out of windows, and let’s understand, this was not like The Alamo where people are close up at the window and shooting out. They’re away from the windows, hiding behind pillars in the basement. So, anything they’re shooting out of the windows has to be at an upward trajectory. They would have to shoot up to get out the window.
Ramp was directly across the street at ground level. So how could something hit him in what was said to be a downward type angle when MOVE members were firing upward from that basement?
Okay, maybe the bullet could have ricocheted a little bit. The apartment building across the street from the old MOVE compound is a brick building. However, their compound was made of wood, so the idea that the bullet ricocheted off the brick, back towards MOVE’s house, and then back again to hit Ramp somewhere near ground level, is highly problematic.
Furthermore, the .223 bullet is actually a very small, light weight bullet. Since it’s a very light bullet it will likely break up bouncing back and forth off a brick wall. It’s not going to maintain its integrity and be able to ricochet back and forth a couple times. Unless this was a bullet like the one that Arlen Specter, when he worked for the Warren Commission, said killed Kennedy. You know, one able to change directions in the air a couple times? It’s questionable to unlikely that the bullet that killed Ramp came from that basement.
But, it’s hard for anyone to ever know, because police destroyed evidence. Earlier that year, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that it’s illegal for authorities to destroy a crime scene before the defense has a chance to examine it.
Furthermore, a couple days before the Aug. 8, raid, a Philadelphia judge signed an order barring the city from destroying the MOVE house. Yet, the city did it in violation of this order.
And guess what? They were never called to account for violating that court order. There are copies of the court order too, so they can’t say that it does not exist. That’s bullshit.
HB: Do you think the MOVE 9 should be granted parole in 2008?
LW: Parole is supposedly based on adjustment to prison. From what I understand, there have been few infractions, if any at all. So, the short answer is yes.
They’ve served 30 years in jail for a third-degree murder conviction. The average sentence for third-degree murder is 10-15 years, so they’ve already served twice that. So, yes, they should be released.
Will that happen? I don’t think so.
The Parole Board has a couple of arguably illegal standards in place. One of them says you have to accept responsibility for your crime. But, if you’ve maintained your innocence the whole time you’re in there, how can you say “Okay, I did it?”
This next standard is clearly illegal. It will demand that for MOVE members to be released without serving their full sentence, they will have to renounce membership in MOVE. This is something that would easily happen in China, North Korea, or Russia, saying “You have to denounce these un-communist feelings that you have.” But in America, we’re not supposed to do that. But we do that in Pennsylvania with MOVE members, and nobody says that it’s a problem.
Once again, this is another example of what I was saying at the beginning of our conversation, that there is a big gap between what America says it is and what it actually does.
HB: Anything else on your mind?
LW: Looking at Abu-Jamal’s appeal with the Third Circuit, I hope that the court follows its own legal precedent in a case involving Abu-Jamal. The legal precedent is this: there is a rule that courts are supposed to follow previous rulings because this keeps some stability in the law, so a Judge doesn’t wake up one morning with a bad hair day and change everything, and then the next day change it back. Had the Pa Supreme Court followed its own previous rulings, Abu-Jamal would have had a new trial and/or been released over a decade ago.
The Third Circuit has an opportunity to show whether the rule of law actually means something. The Third Circuit has granted hearings that have led to new trials to individuals on the issue of jury discrimination. So, if they follow their own precedent, then Abu-Jamal will receive a new hearing, if not a new trial.
Earlier on, you mentioned a guy named Harold Wilson. One of the legal victories that eventually led to his release was the a claim of jury discrimination and in this case it was a local Philadelphia judge who called for a new trial and the Philadelphia DA didn’t even oppose it.
HB: We have to hope, and of course keep raising awareness and applying pressure.
LW: But for the international movement supporting him, Abu-Jamal would have been executed by now. Let’s look at 1995. Pa prison authorities were illegally opening Abu-Jamal’s mail as a result of the FOP complaints about him writing articles and a book while in prison. So, the Pa prisons, who had previously allowed prisoners to work with authors to publish accounts of their crimes, and actually helped facilitate interviews for them, are now cracking down on Abu-Jamal.
It was bad enough that they were opening his mail, and not just mail from family and friends, but mail from his lawyer, which is fundamentally illegal. They were copying his stuff and sending copies to the Governor’s office. So, when Gov. Ridge signed the death warrant on Mumia in June of 1995, he was doing it with the full knowledge that Mumia’s attorney’s were preparing to formally file an appeal.
What Ridge did was fundamentally illegal. But he later became the first Homeland Security Czar. So what does that say about America’s adherence to law?
These are findings of fact from a lawsuit that was filed by Mumia, and these findings of fact are contained in a ruling favoring Abu-Jamal that was issued by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. So, these are rulings from federal judges in the late 1990s.
HB: It at least seems like the DA is afraid of the Third Circuit, with their recent request for the court to recuse itself from Abu-Jamal’s case, which the court denied.
LW: That was so patently absurd. They initially started that with a letter, saying “Listen, we think all you guys should step aside.” Abu-Jamal’s attorney, Robert R. Bryan wrote a letter in response, which cited numerous rulings and precedents. The Third Circuit then told the DA that if they wanted to challenge it, they’d have to file a formal legal brief. The DA filed the formal brief, but it still contained all of the factual inaccuracies and inappropriate law that they had alleged in the letter brief. The court threw it out.
Let me tell you something that is of relevance. If they really cared about a fair trial, why did the DA’s office not oppose Sabo sitting on the 1995 appeals, when one of the appeal items was his bias in 1982. If the judge was biased in 1982, would you not think that he’d be biased in 1995? The DA fought that and said that they wanted Sabo on the case.
When the PA Supreme Court was deciding on the appeal that came out of the 95 hearing, the defense said, “Listen, we seek the recusal of one member of the Pa Supreme Court: Justice Ron Castille, who had been a Philadelphia DA.” They wanted his recusal on grounds of the Judicial Code of Conduct, section 3D, it says that any judge who was a lawyer for a governmental agency, and through that position, has knowledge of the facts of the case in front of him, must recuse himself. So, here we have Castille, who was DA of Philadelphia, who signed papers to oppose Abu-Jamal’s appeals, and is now sitting on the deliberation. That is a violation of ethics and the DA office didn’t care about that at all.
