Support the Warrens in Court Monday, March 3 at 9:00 am

The Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition urges you to show your support for freedom fighters Michael Tarif Warren and Evelyn Warren this coming Monday, March 3rd at 9AM

Monday, March 3, 2008
Michael Tarif & Evelyn Warren
9:00 a.m.
Criminal Court, AP2, 6th Floor
120 Schermerhorn Street
Brooklyn, New York

Take the 2,3,4 or 5 train to Borough Hall or the A or F trains to Jay St./Borough Hall.

The Warrens were assaulted by NYPD near their home when peacefully observing & taking notes as a cop assaulted a young man.

http://www.justiceforwarrens.org

WHAT HAPPENED?

11/30/07: Video interview by TotalBlackTV.com
(this is the first 2 minutes of interview, view rest at TotalBlackTV.com)
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Attorney Michael Tarif Warren and his wife Evelyn were driving along Vanderbilt Avenue around 6 pm on Thursday, June 21, 2007 when they stopped at a red light. While stopped in traffic they witnessed NYPD officers pursuing a young man. They put their vehicle in park and exited their vehicle to see what was happening. They saw the young man on the ground with his hands cuffed behind him surrounded by police officers who were kicking him viciously.

Then Sgt. Talvy, who appeared to be in charge, kicked him in the head and stepped back some distance away. He placed his hand on his handgun on his right hip.

"Not only as people of conscience and moral decency, but as lawyers, we thought this is outrageous." They arrived and stood "more than ten feet away," he said. We returned to the vehicle almost immediately because we were ordered to do so. Outside the vehicle, Mr. Warren said to Sgt. Talvy, "Why are you beating him, he's handcuffed, he's not a threat. Take him to the precinct."

They returned to their car, and Ms. Warren began to write down the license plate numbers of the police vehicles as the Warrens watched the NYPD put the bleeding young man in a car. When Sgt. Talvy came over to the car Mr. Warren told him we were lawyers. Sgt. Talvy struck Ms. Warren while both Warrens were in the vehicle. Sgt. Talvy was punching Mr. Warren repeatedly in the head, looking as if he had no intention of stopping, repeatedly punching him through the window and shouting, "Get out of the car!" Sgt. Talvy dragged Mr. Warren out of the car, ripping his shirt and pants. Ms. Warren, very upset, asked "Why are you doing this?" Sgt. Talvy then punched her in the face. Both were arrested and taken to the 77th precinct charged with obstruction, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest.

Quickly, word of the Warrens arrest spread, and several hundred people descended on the 77th Precinct demanding his release. Organizations including the December 12th Movement, 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, Malcolm X Grassroots, International Action Center, CEMOTAP, the Muslim community, the Haitian community and many others were present and several media outlets were on hand.

NYC Councilman Charles Barron, Attorneys Roger Wareham, Reginald Haley, and Marisa Benton began negotiating their release with Brooklyn's top brass, including Community Affairs Chief Douglas Zeigler, Brooklyn Borough Commander Chief Gerald Nelson, and 77th Precinct Executive Officer Michael Marino. At approximately 10:30 PM Evelyn Warren was released with a summons. Michael Warren was released with a DAT at 11:30 PM.

Councilman Barron and other community activists are demanding Talvy be fired and that Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hines "drop the charges (against the Warrens) and charge the police." He stated, "Police who murder and assault us must be charged with crimes and put in jail. That is the only deterrent."

Evelyn Warren added, "We are professionals, if they do this to us in broad daylight on a crowded street, what do they do in the dark when no one is around? That's what I'm concerned about. Officer Talvy must go and Police Commissioner Kelly must go, because his policy allows this behavior to continue."

If charges against them are not dropped, Michael and Evelyn Warren vow to take the case to trial and use it as a community mobilizing and educating tool to fight police brutality.

This report largely taken from an article by Amadi Ajamu published by the NYC Indymedia Center on June 23, 2007. Thank you, Sister Amadi.

Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org

Questions and comments may be sent to claude@freedomarchives.org

New Link for MOVE 9 Parole Board Letters

The link previously listed for getting the names of parole board members is dead.

Use this link instead: http://www.pbpp.state.pa.us/pbpp/site/default.asp

Here are the names:

Catherine C. McVey, Chairman

Charles Fox

Michael L. Green

Jeffrey R. Imboden

Matthew T. Mangino

Benjamin A. Martinez

Gerard N. Massaro

Judy Viglione

Lloyd A. White

Below is the entire e-mail, (w/updated link). Thanks so much!

URGENT CALL FOR THE MOVE 9!

Phil Africa says that the MOVE 9 can really use letters and calls to the PA Parole Board this month and next [February & March]. Letters supporting their release can make a big difference. The Board will be having a hearing in April.

