From Thandisizwe Chimurenga:
Justice on Trial: Mumia Abu Jamal
L.A. PREMIERE - ONE NIGHT ONLY!
Sunday, Dec. 5, 2010 @ 7 p.m.
@ the Downtown Independent Theatre
251 S. Main Street, betw 2nd and 3rd
TICKETS: $12 at the door
On Nov. 9 a Federal court in Philadelphia again took up the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, journalist, author and former member of the Black Panther Party currently on death row. The results of that hearing, which will determine if Mumia is executed or gets life imprisonment, have not been decided YET. Attorney Robert Bryan says that Mumia is now "in the greatest danger since his 1981 arrest."
Dec. 9 is the 29th anniversary of the night Mumia was accused of murdering a white policeman. He has always affirmed his innocence. This new film, "Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal," fairly presents the arguments made by Mumia's supporters alongside the prosecution's arguments and interviews with others advocating Mumia's execution. The film's featured interviews include press photographer Pedro Polakoff, whose newly discovered crime scene photos expose police manipulation of evidence.
213.321.0575 for more info
Friday, November 19, 2010
Amnesty International: Mumia Abu-Jamal Deserves New Trial, Not New Death Sentence says Amnesty International
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2010/11/09-4
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 9, 2010
Contact:
Amnesty International USA
Wende Gozan Brown
212-633-4247, wgozan@aiusa.org
Mumia Abu-Jamal Deserves New Trial, Not New Death Sentence says Amnesty International
Washington, D.C. - November 9
On Tuesday, November 9, a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals will conduct a hearing to re-examine its previous decision overturning Mumia Abu-Jamal’s death sentence.
In 2000, after a painstaking review of the case, Amnesty International concluded in its report, The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Life in the Balance, that justice could only be served by granting Abu-Jamal a new trial.
The following is a statement from Laura Moye, director of Amnesty International USA’s Death Penalty Abolition Campaign:
“Re-imposing the death penalty would be intolerable. Mumia Abu-Jamal should receive a new trial, not a new death sentence.
“Serious questions about fairness in Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case remain unanswered. While Amnesty International does not take a position on guilt or innocence, the organization maintains that Abu-Jamal’s original trial, which was irredeemably tainted by politics and race, failed to meet international fair trial standards.
“Among myriad concerns surrounding this case: Abu-Jamal had inadequate defense representation at trial and during the sentencing phase. Eleven potential African American jurors were dismissed. The close political relationship between the Fraternal Order of Police and the elected Pennsylvania judiciary was inappropriate. The judge, who had close political ties to law enforcement, was openly hostile to the defense.
“These and other concerns have not been addressed. Justice demands a new trial. The state of Pennsylvania should turn its back on the irreversible and broken death penalty system.”
We are people from across the world standing up for humanity and human rights. Our purpose is to protect people wherever justice, freedom, truth and dignity are denied. We investigate and expose abuses, educate and mobilize the public, and help transform societies to create a safer, more just world.
Amnesty International - USA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 9, 2010
Contact:
Amnesty International USA
Wende Gozan Brown
212-633-4247, wgozan@aiusa.org
Mumia Abu-Jamal Deserves New Trial, Not New Death Sentence says Amnesty International
Washington, D.C. - November 9
On Tuesday, November 9, a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals will conduct a hearing to re-examine its previous decision overturning Mumia Abu-Jamal’s death sentence.
In 2000, after a painstaking review of the case, Amnesty International concluded in its report, The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Life in the Balance, that justice could only be served by granting Abu-Jamal a new trial.
The following is a statement from Laura Moye, director of Amnesty International USA’s Death Penalty Abolition Campaign:
“Re-imposing the death penalty would be intolerable. Mumia Abu-Jamal should receive a new trial, not a new death sentence.
“Serious questions about fairness in Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case remain unanswered. While Amnesty International does not take a position on guilt or innocence, the organization maintains that Abu-Jamal’s original trial, which was irredeemably tainted by politics and race, failed to meet international fair trial standards.
“Among myriad concerns surrounding this case: Abu-Jamal had inadequate defense representation at trial and during the sentencing phase. Eleven potential African American jurors were dismissed. The close political relationship between the Fraternal Order of Police and the elected Pennsylvania judiciary was inappropriate. The judge, who had close political ties to law enforcement, was openly hostile to the defense.
