Recent Short Info (January to March 2023)

See the February 2000 Amnesty International report A Life in the Balance

- Michael Schiffmann -

Mumia Abu-Jamal has been in jail for a seemingly endless time. Between the time when he was convicted of and sentenced to death for the murder of Police Officer Daniel Faulkner in July 1982 and the time when I was first able to visit him in the summer of 2010, the world, the United States, and the U.S. prison system of which he was now an inmate had changed radically. Just to illustrate, the number of people in prison in the United States grew from somewhat over 500,000 in 1982 to almost 2 ½ million in 2010, and the number of prisoners on death row more than tripled in the same time span. These facts were dealt with extensively in Abu-Jamal’s first book, Live from Deathrow, which appeared in 1995 and significantly contributed to him becoming widely known, first nationally in the U.S., then internationally.

Abu-Jamal’s case became an international cause célèbre because it is symptomatic for every-thing that is criticized about the death penalty: racism, classism, the politicization of justice. All these factors led to a criminal investigation and a trial that barely deserved that name. The judge barely even tried to hide his partisanship; indeed, in 2001 a court stenographer reported that she had heard him say in a backroom at the very first day of the trial: “I’m going to help them [the prosecution] fry the nigger.” At the trial, police and security guards alleged that Abu-Jamal, who was himself almost fatally wounded during the incident that led to his arrest, shouted a peculiarly obscene confession at the hospital: “I shot the motherfucker and I hope the motherfucker dies!” In a recent analysis of the circumstances, I conclusively prove that this testimony was false; it was apparently orchestrated by the very same prosecutor who the judge, according to his own words, tried to assist in “fry[ing] the nigger.” The same analysis also shows that the only two witnesses who claimed to have observed Abu-Jamal murdering the officer AND to have been able to identify him hadn’t even seen the shooting. Moreover, together with a third alleged eyewitness who said he could not identify the shooter, they de-scribed a sequence of events that was physically impossible: the classical case of pre-arranged witness statements. Abu-Jamal’s defense was denied the financial means to counter this supe-rior force; any tolerably qualified ballistician and any moderately capable investigator would have been able to dismantle the testimony of the alleged eyewitnesses and the claims about a confession in the hospital without great effort. 1)

When Abu-Jamal, dissatisfied with the performance of his totally overcharged defense attor-ney, demanded to be aided by a third person, something that had just then be granted to the son of a police officer in the very same court building at the very time of Abu-Jamal’s trial, the judge used this as a pretext to exclude him from over half of his own trial without transmitting the procedures to his cell via TV as was already possible at the time and as was practiced by other courts. Already in the guilt phase of the trial (which is supposed to determine the facts as opposed to the penalty), the prosecutor once again reached deeply into his bag of dirty tricks and referred to Abu-Jamal’s past as a youthful member of the Black Panther Party who had, in a newspaper interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, quoted the Chairman of the Communist Party of China, Mao Zedong, with the words: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” What the prosecutor didn’t explain to the jury was the fact that this was in no way an elaboration of the political strategy of the Black Panther Party, but a comment on the murder of the Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by the FBI and the Chicago Police Department a couple of weeks before the interview. 2)  And as for the jury itself, in a city that was almost 40 percent African American, only two of twelve members were Blacks – for the most part because the prosecutor had used most of the challenges of jurors without cause that he was entitled to against African Americans.

And so on and so forth and so forth. Reason enough to throw out the conviction or at least for a new trial? On should think so, but so far it has not happened. The trial court rejected Abu-Jamal’s post-conviction appeals four times and the highest court of the state, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, confirmed the denial every time. On the federal level, Abu-Jamal at least achieved a reversal of his death sentence. That was on December 18, 2001, but it would then take another ten years for the prosecution to drop its protracted resistance against that partial reversal. Abu-Jamal spent every single one of those years on death row in solitary confine-ment. When asked about his time in solitary “in the shadow of the valley of death,” this elo-quent man, who by now has authored thousands of commentaries on contemporary issues and written a dozen books, could only say: “There are no words for it, there are no words for it, there are no words. No words.”