So, when the Pa Supreme Court issued its second rejection of Abu-Jamal’s appeals, Castille wrote a second opinion explaining why he had refused to recuse himself. In there he says (paraphrased), “Abu-Jamal’s attorney’s are jumping all over me because I took campaign funds from the Fop because the FOP worked on my campaign to become a Supreme Court Justice, and a few years ago the FOP named me as their ‘Man of the Year,’ well that’s unfair to focus on me, because four other members of this court received campaign financing and campaign support from the FOP.”
So we have five members of a seven member court, and all were saying that it did not show any kind of impropriety. On issues of recusal of judges, its not just impropriety, but it is the appearance of impropriety. If you have five members of a seven member court receiving money and support from the prime organization seeking the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal, does that not raise the issue of appearance of impropriety?
HB: What other examples are there of media bias?
LW: In this Mumia affair there have been many allegations of his misconduct, including allegations of him confessing. In 1995, there was an article in the Washington Post, which featured an interview with Maureen Faulkner, and it was talking about how she was outraged that Abu-Jamal had been able to publish a book. The article started with an anecdote from her where she claimed that in court, during the trial, when her husband’s bloody shirt was displayed, Mumia turned around, looked at her, pulled his dreadlocks back, and smiled at her.
However, the official court transcript documented that Mumia was not even in the courtroom on the day that Mrs. Faulkner claimed this smiling incident took place. So, I wrote a column questioning this account and others. Maureen Faulkner wrote me a three page, single-spaced letter calling me everything but a child of God.
I wrote her back and said, “Ms. Faulkner, listen, if there are any ambiguities in this matter, it’s because of you and what you said.” So she then claimed that the Washington Post reporter had gotten the wrong date. She then cited an Inquirer article that says she left the courtroom after the shirt was displayed. However, when I checked it, the article did not say anything about Mumia turning around and smiling at her.
When you look at the rest of the articles from the trial, nowhere does Ms. Faulkner say that she had to leave the courtroom because Mumia smiled at her.
Interestingly, that article Mrs. Faulkner cited did quote the trial prosecutor telling the jury that his Office had made no deals with key prosecution witness Cynthia White. Of course, after the trial, the DA drop a lot of criminal cases filed against White. If the deal didn’t exist on that date, it happened soon after. The jury never knew White was getting special deals from the DA – which is another element undermining a fair trial.
This smiling incident and other incidents are things where I fault reporters. The problem with much of the media is that due to turnover, there is not much institutional memory, and not enough people who have the expertise to write intelligently about such things. Apparently, that Washington Post writer must have never covered a trial, because otherwise she’d have known that at a high profile trial such as this, there are many people and 80 percent of those people are looking at every twitch, movement, smile, or frown from the defendant. A question should have been asked as to who else saw this and why it wasn’t reported. But that article didn’t contain that type of question.
No one saw this allegedly objectionable action.
That seems so consistent in a parallel to the alleged confession. No one heard this confession, except for Gary Bell (who was Faulkner’s partner) and he didn’t remember it until over two months later. Gary Wakshul initially reported that the “negro male made no comment,” but after a police brutality complaint by Abu-Jamal, he suddenly remembers the confession. Wakshul and Bell allege that there were over a dozen officers in the area who also heard the confession, and in 25 years not a single one came forward.
In 1995, the defense tried to get Judge Sabo to issue subpoenas to bring them in and ask them what they heard, and why they didn’t report it. Sabo refused. He said “These are officers. They’re honorable people, so I’m sure if you ask them, they’ll come in.” They were asked and didn’t come in. Then, in his opinion, Sabo wrote that there was no contrary evidence that the confession didn’t take place, because all the people who testified in court said there was a confession. By his rulings, Sabo made certain that officers would not come in and testify.
The first person to allegedly report the confession was hospital security guard Priscilla Durham. Interestingly, she claims to hear a confession to a murder, but does she talk to a detective, uniformed officers, or police internal affairs?
No.
She claims that she went to her supervisor and allegedly writes this down on a hand-written report. Did her supervisor give this report to the police? No. So what does that say about the validity of the confession?
HB: Did you follow how the week of December 9, two more accounts came out from William Colarulo (now a Chief Inspector for the Philadelphia police) and Kathleen Gerrow (now an executive producer at NBC 10)?
LW: Hans, let me tell you something. These two accounts sound suspicious like dog dirt…dropping on a sidewalk.
Let’s think logically here. William Colarulo was the head of the police department’s press office for over two years, and he never once said anything about this? That’s ridiculous!
But when you read his news media statements about this confession, what he said about what Abu-Jamal was wearing is totally different from what Wakshul said he was wearing, when Wakshul voluntarily went to police on Dec. 16, 1981 and volunteered more information where he was able to remember the type of clothing, the color, and the texture. The last question the police asked Wakshul on 12/16/81 was, “Is there anything else that you would like to add?” He said no. There was nothing about a confession. It is absurd.
Furthermore, what Colarulo said was not based on what he saw or heard himself, but was based on what someone told him. Has the police officer that Colarulo cites as having heard the confession ever come forward and said anything about it?
Absolutely not.
Now, reporter Kathleen Gerrow. This is what’s really strange. We have a reporter that claims to have heard a confession in the largest murder case that was going on in Philadelphia at the time, and she said nothing about it? Journalistic careers are made on bits of information like hearing a major piece of information in a major murder case. If she had this information, it could have made her career. Why did she not say anything about it for 25 years?
These sorts of things defy logic and common sense. But this is what passes as journalism in Philadelphia…and evidence of Abu-Jamal’s guilt. Why didn’t the so-called reporter interviewing Gerrow ask a follow-up question, like “Why didn’t you say something earlier? It could have made your career?” These questions should be asked.
It’s not for the press to take a position one way or the other, but it is the responsibility of the press to scrutinize all sides with the same rigor. One side (the Danny Faulkner side) can say anything they want, even if it makes no sense at all, yet it gets credibility and traction in the media. On the other side, Abu-Jamal’s side can say anything they want, and irrespective of the substance and factual accuracy, and they get no coverage at all.
Where is the journalistic fairness, balance, and accuracy? These are the three things that are supposed to be fundamental to journalism. Are they happening in this case?
No, they are not.
Hans Bennett (insubordination.blogspot.com) is a Philadelphia-based photojournalist and co-founder of “Journalists for Mumia,” whose new website is: Abu-Jamal-News.com
"I think the level of fanaticism with Mumia’s case is a reaction to the level of support that he has received internationally. Further, I think the intense reactions revolve around race, specifically racism…plus Abu-Jamal’s identification with the Black Panther Party and MOVE. 'Law & Order' types hate the Black Panthers. And Philly police hate MOVE. Focusing anger on Abu-Jamal gives police a counter to criticism directed against them for persistent police brutality."