After THIRTY years, our brothers and sisters are finally up for parole. If not given probation this year, they may all be forced to serve another SEVENTY. They have almost completed their minimum sentence [of the 30-100 year sentence]. Let's bring them home where they belong in August 2008!

This April parole hearing is SO important. Letters and calls to the Parole Board now can really help. Phil is asking that folks send copies of their letters to him. He wants to take a pile of copies of our letters to the hearing as a show of public support.

It is probably a good idea for folks to send letters to each of the nine Board members. The chairperson was appointed by Ed "1985 Bomber" Rendell so don't count on her getting your message to the whole Board. Their individual names are on this web page:

http://www.pbpp.state.pa.us/pbpp/site/default.asp

Letters can all be sent to this address:

[name of Board member],
Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole
1101 South Front Street, Suite #5100
Harrisburg, PA 17104-2517
Phone: (717) 787-5699

Please send copies of the letters to Phil at:

William Phillips Africa #AM-4984
SCI-Dallas
1000 Follies Road
Dallas, PA 18612

For supporters to brush up on the history of MOVE and the "MOVE 9," this recent 45-minute talk by Ramona is great:

http://pittsburgh.indymedia.org/news/2007/08/27830.php

Letters and phone calls to the Board are needed NOW. Let's bring 'em HOME. 30 years is too much already.
70 more is unthinkable.

Peace All! Ona MOVE!!!

Dave

Hans Bennett is a Philadelphia photojournalist mostly focusing on the movement to free Mumia Abu-Jamal and all political prisoners. An archive of his work is available at insubordination.blogspot.com and he is also co-founder of "Journalists for Mumia," created to challenge the long history of corporate media bias, whose website is: http://www.Abu-Jamal-News.com

Urgent Call for the MOVE 9!

from NYC Coalition to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal:

Phil Africa says that the MOVE 9 can really use letters and calls to the PA Parole Board this month and next [February & March]. Letters supporting their release can make a big difference. The Board will be having a hearing in April. After THIRTY years, our brothers and sisters are finally up for parole. If not given probation this year, they may all be forced to serve another SEVENTY. They have almost completed their minimum sentence [of the 30-100 year sentence]. Let's bring them home where they belong in August 2008!

This April parole hearing is SO important. Letters and calls to the Parole Board now can really help. Phil is asking that folks send copies of their letters to him. He wants to take a pile of copies of our letters to the hearing as a show of public support.
It is probably a good idea for folks to send letters to each of the nine Board members. The chairperson was appointed by Ed "1985 Bomber" Rendell so don't count on her getting your message to the whole Board. Their individual names are on this web page: http://www.pbpp.state.pa.us/pbppinfo/cwp/view.asp?a=3&q=154178&pbppNav=|

Letters can all be sent to this address:

[name of Board member],
Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole
1101 South Front Street, Suite #5100
Harrisburg, PA 17104-2517

tel: (717) 787-5699

Please send copies of the letters to Phil at:

William Phillips Africa #AM-4984
SCI-Dallas
1000 Follies Rd.,
Dallas, PA 18612

For supporters to brush up on the history of MOVE and the "MOVE 9," this recent 45-minute talk by Ramona is great:
http://pittsburgh.indymedia.org/news/2007/08/27830.php

Letters and phone calls to the Board are needed NOW. Let's bring 'em HOME. 30 years is too much already, 70 more is unthinkable.

Responses to the Court's Decision

From Hans Bennett:

Immediately following Tuesday's news, I asked several people to respond to the court's decision: Pam Africa, Robert R. Bryan, Dave Lindorff, Michael Schiffmann, and Linn Washington Jr.

PAM AFRICA, Coordinator of The International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal

I am not shocked by this decision. The PA Supreme Court has never ruled fairly in Mumia's case, especially with former Philadelphia DA Ron Castille's participation.

This should wake people up to see the injustice in Mumia's case. Why can the media report so quickly on this decision, but not report on the newly discovered crime scene photos? These photos are serious evidence, but the media has ignored them.

The media and courts are complicit in the railroading of Mumia.

I urge readers to please help fight the media bias by going to Abu-Jamal-News.com to see the new photo evidence, downloading the information, and spreading the word, at this urgent time in Mumia's case.


ROBERT R. BRYAN, San Francisco, Lead Counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal

Mumia and I had a long conference this afternoon, shortly after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court made its ruling. We were not surprised since that court has a history of not addressing the racism and fraud that has dominated the prosecution since its inception over a quarter of a century ago. By dismissing the appeal on procedural grounds, the court avoided dealing with the compelling facts establishing that the prosecution of my client was based upon lies, half-truths, and bigotry. It is sad that the state court used possible mistakes of the previous lawyers in the case as an excuse to dodge the truth.