“These and other concerns have not been addressed. Justice demands a new trial. The state of Pennsylvania should turn its back on the irreversible and broken death penalty system.”
We are people from across the world standing up for humanity and human rights. Our purpose is to protect people wherever justice, freedom, truth and dignity are denied. We investigate and expose abuses, educate and mobilize the public, and help transform societies to create a safer, more just world.
Amnesty International - USA
No News is Not Good News: If Cops Tape Protests and Journalists and No One Reports It, Is It Intimidation?
by Dave Lindorff
11/19/2010
Is it news when police photograph and videotape demonstrations?
Apparently for American editors and reporters, making that news judgement depends on where the demonstration occurs and what nationality the police are.
When a hundred artists gathered outside a Beijing courtroom in mid-November to protest the jailing of artist Wu Yuren, who had earlier been beaten by police and jailed because he had gone to a police station to file a complaint against a landlord, the New York Times ran an article by reporter Andrew Jacobs which pointedly noted that police officers had videotaped the crowd, and then quoted a demonstrator, artist Dou Bu, as saying, "I was scared to come out here today, but you have to face your fears."
But a week earlier, when several hundred backers of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a black journalist on Pennsylvania's death row for the killing of a police officer, demonstrated in front of a Third Circuit federal court building in Philadelphia, where a three-judge panel was rehearing an argument on his sentence, and local police not only videotaped the officially sanctioned rally, but also aggressively photographed and taped a group of journalists waiting to be allowed into the courtroom early, there was no mention of their action in any media, local or national.
In Philadelphia, and in cities across the country, it has become routine for police departments to openly and surreptitiously videotape participants in demonstrations, and to assemble files on demonstrators, even when the events are entirely peaceful and without incident, and when the rallies or marches have been issued city permits.
Philadelphia Police officials insist that the photographing and videotaping of protests is legal and is not intended to intimidate dissent. Lt. Raymond Evers, who heads the Philadelphia Police public affairs unit, says the purpose of such photographic records is "crowd control and training." He claims the department wants a record so that if any violence occurs, police can show what happened, and how police responded, and also so that any perpetrators or malefactors can be identified later.
That doesn‚t explain what happened at the Abu-Jamal hearing, however. On Nov. 9, some 12 journalists who had come to the Federal Courthouse on 6th Street, just two blocks from the old Independence Hall where the Constitution and Declaration of Independence were signed, to cover an appellate court panel hearing reviewing a federal district judge‚s 2001 ruling that lifted Abu-Jamal's death sentence, found themselves surrounded by Philadelphia Police who began photographing and videotaping them at close range. The reporters, who had been credential-checked and then herded by US Marshals down a kind of "cattle chute" constructed of temporary metal barriers, to a holding point in front of the court building‚s main entrance, were unable to avoid being repeatedly photographed.
Many, including journalists from abroad, expressed shock and dismay at the police actions. "Is this how they treat the press here in America?" asked one reporter from Agence France Presse.
Linn Washington, a local journalist with the Philadelphia Tribune, America‚s oldest African-American newspaper (and a member of the ThisCantBeHappening! news collective), who was singled out for photographing and videotaping by police cameramen as he walked down the chute alone to join the other journalists, said, "It was absolutely a process designed to intimidate us."
Journalists who asked the police pointing the cameras, and accompanying officers in civilian clothes from the department‚s civil affairs office, for an explanation for their actions, and for information concerning what would be done with the resulting photographs and video records, were met with a stony silence.
It is likely that their images may end up intelligence files held in Washington, DC.
A couple of years ago, at an anti-war rally in front of the municipal building across the street from Philadelphia‚s City Hall, I spotted an unidentified and unmarked police videographer standing alongside legitimate TV cameramen recording speakers at the permitted event, and also panning the assembled crowd. Noting that he had no identifying TV station placard on his camera as the other cameras had, I asked him what station he was with. When he ignored me, I asked a couple more times, at which point he aggressively and silently turned his big videocamera directly on me. At that point, I identified him to rally attendees as a police officer. He and an associate I hadn‚t noticed earlier immediately hurried off to a nearby Police Department van and left the scene.