---Linn Washington, Jr.
The full text transcript and audio of the interview are available at Hans Bennett's blog, Insubordination
Interview by Hans Bennett
“Attention, MOVE: This Is America!” Philadelphia Police Commissioner Sambor declared through a loudspeaker 22 years ago, minutes before the May 13, 1985 police assault on the revolutionary MOVE organization’s home. This assault killed 5 children and 6 adults, including MOVE founder John Africa. After police shot over 10,000 rounds of bullets into their West Philadelphia home, a State Police helicopter dropped a C-4 bomb, illegally supplied by the FBI, on MOVE’s roof. The bomb started a fire that eventually destroyed 60 homes: the entire block of a middle-class black neighborhood. Carrying the young Birdie Africa, the only other survivor, Ramona Africa dodged gunfire and escaped from the fire with permanent burn scars.
The 1985 police bombing was the culmination of many years of political repression by Philadelphia authorities. At the time of the 1985 confrontation, MOVE was working to publicize the imprisonment of the “MOVE 9”: Janine, Debbie, Janet, Merle, Delbert, Mike, Phil, Eddie, and Chuck Africa. These nine MOVE members were jointly sentenced in the 1978 killing of Officer James Ramp after a year-long police stakeout of MOVE’s Powelton Village home. Their parole hearings come up in August, 2008.
In this interview, veteran black journalist Linn Washington, Jr. talks about reporting on the city of Philadelphia’s confrontations with MOVE, mostly focusing on the August 8, 1978 standoff, and the subsequent evidence used to convict the MOVE 9 prisoners. Washington passionately critiques the mainstream Philadelphia media’s bias against MOVE: “when you look at the media coverage of MOVE, everything that was perceived as MOVE doing something wrong, was publicized. In contrast, the attacks on MOVE, the injustices, and the deprivations that they endured never found any coverage in the mainstream media.”
On May 17, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in the case of Linn Washington’s former colleague, black death-row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal. Widely considered to be a political prisoner, Abu-Jamal was convicted of killing white Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in a 1982 trial that Amnesty International has declared a "violation of minimum international standards that govern fair trial procedures and the use of the death penalty."
Abu-Jamal is a longtime supporter of the MOVE organization, dating back to his days as a Philadelphia journalist in the 1970s. Since his imprisonment, MOVE has spearheaded the international support network for Abu-Jamal that is now organizing for a new trial.
Concerning the injustice in Abu-Jamal’s case, Washington is just as passionate in calling for a new trial, and in this interview, he documents the bias of the Philadelphia media: “It’s not for the press to take a position one way or the other, but it is the responsibility of the press to scrutinize all sides with the same rigor. One side (the Danny Faulkner side) can say anything they want, even if it makes no sense at all, yet it gets credibility and traction in the media. On the other side, Abu-Jamal’s side can say anything they want, and irrespective of the substance and factual accuracy, and they get no coverage at all.”
Washington concludes: “Where’s the journalistic fairness, balance, and accuracy? These are the three things that are supposed to be fundamental to journalism. Are they happening in this case? No, they are not.”
Linn Washington, Jr. is currently a columnist for the Philadelphia Tribune newspaper and a freelance journalist for publications nationwide. He writes extensively on matters involving the criminal justice system and racism. An Assistant Professor in the Journalism Department at Temple University in Philadelphia, he holds a Master Degree from the Yale Law School and a B.S. in Communications from Temple University.
This interview was conducted on May 8, 2007.
Hans Bennett: You recently traveled to France with recently exonerated death-row prisoner Harold Wilson and others?
Linn Washington, Jr.: I was over there for the one year anniversary of the naming of a street for Mumia, Rue Mumia Abu-Jamal, in St. Denis, just outside of Paris.
HB: How did that go?
LW: First, it was fascinating to me to actually see the street, considering the fact that the Philadelphia City Council, Pennsylvania State Senate, and US Congress were so outraged. This is the same US Congress that does nothing about global warming, health care for people without insurance, the Iraq war, etc., but it could take the time to order a town 3500 miles away to take a name off a street.
The incredible thing is that this street is about 150 paces long and sits between two one-way streets in a secluded section of St. Denis. This is not a place that The Tour de France or any tour buses will be going through because the streets are so small that you could not get a tour bus to the area. For this to cause so much consternation I think takes absurd into the level of obscene. The significance of the street for people in St. Denis is not its size but the symbolism of it standing for the notions of equal justice and a fair trial as represented in Abu-Jamal's struggle. So that’s my personal reaction.
In terms of the overall visit, there was a brief ceremony with 20-30 people that included the current Mayor of St. Denis and the previous Mayor who is now the equivalent of a congressman of that whole area, also one of the deputy Mayors, in a little park about a block away from the street. They were reaffirming why they had dedicated the street, and explained that they feel Mumia has not received a fair trial and they are calling on the United States to live up to the constitutional mandate that everyone receive a fair trial.
The US contingent included Suzanne Ross from the NYC Free Mumia Coalition, and Sundiata Sadiq, who is the President of the Ossining, NY chapter of the NAACP. Sadiq was the one that spearheaded the efforts that led to the national NAACP adopting a resolution calling on all of its chapters around the country to support Mumia getting a new trial. Curiously, for a civil rights organization that prides itself on being progressive, the President of the NY state chapter, Hazel Dukes, filed some very specious reason to suspend the Ossining chapter, which again takes absurdity into obscene dimensions.
HB: How do you explain such an intense reaction here at home?
LW: It typifies US arrogance where we can tell everyone what to do but we don’t actually practice what we preach. We are all over the world “installing democracy” literally at the barrel of a gun, or at the tip of a cruise missile, depending on which goes in first, yet we do not practice democracy here at home.
A couple examples:
There are strong reactions to this street and very little concern about what the case represents. There are fundamental flaws in our criminal justice system. Not only from the perspective of the death penalty, but all the way down to minor crimes like “breaking and entering,” where justice is not fair. Justice in America is a matter of how much money you have, where there is not “equal justice under the law” (which is THE PHRASE chiseled in stone at the entrance to the Supreme Court in Washington).
We don’t have equal justice under the law. There are some people who commit crimes and get virtually no criminal penalties, if they face any at all. Meanwhile, others get severe penalties for the same crimes committed under similar circumstances.