This state ruling has no bearing on the the proceedings pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. If the federal decision is favorable, then the Pennsylvania Supreme Court judgment will be moot. Otherwise, I plan to seek relief in the U.S. Supreme Court. I will not rest until Mumia is free.


LINN WASHINGTON, JR., Philadelphia Tribune Columnist, Temple University Professor of Journalism, and graduate of the Yale Law Journalism Fellowship Program

This ruling is sad but not surprising. It continues the infamous Pennsylvania Supreme Court tradition in the Abu-Jamal case of abusing law to block justice. Until this Court grants a new trial to Abu-Jamal where both sides can fairly present evidence, any ruling it issues is legally corrupt.


DAVE LINDORFF, Author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia
Abu-Jamal<(Common Courage Press, 2003)

It comes as no surprise to hear that the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court has rejected yet another appeal by Mumia Abu-Jamal, the state's longest-surviving death row prisoner. The court, which is led by former Philadelphia D.A. Ron Castille (who helped fight Abu-Jamal's appeals in his role as DA and has yet to recuse himself from decisions involving this case), has never issued a ruling favorable to Abu-Jamal.

That said, it is clear that the prosecution's case was rampant with examples of suborned perjury, from the belated and choreographed lies by police about having heard a shouted out confession in the hospital--an event no nurse or attending physician heard, and which police at the time curiously failed to note in their reports on the evening's events, to "eye-witness" testimony from a taxi driver whose taxi nobody remembers seeing where he said it was--parked directly behind Officer Daniel Faulkner's car. And of course more recently we have the newly discovered news photos showing police tampering with the evidence at the very scene of the crime.

In a fair world, this case would have been tossed out long ago, but as the PA Supreme Court has demonstrated yet again, we do not live in a fair world.


DR. MICHAEL SCHIFFMANN, German Linguist at The University of Heidelberg, co-founder of Journalists for Mumia, and the author of Race Against Death; Mumia Abu-Jamal: a Black Revolutionary in White America

The original decision in May/June 2005 by Court of Common Pleas Judge Pamela Dembe to dismiss Mumia Abu-Jamal's 3rd PCRA petition was already a travesty of justice. Everything in that decision was tailored to deny Abu-Jamal relief. After sitting on the case for almost four years, the judge deciding it evidently didn't have a clue about the most elementary facts.

That was not necessary, though; all that was needed was to twist the law in such a way that Abu-Jamal wound never have a chance, regardless of what he presented.

Abu-Jamal's 3rd PCRA petition presented testimony by two witnesses that attacked the arguably two single-most important prosecution witnesses at the June/July 1982 Abu-Jamal trial, prostitute Cynthia White and hospital security guard Priscilla Durham. As discussed extensively in work on our website www.abu-jamal-news.com and elsewhere, not least in many, many defense briefs, these witnesses were highly incredible even without that new testimony.

All the same, it was crucially important: New witness Yvette Williams testified that Cynthia White had been blackmailed into fingering Abu-Jamal as the murderer by death threats on the part of the police, and new witness Kenneth Pate testified that Durham had been peer-pressured by the police into falsely accusing Abu-Jamal of having boasted about having "shot the motherfucker" Daniel Faulkner and hoping he would die.

If proven in court, these two new claims in themselves would be enough to prove that the case against Abu-Jamal was hopelessly contaminated right from the start and to explode it once and for all.

By bending even the reactionary new Clinton-era laws to expedite the application of the death penalty out of shape, Judge Dembe at the time concluded that the new evidence was not presented in a "timely" fashion. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court now does the same, inventing yet other and different reasons why the evidence is "untimely."

It's not worth going again into the "legal" forks and angles of that new decision. It's a repeat performance of the 2005 Dembe decision which I analyzed at the time and which got a worthy response by the defense, as we now see without avail. What simmers through in every line of those decisions is that one thing always left unsaid: "WE ARE AFRAID OF THE FACTS."

But those facts won't go away, if we fight to disseminate them, to get them out into the public sphere, and to have them finally heard on court. That is the most urgent task in the weeks and months to come.

Mumia Abu-Jamal Loses Bid for Hearing

From Hans Bennett/Sis. Fatirah:
This is NOT the decision from the 3rd Circuit Court. It is a separate appeal with the State Supreme Court.

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Pennsylvania's highest appeals court has rejected a request by convicted killer Mumia Abu-Jamal (moo-MEE'-ah AH'-boo jah-MAHL') for a hearing into his claims that witnesses in his case perjured themselves.

The state Supreme Court on Tuesday issued a unanimous ruling saying the former Black Panther and radio reporter waited too long to file a post-conviction appeal in the matter.

Abu-Jamal was convicted of shooting to death Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981. A federal judge in 2001 overturned Abu-Jamal's death sentence but upheld his conviction.