While the mills of justice were grinding and the reversal of Abu-Jamal’s death sentence was finally confirmed and then also accepted by the prosecution, Abu-Jamal’s hopes for a new trial were also dashed. The court decision in December 2001 that threw out the death sentence at the same upheld his murder conviction, and in March 2008, the 3rd Circuit Court of Ap-peals, the highest appeals court below the U.S, Supreme Court, unanimously confirmed the lower court’s decision to rescind the death penalty but also denied a new trial to determine Abu-Jamal’s guilt.

Thus, in 2021 Mumia Abu-Jamal is still in jail, even though Amnesty International, in one of its rare extensive reports devoted to individual cases issued already in February 2000, came to the conclusion that the trial of Mumia Abu-Jamal did not meet the minimal international legal standards for a death penalty case and that this fact required the reversal of his conviction and/or a new trial.

Since his arrest in 1981, Abu-Jamal himself has said little to shed light on the events that led to the death of Officer Faulkner and had mostly confined himself to protesting his innocence in general terms. When I asked him about this during my 2010 visit, he invoked, just as he had done at the end of his 1982 trial, the principle of parity of arms between prosecution and de-fense and explained that he had been deprived of practically all the rights of a defendant apart from one, the right to testify in his own defense, and that this had not been an option for him then and was still not an option now, except in the context of a new trial.

But actually, in 2001 Abu-Jamal for once did give a statement on the central charges against him. That text was probably written by his then lawyers but he has repeatedly confirmed it even after he dismissed these attorneys. In it, he explicitly denies having killed the police of-ficer, and also having made the boastful confession attributed to him. “I never said I shot the policeman. I did not shoot the policeman. I never said I hoped he died. I would never say something like that.”

As a result of my own research into the death of the policeman, I am strongly inclined to be-lieve that Abu-Jamal indeed, as he said in 2001, had “nothing to do” with the officer’s death. Even though the personal contact I had with him during two long visits in 2010 and 2012 and the humane mindset that emanates from his whole work as a journalist and writer are not very relevant in forensic terms, I have to admit that they, too, reinforce this opinion.

Right now, Abu-Jamal is trying, for the fifth time, to get a higher court in Pennsylvania to reverse his conviction. In an unexpected turn, his current opponent is Philadelphia’s new progressive District Attorney’s Office under Larry Krasner, who came into office in January 2018 and who, in February 2021, filed a brief to the higher court in which he opposed a new trial for Abu-Jamal.

This is ironic in three ways.

First, Abu-Jamal’s trial, which was obviously a farce and was called “ridiculously unfair” by the conservative lawyer Stuart Taylor Jr. already in 1995, is painted in a fairly favorable light in this brief – but how can an alternative prosecutor do so if the judge, the prosecutor, and the police literally conspired against the defendant, as was the case here?

Second, the DAO’s brief gets nearly all the factual issues of the case wrong. None of the things mentioned at the beginning of this article – the two false eyewitnesses, the impossible version all three “eyewitnesses” told of the events, the invented confession – made it into the DAO’s brief, even though many of the facts have been known for years. Whoever wrote these parts of the brief did a copy-and-paste job from previous prosecutors’ briefs, prosecutors whose corruption and pro-conviction bias Krasner used to fight so hard against for the last thirty years.

A third irony is that while perhaps the most apt comment on all this comes from an old deci-sion the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 1959: “Even if the evidence of the guilt of a defend-ant piles up as high as the Mount Everest, the defendant is still entitled to a fair trial” – in Oc-tober 2021, Krasner’s DAO had its way because the next lower court in the state, the Penn-sylvania Superior Court, agreed with the prosecution’s February 2021 brief and denied Abu-Jamal relief.

Another motion of the defense based on new evidence of a rigged trial discovered by none other than Krasner’s office late in 2018 is still before the court, this time unopposed by Phila-delphia’s DAO. But the Superior’s October decision is an ominous sign. Abu-Jamal’s best legal hope now seems to be the possibility that Krasner’s office takes a fresh look at the facts of the case and the corruption of the trial, sides with the defense, and  asks the courts to throw the conviction out.