Let me give you an example close to home.
May 13, 1985, what happened? Police conducted a raid in the 6200 block of Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia. Essentially to fulfill misdemeanor warrants, the Police Commissioner authorized the dropping of a bomb that caused a fire, and the Ppolice Commissioner gave the unconscionable order to let the fire burn. MOVE members attempted to exit the building with temperatures as high as 2000 degrees, according to subsequent investigations, but were shot at and forced back inside. In the end, 11 people in the house were incinerated, including 5 children. 61 homes were completely destroyed and 250 people were homeless.
Not a single police officer or city official even faced any kind of criminal prosecution. Note that this is totally separate from whether they should have been convicted of crimes committed that day. Given the fact that there were a series of crimes committed, they should have at least faced their day in court. That is equal justice where no one is above the law. The District Attorney, Ed Rendell (now Governor) initially refused to do a Grand Jury investigation. That was a dereliction of duty. The subsequent DA, Ron Castille, who now sits on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, did do an investigation and just white-washed it. He claimed nobody that day had criminal intent that day, which is a very specious argument.
However, there are crimes that could have been brought against the Police and Fire Commissioners which were not “intent based” crimes. Maybe murder and arson are intent based, but “risking catastrophe” and “reckless endangerment” are based on what happened as a result of the actions.
This grand jury, under the control of the DA’s office issued a report written by the DA’s office stating that charges won’t even be brought against police officers, who had been caught lying to the grand jury. Lying to a grand jury is a crime called perjury, and perjury is a crime all day and every day. The Grand Jury Report stated it would be unfair to bring perjury charges against low-ranking police officers, when, in fact, top city officials were at least morally responsible for what had happened on Osage Ave. on May 13th.
Well a crime is a crime, and equal justice would mean that you bring charges against all who committed crimes…particularly since most major investigations begin with charges against lowly folks who provide evidence on higher ups. So, on many levels, America doesn’t practice what it preaches. So that is under girding the reaction to Rue Mumia.
Let me give you another example.
In the early 90’s in New York City an Irish Republican Army operative, named Joe Doherty, was being held at a jail in NYC. He had been convicted in Northern Ireland of murdering a British Special Forces officer during one of the IRA’s clashes with the British. Set aside for the moment the propriety of what was going on there, and whether the IRA were actually terrorists or were fighting for their homeland. The fact of the matter is that Britain is a major US ally and Dogherty had been convicted of murdering a British military officer. He escapes from Northern Ireland and comes to the US as a fugitive, hides out a couple years and is eventually arrested, and is being held in a federal detention facility. Efforts by the US government to deport him and send him back, were countered by officials in NYC and about 100 members of Congress.
They’re standing up for this convicted murderer on the claim that he did not receive a fair trial in Northern Ireland. In 1990, as a part of this effort to Free Joe Doherty, his supporters authorized the renaming of the street in front of the federal prison in Manhattan, and renamed it to Joe Doherty Corner.
Here you have officials rename a street for a convicted murderer, but then people are outraged when France does the same thing for an alleged cop-killer on the same basis, that they don’t feel that Abu-Jamal received a fair trial. Hypocrisy, contradictions, double-standards of justice, you choose the name.
HB: What do you think it is about Mumia’s case in particular that causes such a fanatical reaction?
LW: I think the level of fanaticism with Mumia’s case is a reaction to the level of support that he has received internationally. Further, I think the intense reactions revolve around race, specifically racism…plus Abu-Jamal’s identification with the Black Panther Party and MOVE. “Law & Order” types hate the Black Panthers. And Philly police hate MOVE. Focusing anger on Abu-Jamal gives police a counter to criticism directed against them for persistent police brutality.
The police are taking it on the chin all the time for continuing brutality, and this is the case that they have decided to dig in on. You get all this police rage against Abu-Jamal despite the fact that he’s not the only person that allegedly shot and killed a police officer in US history. There were at least three police officers shot and killed in Philadelphia in 1981, do you know about that?
HB: Yes, you’ve been researching that, and the two others in Philadelphia were black police officers?
LW: Yes.
HB: Do you feel that the Fraternal Order of Police’s behavior is racially motivated?
LW: Yes, and it has always been racially motivated. This is one of the most outrageous aspects of it, because that organization is racist. I became a full time reporter in Philadelphia in October of 1975. One of the first big stories that I covered was a protest in front of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) headquarters, by members of the black police officer organization, The Guardian Civic League. Some of the people who participated in that demonstration are now State Rep Harold James, who was a police officer at the time, and also the current Sheriff of the City of Philadelphia, John Greene.
Why were these black police officers out in front of the FOP headquarters?
Because there is a bar in the basement of the FOP building, and black police officers (including ones there with their wives) would receive racist treatment when they went to the bar at their union headquarters and they were protesting against that. That type of racism didn’t end in the 1970s. Do a lot of officers find themselves treated badly on a bureaucratic level within the PPD? Yes, but who does the FOP stand up for?
Invariably, it’s white police officers.
One example, a couple years ago, the FOP made some public statements about the unfairness of the police departments in terms of their refusal to allow a police officer, I think his name is Flemming, to move up to become a detective. Flemming has cost the City of Philadelphia over one million dollars in legal settlements because of police brutality. Just a year or so before this controversy about his being promoted to detective, the City had to pay out $750,000 because Flemming beat up a man at the airport without provocation. So here’s the FOP standing up for a chronically brutal cop, instead of saying, “No, this isn’t the type of behavior that we as an organization want to endorse.”
But, it gets worse.
This officer Flemming also beat up a former police officer in 1995, an ex-cop named Gary Wakshul, days before that officer became a witness for the prosecution during the appeals hearing for Mumia Abu-Jamal. Flemming and one of his partners on the police force beat the stuffings out of Gary Wakshul in the hallway of Philadelphia’s Criminal Justice Center, beating him so bad that he sustained multiple injuries. Wakshul subsequently sued the City for the beating and got $60,000 for it.
As you know, Wakshul was a police officer involved in the Mumia Abu-Jamal case. He was the one who brought Abu-Jamal from the scene to the hospital on the morning of Dec. 9, 1981 and Wakshul stayed with him until he was brought in for surgery. Initially, Wakshul filed an official report stating that “the negro male made no comment.” Two months later, he came out and said that he had heard Abu-Jamal confess. Then, when the police asked him about the contradiction between his official report and the later confession claim, Wakshul came up with the absurd response that he “didn’t know the confession had any importance until today.”