His case has attracted international notoriety. A separate appeal in the case, regarding claims of racial bias and faulty jury instructions, is pending before the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

---FROM: Associated Press, Tues, Feb. 19

For background on this appeal, see these 2 previous articles from Betsy Piette: http://www.workers.org/2007/us/mumia-appeal-0719/

Michael Schiffmann: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=8603
==============

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/diarypage.php?did=6184

PA Supreme Court rejects Mumia Abu-Jamal's PCRA appeal
--Critics say the ruling is unjust
By Hans Bennett (Abu-Jamal-News.com)

On Tuesday, February 19, in a ruling unrelated to the pending US Third Circuit Court decision, The Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected death row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal's appeal of a 2005 ruling by Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Pamela Dembe, which denied Abu-Jamal's Post Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) petition, on grounds that it was not "timely." (See reports by The Associated Press and Philadelphia Inquirer.)

This recent PCRA petition was based on affidavits by two witnesses that did not testify at the original 1982 trial: Yvette Williams and Kenneth Pate. Yvette Williams states that key prosecution witness Cynthia White told her that she had been coerced by police into giving false testimony against Abu-Jamal. Defense witnesses Veronica Jones and Pamela Jenkins have given similar accounts of Cynthia White's coerced testimony against Abu-Jamal. As Amnesty International has documented, White's alleged eye-witness account was altered, as each subsequent account given to police further served to support the prosecution scenario used to convict Abu-Jamal. Kenneth Pate says that prosecution witness Priscilla Durham confided to him that she had also lied in court when she stated that she's heard Abu-Jamal confess at the hospital. Even before Pate's affidavit, Durham's account was very suspicious.

The alleged "hospital confession," where Abu-Jamal reportedly declared, "I shot the motherf***er and I hope the motherf***er dies," was first officially reported to police over two months later, by hospital guards Priscilla Durham and James LeGrand (Feb. 9, 1982), P.O. Gary Wakshul (Feb.11), P.O. Gary Bell (Feb.25), and P.O. Thomas M. Bray (March 1). Only 2 of these five witnesses were called by the DA: Gary Bell (Faulkner's partner and "best friend") and Priscilla Durham.

At trial, Gary Bell testified that the 2 month lapse resulted from him being so upset over the death of Faulkner. Priscilla Durham testified, and added for the first time, that she had reported the confession to her supervisor the next day. Neither her supervisor, nor the alleged handwritten statement were presented in court. The DA sent an officer to the hospital, returning
with a suspicious typed version. Sabo accepted the paper (not signed) despite both Durham's disavowal, and the defense's protest that authorship and authenticity were unproven.

For more on Kenneth Pate and Yvette Williams, please see German author Michael Schiffmann's 2005 analysis of Judge Pamela Dembe's ruling.

IMPORTANT TEACH-IN ON GRAND JURIES, REPRESSION, AND RESISTANCE

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 23rd, 2-5 PM
St. Mary's Church
521 West 126th Street (between Amsterdam and Broadway).

Participants will include:

Ana Lopez and Youth Resisters, Hostos January 11 Grand Jury Resistance Campaign
Julio Rosado, Legendary Independentista and Grand Jury Resister
Esperanza Martell, Iglesia San Romero de las Americas
Roger Wareham, December 12th Movement
Robert Boyle, National Lawyers Guild
Bob Lederer, Grand Jury Resister/Resistance in Brooklyn
NYC Coalition members
Friends of MOVE
And others to be announced

Learn from and support the Puerto Rican Independence Movement and the young Puerto Rican cultural workers who have been served notice to appear before a Grand Jury in Brooklyn - a serious attack on the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, on the Puerto Rican community, and on all of our civil liberties. Learn how the grand jury process is part of the state's attacks on the progressive movement in this country. Learn about the history of resistance to this repression. How does this particular governmental attack on us fit into the overall picture of repression and fascistic developments? Learn about the attacks on December 12th, the Free Mumia Movement, the MOVE organization, and many others.

There will be extensive time for questions and role playing to help people understand the grand jury process, and to strengthen our courage and ability to resist.

Sponsored by: Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition, Hostos January 11th Grand Jury Resistance Campaign, and the December 12th Movement.

For more information call: (212) 330-8029 or check www.freemumia.com

Protest the Building of Museum at Sing Sing Prison

Activists are opposing the building of a museum to be located in Sing Sing prison in Ossining, New York. The museum will include a tourist friendly depiction of all people deemed "famous" who were executed in Sing Sing at the hands of the state, including the Rosenbergs. Some are comparing this move to what has similarly happened at Alcatraz, calling Sing Sing the "Alcatraz of the east".

We urge people to protest the building of this museum. For an article on this development please visit: http://www.hudsonriver.com/halfmoonpress/stories/0205singsing.htm


To sign on to a letter against the building of the museum, please email: willwall04@yahoo.com