In the meantime, Mumia Abu-Jamal is waiting. On December 9, 2021, he will have been in jail for 40 years.

In 1982, Mumia Abu-Jamal was tried for and found guilty of having shot and killed Police Officer Daniel Faulkner.

Allegedly, the officer first stopped Abu-Jamal’s brother Billy Cook’s Volkswagen on Philadelphia’s Locust Street and then beat him after Cook had attacked him while resisting arrest. Abu-Jamal came running from a parking lot across the street, shot Faulkner in the back with one shot, was shot in the chest by him in return, and then murdered the officer execution-style by firing several more shots at him as he already lay defenseless on the sidewalk. Only one of these shots hit and killed Faulkner instantaneously.

Abu-Jamal’s conviction was based (a) on three eyewitnesses whose combined testimony resulted in the picture just sketched, (b) the trial testimony by a police officer and a hospital guard who claimed to have heard Abu-Jamal at the hospital to which he was brought shout about Officer Faulkner “I shot the motherfucker and I hope the motherfucker dies,” and (c) the alleged presence of Abu-Jamal’s gun, whose .38 caliber was consistent with the bullet found in the head of the dead officer, right next to him at the scene.

Actually, (a) and (b) were the pillars of Abu-Jamal’s conviction, because (c) was just circumstantial as there was no precise match between the deadly bullet and Abu-Jamal’s gun and the bullet could have come from millions of other 0.38 caliber firearms. It is also very doubtful that Abu-Jamal’s weapon even left its holster before police found him, but I will put that aside here.

For reasons of natural justice, this conviction should be thrown out for four reasons, each of which would, in my opinion, already be sufficient to do so.

(1) The identical claim by the three prosecution witnesses that the killer (whom two of the witnesses identified as Abu-Jamal) stood on top of the prone officer on the sidewalk and fired several shots at him is false. Photos prove that are no traces of these shots in the sidewalk. That these three witnesses claimed to have observed the very same event which did not and cannot have happened is proof of a police frame-up.

(2) The two most important eyewitnesses (the ones who claimed to have been able to identify Abu-Jamal as the shooter, a prostitute and a cab driver) actually did not observe the shooting. All other witnesses at the scene either did not see them or specifically denied their presence, and there is much other evidence that makes their absence foolproof. In the case of the cab driver, the police must have known he was not parked where he claimed to have been as the police arriving at the scene could not have overlooked this.

(3) The police officer and the hospital guard who testified at the trial to have heard Abu-Jamal shout the motherfucker “confession” clearly lied. Had the confession happened, dozens of other people also present would also have heard it, and they didn’t. This is clearly another police frame-up, this time also involving hospital security.

(4) At the trial, the prosecutor produced a faked document in court purportedly showing that the hospital guard had reported Abu-Jamal’s confession to her superiors right after the event. Since the confession never took place, this “report” also never took place. The prosecutor could have called the hospital superiors as witnesses, which would have won him the trial then and there, but he didn’t. This is an example of monumental prosecutorial misconduct. 

Based not least on previous work by many others, I examine and prove the claims made above in my much longer text Facts Matter. Why the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office Should Drop the case Against Mumia Abu-Jamal, which can be accessed by clicking on the button at the top of this site.

That text is a comment on the factual aspects of the February 3, 2021 brief by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office in which the DAO opposes Abu-Jamal’s request to have his conviction overturned. It was made available to the DAO in mid-September 2021; I am now making it public.

It is my hope that Larry Krasner’s DAO, which in fact HAS introduced important reforms in Philadelphia, will be open to its arguments, even though in Philadelphia everything around Abu-Jamal seems to be graven in stone.

Even the original charge against, let alone the following conviction of, Mumia Abu-Jamal is irredeemably tainted by maliciously false and concocted testimony and police and prosecutorial misconduct on an epic scale. Every other issue in this case, like timeliness of defense filings, ineffectiveness of council, admissibility of “hearsay,” and even Batson issues should be seen in the light of this elementary fact.