Now, why was Wakshul working for the court system in 1995?
Because, in 1984 Wakshul almost beat a man to death in a hospital emergency room, and he was fired. When he was put on trial for this, the judge said, “Well, I think Wakshul’s a good guy and since this happened in the heat of battle,” he chose to acquit him of this unjustified beating. Now, the man he almost killed was in handcuffs, so there wasn’t any battle. And then, guess what? The FOP tried to get Wakshul’s job back.
I will raise the question: what type of law enforcement does the FOP represent? Good lawful law enforcement, or does it support unlawful acts of brutality, many of which are tinged, if not saturated, with racism?
HB: Going back to the Wakshul beating, what do you think was going on there just days before his testimony at Mumia’s PCRA hearing?
LW: The short answer is that I don’t know.
There’s been speculation that the beating was meant to send a message to Wakshul, not to deviate from his testimony that Abu-Jamal actually confessed.
Given all the solid and verifiable facts in Abu-Jamal’s case, I feel that it’s counter-productive and detrimental to engage in a lot of speculation. The factual record is this: Wakshul was beaten up and came to court and gave absurd testimony. The importance is this: Judge Sabo’s 153 page opinion rejected all of Abu-Jamal’s appeal items including claims that Wakshul lied. Incredibly Sabo’s opinion was issued just three days after the hearing, and incredibly Sabo’s opinion was a verbatim copy of the DA’s finding of facts that had been submitted (including grammatical and factual errors).
Sabo ruled that there was no such thing as police brutality in Philadelphia, and that in making that claim, Abu-Jamal was making one more absurd claim to deflect his guilt. Here we have a former police officer who testified for the prosecution during the hearing, who was a victim of police brutality within days of the hearing. That just is yet another
example of the manifest unfairness and factual distortion in Sabo’s ruling and his entire presence throughout the case.
HB: Sabo’s fairness in the PCRA hearings is one of the issues being considered on May 17 by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Any thoughts on next week’s oral arguments?
Clearly Mumia deserves a new trial and I think it is bogus for people to argue that he doesn’t deserve a fair trial because he disrupted his original trial. If you look, his disruptions occurred after it was clear that Sabo in collusion with Prosecutor McGill was intent on violating all of his rights, not just the right to self-representation.
They also hamstrung his attorney by not providing adequate resources, and they tried to sabotage his efforts at every turn. That is when Abu-Jamal started “acting out.” Did he take the right tact in doing that? It’s arguable, but the fact is that everyone is entitled to a fair trial.
In 1959, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a ruling in a murder case from Philadelphia where a guy pled guilty to the murder, and the judge and prosecutor tried to cut corners. The court said that even with evidence of guilt piled as high as Mount Everest, everybody is entitled to a fair trial.
Now, with the hearing coming up on May 17, I think it’s interesting to note that there are a couple of items that this court wanted to hear in oral arguments that the federal District Court Judge had not certified for appeal. One of the items is the bias of Sabo in the 1995 hearing.
Here’s something interesting.
Sabo’s bias has always been obvious and objectionable to anyone with their eyes open, but in 1995, Sabo was so bad that both the Daily News and Philadelphia Inquirer harshly criticized his behavior. The New York Times criticized Sabo’s behavior and was joined by other national publications like the Christian Science Monitor and also an article came out in the American Lawyer, where a lawyer/journalist named Stuart Taylor observed the entire proceedings and concluded that Sabo was thoroughly biased and also concluded that he thought Abu-Jamal did it, but did not receive a fair trial.
There is this incredible record of Sabo’s biases, and the importance of the criticism from the Philly media about Sabo’s bias is that normally these people are rabidly anti-Abu-Jamal and they felt that because of Sabo’s continuing presence on this case and his obvious and detestable bias, that it would undermine any credibility of a fair trial. By undermining that, it would give further credence to criticism that Abu-Jamal did not receive a fair trial.
They were saying, “Take this clown off the case so you don’t give more ammunition to the Mumidiots.” So when it got to the State Supreme Court and when that Court issued their rejection of Abu-Jamal’s appeal in Oct. 1998, there was a paragraph in there talking about Sabo’s bias, and it said the opinions of a handful of journalists “do not convince us” that Sabo was biased. The court said yes, he was intemperate, and made remarks he shouldn’t have, etc., but the Court declared that Sabo wasn’t biased.”
The law and the logic that has been used consistently by the Pa Supreme Court in their rulings on this case would make a Philly pretzel look straight. The Court has bent and broken law and legal precedents in their rulings on the Abu-Jamal case.
HB: Given all of this that you lay out, how is it today that the media is still so biased and does not report the key facts that expose all this injustice?
LW: Because the media of today is like the mainstream white media has always been in this country. They accept a basic narrative and do not deviate from that.
You have to understand that in 1970, a group published a report on the Philly media and it said they reflexively take the side of the police and the prosecutors anytime there is an allegation of police brutality. This is 1970. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that Philadelphia’s media started covering police brutality. The local white media started reporting on brutality after the Inquirer started reporting on it. The Inquirer subsequently won a Pulitzer Prize for that coverage. But before that, they ignored it.
Now I’m not just telling you that from scholarly research and examination. I’m telling you what I know from experience.
From 1975 on, I worked as a reporter covering police brutality. From 1975-78 when I worked for the Philadelphia Tribune (a black newspaper), almost every other day people would come into our office beaten and bloody. The blood was dried on their faces and clothes.
The police refused to allow these brutality victims to file brutality complaints. They would go to the Inquirer in an attempt to talk to a reporter, but they couldn’t get through the door. The Daily News was the same way. Then, they’d go across town to the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, and still couldn’t get through the door. Finally they’d come to the Philadelphia Tribune and they would get through the door. So, I know from personal experience that the mainstream Philadelphia media refused to cover police brutality and really many other issues involving race. They’ll only write about it superficially.
Listen. Why is it that the media in Philadelphia can occasionally cover issues involving police brutality, but never say that there is a pattern and practice of it? Why do they treat these incidents of police brutality as “isolated incidents” instead of examples of an endemic problem?
The Inquirer also won a Pulitzer Prize writing a story about a man who had been falsely convicted of murder, and their coverage got him out of jail and others. So all these examples they’ve written about people being falsely incarcerated, mistreated by police and prosecutors—which shows a pattern—why is it, then, that they stop and say “Yes, all these improprieties have happened, but it doesn’t have any effect at all on the Mumia Abu-Jamal case.”