When I later called the police department to ask about the taping, I was told that it was routine to tape demonstrations, and that because the Philadelphia Police are part of the federal Anti-Terrorism Joint Strike Force, copies of such tapes would be provided to the federal Department of Homeland Security.
In other words, in America, participating in a First Amendment-protected activity--protesting at a rally that has been granted a city permit--can get your image added to some terrorism file in Washington, DC.
Is that also what happens to the images of reporters who are simply performing their First Amendment role of reporting on a court hearing?
No doubt.
But is this news in the American corporate media?
Apparently not.
If police tape demonstrators or journalists at a political event, it‚s only news if it occurs somewhere like China.
Source URL: http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/306
11/19/2010
Is it news when police photograph and videotape demonstrations?
Apparently for American editors and reporters, making that news judgement depends on where the demonstration occurs and what nationality the police are.
When a hundred artists gathered outside a Beijing courtroom in mid-November to protest the jailing of artist Wu Yuren, who had earlier been beaten by police and jailed because he had gone to a police station to file a complaint against a landlord, the New York Times ran an article by reporter Andrew Jacobs which pointedly noted that police officers had videotaped the crowd, and then quoted a demonstrator, artist Dou Bu, as saying, "I was scared to come out here today, but you have to face your fears."
But a week earlier, when several hundred backers of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a black journalist on Pennsylvania's death row for the killing of a police officer, demonstrated in front of a Third Circuit federal court building in Philadelphia, where a three-judge panel was rehearing an argument on his sentence, and local police not only videotaped the officially sanctioned rally, but also aggressively photographed and taped a group of journalists waiting to be allowed into the courtroom early, there was no mention of their action in any media, local or national.
In Philadelphia, and in cities across the country, it has become routine for police departments to openly and surreptitiously videotape participants in demonstrations, and to assemble files on demonstrators, even when the events are entirely peaceful and without incident, and when the rallies or marches have been issued city permits.
Philadelphia Police officials insist that the photographing and videotaping of protests is legal and is not intended to intimidate dissent. Lt. Raymond Evers, who heads the Philadelphia Police public affairs unit, says the purpose of such photographic records is "crowd control and training." He claims the department wants a record so that if any violence occurs, police can show what happened, and how police responded, and also so that any perpetrators or malefactors can be identified later.
That doesn‚t explain what happened at the Abu-Jamal hearing, however. On Nov. 9, some 12 journalists who had come to the Federal Courthouse on 6th Street, just two blocks from the old Independence Hall where the Constitution and Declaration of Independence were signed, to cover an appellate court panel hearing reviewing a federal district judge‚s 2001 ruling that lifted Abu-Jamal's death sentence, found themselves surrounded by Philadelphia Police who began photographing and videotaping them at close range. The reporters, who had been credential-checked and then herded by US Marshals down a kind of "cattle chute" constructed of temporary metal barriers, to a holding point in front of the court building‚s main entrance, were unable to avoid being repeatedly photographed.
Many, including journalists from abroad, expressed shock and dismay at the police actions. "Is this how they treat the press here in America?" asked one reporter from Agence France Presse.
Linn Washington, a local journalist with the Philadelphia Tribune, America‚s oldest African-American newspaper (and a member of the ThisCantBeHappening! news collective), who was singled out for photographing and videotaping by police cameramen as he walked down the chute alone to join the other journalists, said, "It was absolutely a process designed to intimidate us."
Journalists who asked the police pointing the cameras, and accompanying officers in civilian clothes from the department‚s civil affairs office, for an explanation for their actions, and for information concerning what would be done with the resulting photographs and video records, were met with a stony silence.
It is likely that their images may end up intelligence files held in Washington, DC.
A couple of years ago, at an anti-war rally in front of the municipal building across the street from Philadelphia‚s City Hall, I spotted an unidentified and unmarked police videographer standing alongside legitimate TV cameramen recording speakers at the permitted event, and also panning the assembled crowd. Noting that he had no identifying TV station placard on his camera as the other cameras had, I asked him what station he was with. When he ignored me, I asked a couple more times, at which point he aggressively and silently turned his big videocamera directly on me. At that point, I identified him to rally attendees as a police officer. He and an associate I hadn‚t noticed earlier immediately hurried off to a nearby Police Department van and left the scene.
When I later called the police department to ask about the taping, I was told that it was routine to tape demonstrations, and that because the Philadelphia Police are part of the federal Anti-Terrorism Joint Strike Force, copies of such tapes would be provided to the federal Department of Homeland Security.
In other words, in America, participating in a First Amendment-protected activity--protesting at a rally that has been granted a city permit--can get your image added to some terrorism file in Washington, DC.
Is that also what happens to the images of reporters who are simply performing their First Amendment role of reporting on a court hearing?
No doubt.
But is this news in the American corporate media?
Apparently not.
If police tape demonstrators or journalists at a political event, it‚s only news if it occurs somewhere like China.
Source URL: http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/306
Statement Against FBI and Grand Jury Repression
By Angela Davis
November 18, 2010
On September 24 the FBI raided homes of 14 activists in movements in solidarity with oppressed workers and peoples of Latin America and Israel/Palestine. I consider these raids to be an assault on democracy. While the immediate targets of the raids were activists in movements in solidarity with trade unionists and others facing violence in Colombia and the Middle East, their purpose is to disrupt the unity of progressive movements by sowing suspicion, distrust, and an aura of guilt by association. I am not too young to remember the dark days of McCarthyism in our country, and I know very well what the effect of such government reprisals can be.
The FBI seized computers, cell phones, boxes of papers and personal possessions from all 14. They served grand jury subpoenas on many of them. The FBI announced they were investigating possible “material support” to terrorist groups. But it appears that their real purpose is to disrupt the growing unity of the majority of Americans who are critical of the wars and occupations being carried out today in Iraq and Afghanistan, who oppose U. S. support for violence against trade unionists in Colombia and against Palestinians by the Israeli government in Israel, on the West Bank, and in Gaza. The only way the FBI’s actions make any sense at all is to see them as an attempt to isolate and intimidate any who would dissent from government policy or speak out against injustice. These raids violate the spirit and the letter of the Bill of Rights. They endanger the freedom of the entire U. S. population.
We learned bitter lessons from the FBI’s COINTELPRO repression in the 1960s, in which African American leaders, including Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and leaders of the Black Panther Party such as Fred Hampton, were targeted for assassination. Progressive movements were targeted for disruption.
I urge President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder to
Angela Y. Davis is the author of many books, her most recent are: Abolition Democracy, Are Prisons Obsolete? and a new critical edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave.
From Angela Davis's Blog http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/angeladavis
November 18, 2010
On September 24 the FBI raided homes of 14 activists in movements in solidarity with oppressed workers and peoples of Latin America and Israel/Palestine. I consider these raids to be an assault on democracy. While the immediate targets of the raids were activists in movements in solidarity with trade unionists and others facing violence in Colombia and the Middle East, their purpose is to disrupt the unity of progressive movements by sowing suspicion, distrust, and an aura of guilt by association. I am not too young to remember the dark days of McCarthyism in our country, and I know very well what the effect of such government reprisals can be.
The FBI seized computers, cell phones, boxes of papers and personal possessions from all 14. They served grand jury subpoenas on many of them. The FBI announced they were investigating possible “material support” to terrorist groups. But it appears that their real purpose is to disrupt the growing unity of the majority of Americans who are critical of the wars and occupations being carried out today in Iraq and Afghanistan, who oppose U. S. support for violence against trade unionists in Colombia and against Palestinians by the Israeli government in Israel, on the West Bank, and in Gaza. The only way the FBI’s actions make any sense at all is to see them as an attempt to isolate and intimidate any who would dissent from government policy or speak out against injustice. These raids violate the spirit and the letter of the Bill of Rights. They endanger the freedom of the entire U. S. population.
We learned bitter lessons from the FBI’s COINTELPRO repression in the 1960s, in which African American leaders, including Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and leaders of the Black Panther Party such as Fred Hampton, were targeted for assassination. Progressive movements were targeted for disruption.
I urge President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder to
- Direct the FBI to return the belongings seized.
- Dissolve the grand juries threatening an inquisition against peace and solidarity activists and movements.
- Cancel all subpoenas to appear before the grand jury in Chicago.
Angela Y. Davis is the author of many books, her most recent are: Abolition Democracy, Are Prisons Obsolete? and a new critical edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave.
From Angela Davis's Blog http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/angeladavis
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