HB: You and Mumia both covered the MOVE 9 trial. Looking back at it, what
things about the trial remain most vivid in your mind?
LW: To clarify, I covered the preliminary aspects of the MOVE 9 trial, but I did not cover the trial itself. I covered a few parts of the trial when MOVE was actually representing itself. That right of self-representation was revoked, and I think correctly because MOVE was not really trying to represent themselves, but rather to “put the system on trial.” That may be okay, but when your body is in danger of going to jail for a long time, I think you should direct your attention to the evidence (or lack thereof ) and try to get yourself off.
One of my most vivid memories was of MOVE’s house being destroyed around 1:30 that afternoon, just hours after MOVE’s arrest. The shoot out had stopped around 10:30, and the last MOVE person was out around 11:00.
The police had dumped 250,000 gallons of water into the basement. I know this because I was hiding behind the pumping truck that they used for the water cannon when the shooting started. I was talking to the guy as he was pumping the water in. So I know how much water went into that basement. It was a darkened basement filled with water and tear gas, and you can not adequately do an investigation of that within a few hours. Yet police claimed they conducted a thorough investigation and then they tore the compound down.
So, the destruction of evidence alone raises serious questions about the propriety of the evidence used for the charges against them.
HB: Why do you think they destroyed it?
LW: I think they tore down the house in part because they wanted to destroy evidence. Mayor Frank “the racist” Rizzo’s administration and Police Commissioner O’Neill claimed they tore it down because they didn’t want it to become a shrine for MOVE and they felt that they could not maintain security around the house to prevent MOVE people from occupying it again.
The patent absurdity of that is shown by this: From the beginning of March to around the middle of April, 1978, the police enacted a starvation blockade around the house where they sealed off a whole section of Powelton Village, and did not let anyone in or out. People that lived there had to have special passes like in South Africa to get in and out of their homes. So the notion that police couldn’t adequately secure the house is absolutely absurd.
One point of view is that the destruction of evidence destroyed any semblance of a fair trial.
You asked about “vivid memories,” and I remember covering one of the early preliminary hearings. It was held in prison, where they brought in a mini-courtroom and a presiding judge (who was later fired for corruption). I remember vividly when the medical examiner came in and gave his testimony based on the autopsy report related to James Ramp, the officer who was killed.
The medical examiner testified to one thing, in terms of how the bullet entered the body and such. Then, when the prosecutor was getting ready to introduce the medical examiner’s report as evidence, he looked at the first couple paragraphs, and said “Oh, your honor, the medical report here does not conform with the testimony you just heard, let me correct it right here.” This dude pulled out a pencil and changed the damn report right in the courtroom, and then introduced it as evidence. Unbelievably, the judge accepted it!
Once again, this was a very fundamental and egregious violation of procedures. I left the courtroom and called my boss at the Philadelphia Journal, where I was working at the time. I was told, “Yeah, okay, well, we’ll talk about it when you get back.” I was also covering it for the United Press International (UPI) news service, so I called them up, but they told me they weren’t interested.
I said, “Wait a minute. This whole confrontation between the city of Philadelphia and MOVE, starting from 1972, has been about double-standards of justice and violations of
rules and procedures. Here you have a clear example of one, and it’s not newsworthy?” UPI answered: “No. It’s not newsworthy, Linn. If you find something else out, give me a call back.”
HB: So, did anybody use your story?
LW: No!
Nobody used it because they didn’t think it was important. This is a separate argument from whether MOVE is right or wrong, but when you look at the media coverage of MOVE, everything that was perceived as MOVE doing something wrong, was publicized. In contrast, the attacks on MOVE, the injustices, and the deprivations that they endured never found any coverage in the mainstream media. I know it was covered in the Tribune because I was covering for them. It was also on black radio stations because there were black reporters that believed that you should be fair and balanced, and we were criticized for it, Mumia being one of them. This was just because we felt that there were two sides to the story. We weren’t taking MOVE’s side, but we felt they had a legitimate side that needed to be accurately presented.
If they’re getting beaten up, the women getting kicked in the vagina and having miscarried babies, that should be a news story.
February of 1978, there were MOVE members being held in the Philadelphia prisons. The guards jumped on these guys and beat them horribly and then turned around and charged them with assault on the prison guards.
Now, MOVE would normally say, “No, we don’t participate in any kind of cooperation with the system, because we know the system is corrupt.” But, in this particular instance, they said “We’ll cooperate just to show that even if we do cooperate, it won’t mean anything.” So they cooperated with the DA’s office (then headed by Ed Rendell), and after a lengthy investigation, the DA concluded that the victims had indeed been MOVE, who had been attacked by the guards.
So, that meant that the prison guards should have been charged with assault and other crimes. However, Rendell’s office concluded that the appropriate action was not to take any action against the guards, but rather to simply drop the false charges against the MOVE members.
Now, filing a false police report is a crime, as well as lying about something in the report. There are many crimes short of assault (that had been proven in the investigation) that could have been brought against them, but they didn’t do anything.
And, you know what? Little of this that I just told you about that confrontation at the prison ever got into the news media.
HB: In the recent documentary on MOVE, you cite your sources within the police
department who told you that the police know Ramp was killed by police gunfire. Can you say anything more about this?
LW: I will confirm that I was told that by my sources in the police department. However, I have never identified the sources to MOVE, and I will never identify them to anyone else.
But I will tell you this.
Officer Ramp was allegedly shot and killed by a bullet that came from a weapon that fired a .223 caliber round. .223 is the same caliber used in an M-16. Inside MOVE’s house, police claimed that they found four carbines called Mini-14’s, made by Ruger and they fired this .223 round.
The day immediately after the shootout, police were claiming that not a single officer out there that day carried that particular type of weapon. About three weeks later, during the pre-trial proceedings, the police department began to acknowledge the fact that there were police officers who had the Mini-14s firing the .223 rounds. They first said that they had just been out there, but not near the scene. Then, subsequent reports put the officers with those guns closer to the scene, however the official version was “Yes, they were part of the assault, but no, they never fired their weapon.”
So, if in fact, there were no improprieties, why the constantly changing stories and why the heavy-handed cover-up?
There’s another thing, and this is where the destruction of the property precluded a thorough examination, as well as how the trial was handled by MOVE and when the court-appointed attorneys came in, it really became a circus.
But let’s think about this for a minute. You don’t have to be a ballistician to figure this one out. It’s just common sense. You’ve got four male MOVE members in the basement allegedly armed, according to police testimony. A basement by its very nature means it’s below ground level. They’re allegedly firing out of windows, and let’s understand, this was not like The Alamo where people are close up at the window and shooting out. They’re away from the windows, hiding behind pillars in the basement. So, anything they’re shooting out of the windows has to be at an upward trajectory. They would have to shoot up to get out the window.
Ramp was directly across the street at ground level. So how could something hit him in what was said to be a downward type angle when MOVE members were firing upward from that basement?
Okay, maybe the bullet could have ricocheted a little bit. The apartment building across the street from the old MOVE compound is a brick building. However, their compound was made of wood, so the idea that the bullet ricocheted off the brick, back towards MOVE’s house, and then back again to hit Ramp somewhere near ground level, is highly problematic.
Furthermore, the .223 bullet is actually a very small, light weight bullet. Since it’s a very light bullet it will likely break up bouncing back and forth off a brick wall. It’s not going to maintain its integrity and be able to ricochet back and forth a couple times. Unless this was a bullet like the one that Arlen Specter, when he worked for the Warren Commission, said killed Kennedy. You know, one able to change directions in the air a couple times? It’s questionable to unlikely that the bullet that killed Ramp came from that basement.
But, it’s hard for anyone to ever know, because police destroyed evidence. Earlier that year, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that it’s illegal for authorities to destroy a crime scene before the defense has a chance to examine it.
Furthermore, a couple days before the Aug. 8, raid, a Philadelphia judge signed an order barring the city from destroying the MOVE house. Yet, the city did it in violation of this order.
And guess what? They were never called to account for violating that court order. There are copies of the court order too, so they can’t say that it does not exist. That’s bullshit.
HB: Do you think the MOVE 9 should be granted parole in 2008?
LW: Parole is supposedly based on adjustment to prison. From what I understand, there have been few infractions, if any at all. So, the short answer is yes.
They’ve served 30 years in jail for a third-degree murder conviction. The average sentence for third-degree murder is 10-15 years, so they’ve already served twice that. So, yes, they should be released.
Will that happen? I don’t think so.
The Parole Board has a couple of arguably illegal standards in place. One of them says you have to accept responsibility for your crime. But, if you’ve maintained your innocence the whole time you’re in there, how can you say “Okay, I did it?”
This next standard is clearly illegal. It will demand that for MOVE members to be released without serving their full sentence, they will have to renounce membership in MOVE. This is something that would easily happen in China, North Korea, or Russia, saying “You have to denounce these un-communist feelings that you have.” But in America, we’re not supposed to do that. But we do that in Pennsylvania with MOVE members, and nobody says that it’s a problem.
Once again, this is another example of what I was saying at the beginning of our conversation, that there is a big gap between what America says it is and what it actually does.
HB: Anything else on your mind?
LW: Looking at Abu-Jamal’s appeal with the Third Circuit, I hope that the court follows its own legal precedent in a case involving Abu-Jamal. The legal precedent is this: there is a rule that courts are supposed to follow previous rulings because this keeps some stability in the law, so a Judge doesn’t wake up one morning with a bad hair day and change everything, and then the next day change it back. Had the Pa Supreme Court followed its own previous rulings, Abu-Jamal would have had a new trial and/or been released over a decade ago.
The Third Circuit has an opportunity to show whether the rule of law actually means something. The Third Circuit has granted hearings that have led to new trials to individuals on the issue of jury discrimination. So, if they follow their own precedent, then Abu-Jamal will receive a new hearing, if not a new trial.
Earlier on, you mentioned a guy named Harold Wilson. One of the legal victories that eventually led to his release was the a claim of jury discrimination and in this case it was a local Philadelphia judge who called for a new trial and the Philadelphia DA didn’t even oppose it.
HB: We have to hope, and of course keep raising awareness and applying pressure.
LW: But for the international movement supporting him, Abu-Jamal would have been executed by now. Let’s look at 1995. Pa prison authorities were illegally opening Abu-Jamal’s mail as a result of the FOP complaints about him writing articles and a book while in prison. So, the Pa prisons, who had previously allowed prisoners to work with authors to publish accounts of their crimes, and actually helped facilitate interviews for them, are now cracking down on Abu-Jamal.
It was bad enough that they were opening his mail, and not just mail from family and friends, but mail from his lawyer, which is fundamentally illegal. They were copying his stuff and sending copies to the Governor’s office. So, when Gov. Ridge signed the death warrant on Mumia in June of 1995, he was doing it with the full knowledge that Mumia’s attorney’s were preparing to formally file an appeal.
What Ridge did was fundamentally illegal. But he later became the first Homeland Security Czar. So what does that say about America’s adherence to law?
These are findings of fact from a lawsuit that was filed by Mumia, and these findings of fact are contained in a ruling favoring Abu-Jamal that was issued by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. So, these are rulings from federal judges in the late 1990s.
HB: It at least seems like the DA is afraid of the Third Circuit, with their recent request for the court to recuse itself from Abu-Jamal’s case, which the court denied.
LW: That was so patently absurd. They initially started that with a letter, saying “Listen, we think all you guys should step aside.” Abu-Jamal’s attorney, Robert R. Bryan wrote a letter in response, which cited numerous rulings and precedents. The Third Circuit then told the DA that if they wanted to challenge it, they’d have to file a formal legal brief. The DA filed the formal brief, but it still contained all of the factual inaccuracies and inappropriate law that they had alleged in the letter brief. The court threw it out.
Let me tell you something that is of relevance. If they really cared about a fair trial, why did the DA’s office not oppose Sabo sitting on the 1995 appeals, when one of the appeal items was his bias in 1982. If the judge was biased in 1982, would you not think that he’d be biased in 1995? The DA fought that and said that they wanted Sabo on the case.
When the PA Supreme Court was deciding on the appeal that came out of the 95 hearing, the defense said, “Listen, we seek the recusal of one member of the Pa Supreme Court: Justice Ron Castille, who had been a Philadelphia DA.” They wanted his recusal on grounds of the Judicial Code of Conduct, section 3D, it says that any judge who was a lawyer for a governmental agency, and through that position, has knowledge of the facts of the case in front of him, must recuse himself. So, here we have Castille, who was DA of Philadelphia, who signed papers to oppose Abu-Jamal’s appeals, and is now sitting on the deliberation. That is a violation of ethics and the DA office didn’t care about that at all.
So, when the Pa Supreme Court issued its second rejection of Abu-Jamal’s appeals, Castille wrote a second opinion explaining why he had refused to recuse himself. In there he says (paraphrased), “Abu-Jamal’s attorney’s are jumping all over me because I took campaign funds from the Fop because the FOP worked on my campaign to become a Supreme Court Justice, and a few years ago the FOP named me as their ‘Man of the Year,’ well that’s unfair to focus on me, because four other members of this court received campaign financing and campaign support from the FOP.”
So we have five members of a seven member court, and all were saying that it did not show any kind of impropriety. On issues of recusal of judges, its not just impropriety, but it is the appearance of impropriety. If you have five members of a seven member court receiving money and support from the prime organization seeking the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal, does that not raise the issue of appearance of impropriety?
HB: What other examples are there of media bias?
LW: In this Mumia affair there have been many allegations of his misconduct, including allegations of him confessing. In 1995, there was an article in the Washington Post, which featured an interview with Maureen Faulkner, and it was talking about how she was outraged that Abu-Jamal had been able to publish a book. The article started with an anecdote from her where she claimed that in court, during the trial, when her husband’s bloody shirt was displayed, Mumia turned around, looked at her, pulled his dreadlocks back, and smiled at her.
However, the official court transcript documented that Mumia was not even in the courtroom on the day that Mrs. Faulkner claimed this smiling incident took place. So, I wrote a column questioning this account and others. Maureen Faulkner wrote me a three page, single-spaced letter calling me everything but a child of God.
I wrote her back and said, “Ms. Faulkner, listen, if there are any ambiguities in this matter, it’s because of you and what you said.” So she then claimed that the Washington Post reporter had gotten the wrong date. She then cited an Inquirer article that says she left the courtroom after the shirt was displayed. However, when I checked it, the article did not say anything about Mumia turning around and smiling at her.
When you look at the rest of the articles from the trial, nowhere does Ms. Faulkner say that she had to leave the courtroom because Mumia smiled at her.
Interestingly, that article Mrs. Faulkner cited did quote the trial prosecutor telling the jury that his Office had made no deals with key prosecution witness Cynthia White. Of course, after the trial, the DA drop a lot of criminal cases filed against White. If the deal didn’t exist on that date, it happened soon after. The jury never knew White was getting special deals from the DA – which is another element undermining a fair trial.
This smiling incident and other incidents are things where I fault reporters. The problem with much of the media is that due to turnover, there is not much institutional memory, and not enough people who have the expertise to write intelligently about such things. Apparently, that Washington Post writer must have never covered a trial, because otherwise she’d have known that at a high profile trial such as this, there are many people and 80 percent of those people are looking at every twitch, movement, smile, or frown from the defendant. A question should have been asked as to who else saw this and why it wasn’t reported. But that article didn’t contain that type of question.
No one saw this allegedly objectionable action.
That seems so consistent in a parallel to the alleged confession. No one heard this confession, except for Gary Bell (who was Faulkner’s partner) and he didn’t remember it until over two months later. Gary Wakshul initially reported that the “negro male made no comment,” but after a police brutality complaint by Abu-Jamal, he suddenly remembers the confession. Wakshul and Bell allege that there were over a dozen officers in the area who also heard the confession, and in 25 years not a single one came forward.
In 1995, the defense tried to get Judge Sabo to issue subpoenas to bring them in and ask them what they heard, and why they didn’t report it. Sabo refused. He said “These are officers. They’re honorable people, so I’m sure if you ask them, they’ll come in.” They were asked and didn’t come in. Then, in his opinion, Sabo wrote that there was no contrary evidence that the confession didn’t take place, because all the people who testified in court said there was a confession. By his rulings, Sabo made certain that officers would not come in and testify.
The first person to allegedly report the confession was hospital security guard Priscilla Durham. Interestingly, she claims to hear a confession to a murder, but does she talk to a detective, uniformed officers, or police internal affairs?
No.
She claims that she went to her supervisor and allegedly writes this down on a hand-written report. Did her supervisor give this report to the police? No. So what does that say about the validity of the confession?
HB: Did you follow how the week of December 9, two more accounts came out from William Colarulo (now a Chief Inspector for the Philadelphia police) and Kathleen Gerrow (now an executive producer at NBC 10)?
LW: Hans, let me tell you something. These two accounts sound suspicious like dog dirt…dropping on a sidewalk.
Let’s think logically here. William Colarulo was the head of the police department’s press office for over two years, and he never once said anything about this? That’s ridiculous!
But when you read his news media statements about this confession, what he said about what Abu-Jamal was wearing is totally different from what Wakshul said he was wearing, when Wakshul voluntarily went to police on Dec. 16, 1981 and volunteered more information where he was able to remember the type of clothing, the color, and the texture. The last question the police asked Wakshul on 12/16/81 was, “Is there anything else that you would like to add?” He said no. There was nothing about a confession. It is absurd.
Furthermore, what Colarulo said was not based on what he saw or heard himself, but was based on what someone told him. Has the police officer that Colarulo cites as having heard the confession ever come forward and said anything about it?
Absolutely not.
Now, reporter Kathleen Gerrow. This is what’s really strange. We have a reporter that claims to have heard a confession in the largest murder case that was going on in Philadelphia at the time, and she said nothing about it? Journalistic careers are made on bits of information like hearing a major piece of information in a major murder case. If she had this information, it could have made her career. Why did she not say anything about it for 25 years?
These sorts of things defy logic and common sense. But this is what passes as journalism in Philadelphia…and evidence of Abu-Jamal’s guilt. Why didn’t the so-called reporter interviewing Gerrow ask a follow-up question, like “Why didn’t you say something earlier? It could have made your career?” These questions should be asked.
It’s not for the press to take a position one way or the other, but it is the responsibility of the press to scrutinize all sides with the same rigor. One side (the Danny Faulkner side) can say anything they want, even if it makes no sense at all, yet it gets credibility and traction in the media. On the other side, Abu-Jamal’s side can say anything they want, and irrespective of the substance and factual accuracy, and they get no coverage at all.
Where is the journalistic fairness, balance, and accuracy? These are the three things that are supposed to be fundamental to journalism. Are they happening in this case?
No, they are not.
Hans Bennett (insubordination.blogspot.com) is a Philadelphia-based photojournalist and co-founder of “Journalists for Mumia,” whose new website is: Abu-Jamal-News.com
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