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Important Lessons from Mumia Abu-Jamal's 20-Year Saga
By El-Hajj Mauri' Saalakhan
28/12/2001
On December 18, after two years of reviewing one of the most politicized criminal cases in modern judicial history, U.S. District Judge William Yohn threw out a death sentence against Mumia Abu-Jamal, and ordered Pennsylvania authorities to give America's most famous death row inmate a new sentencing hearing. "Should the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania not have conducted a new sentencing hearing...the Commonwealth shall sentence petitioner to life imprisonment," Yohn ordered in his 272-page ruling.
On the night of Yohn's decision, I was engaged in a radio interview with WBAI in New York, concerning the case of Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, another Muslim involved in serious court proceedings in Atlanta, Georgia. Toward the end of the program the interviewer asked my opinion of this latest development in Mumia's case, and invited me to speculate on what the next step might be. I ended my response with, "If I were a betting man, I would wager everything I had that this case will be appealed by state authorities." I couldn't have been more right.
Despite having 180 days to either comply with or challenge the judge's order, the very next day, District Attorney Lynne Abraham formally announced her decision to appeal Yohn's ruling to the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals.
There are many lessons in the numerous twists and turns that this case has taken over the past 20 years; it would behoove any conscientious observer to pause and reflect over what some of these lessons might be.
In the early morning hours of December 9, 1981, Mumia Abu-Jamal became embroiled in a confrontation that would forever change the course of his young, promising life. While moonlighting as a taxi driver, the award-winning journalist witnessed a scene that he had reported on numerous occasions in his relatively short but illustrious career as an independent journalist - a black man being accosted by a Philadelphia police officer (only this time the man turned out to be his own blood brother).
According to Mumia, as he got out of his taxi and ran over to intervene, within feet of the confrontation Officer Daniel Faulkner, 25, shot him in the stomach area, and as Mumia slumped to the ground an unknown assailant proceeded to shoot Officer Faulkner, and then fled down an adjacent alleyway. The prosecution has always maintained that it was Mumia who fired first, with a seriously wounded Daniel Faulkner returning fire in self-defense before succumbing to his wounds; but this is where the murkiness only begins.
Despite the hour of the morning, there were many people on the street when the tragedy unfolded. This was a red light district of Philadelphia, and the nightclubs were just closing down. According to the official record, there were many witnesses that night - some of whom would be bribed, threatened, or in other ways coerced by "law enforcement officers" of what was then a nationally known, openly corrupt and brutal police force - to either testify along certain lines or simply disappear.
It is true that Mumia had a weapon in his possession that night; but it was a .38 caliber revolver that he was licensed to carry (he had been robbed at gun point on more than one occasion), and according to the preliminary ballistic report, the weapon used to kill Daniel Faulkner was a .45 caliber handgun. There were other glaring inconsistencies in the state's case against Mumia, but all of this was to no avail, for Mumia was already known to be a marked man.
On the streets of Philadelphia he was known as "the voice of the voiceless." However, the city administration (led by the late Frank Rizzo) and the police bureaucracy hated Mumia with a passion, because of his courageous and principled reporting of corruption in high places, and the rampant and widespread police abuse of authority.
Mumia has been on Pennsylvania's death row since his so-called trial ended in 1982. Citing police and prosecutorial misconduct, and the abundance of suppressed evidence pointing to his innocence, he has been petitioning the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for a new trial for years without success. The original trial judge, Albert Sabo, has adamantly refused to grant Mumia a new trial, and Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge Pamela Dembe ruled on November 21 of this year that she did not have jurisdiction over Mumia's petition for a new trial.
Mumia exhausted the state appeals process two years ago, and thus, Dembe's decision came in response to a petition filed in September arguing that the defense had new evidence to clear Mumia - evidence which included a confession by a man named Arnold Beverly, who in a 1999 sworn affidavit claimed that the mob (mafia) had hired him to kill Faulkner, because the officer had interfered with mob payoffs to corrupt police.
In his ruling, Judge Yohn cited problems with the jury charge and verdict form in the sentencing phase of the trial, and while he threw out the death sentence imposed by the court two decades earlier, he denied all of Mumia's other claims and refused his request for a new trial. While most of Mumia's supporters consider Yohn's decision a small but important step forward - as can be expected in a case that has drawn clearly defined battlelines - all were not pleased with Judge Yohn's decision to throw out the 1982 death sentence.
Maureen Faulkner, Daniel Faukner's widow, angrily responded after hearing of Yohn's decision, "I think Judge Yohn is a sick, twisted person, after sitting on this case for two years and making this decision just before Christmas. He wants to play the middle road and try to appease both sides and it doesn't work." There may be more than a kernel of truth to Ms. Faulkner's criticism; and from where I stand, this is, perhaps, one of the most important lessons in this now 20-year-old tragedy.
I do believe that during the two years that U.S. District Judge William Yohn has visited this case, he no doubt saw the numerous and glaring inconsistencies surrounding the conviction of Mumia Abu-Jamal. I also believe Judge Yohn clearly noted the pro-prosecution bias that the original trial judge, Albert Sabo, openly displayed from start to finish in a judicial proceeding that masqueraded as a trial. (This writer was present in the courtroom during the first round of appeals hearings in 1995, and, like others, witnessed the naked bias, and [un]judicial decorum of Judge Sabo at that time.)
I have no doubt that Judge Yohn saw all of this and so much more. However, like so many other judicial officers (yes, even federal judges) in highly politicized cases, Yohn lacked the courage do the very thing that his conscience - indeed, his judicial integrity - demanded that he do, order a new trial! Yohn made a decision that he thought would appease both sides; but as Maureen Faulkner correctly observed, it just "doesn't work."
As I near the conclusion of this commentary, a number of case studies come to mind. The case of Leonard Peltier; a Native American activist who has been a political prisoner now for 25 years, despite retired Senior U.S. Judge Gerald Heaney's appeal to then President Bill Clinton in 1991, that "evidence of unlawful misconduct by the FBI and other governmental agencies, before, during and after the Fargo trial," persuaded him that Peltier deserved executive clemency. (Ironically, U.S. District Judge Gerald Heaney was part of the same 8th Circuit panel that denied Peltier's 1986 appeal.)
I think of Shaka Sankofa (Gary Graham) who went struggling to his death one year ago, because the State of Texas, under the stewardship of [then] Gov. George W. Bush, placed more sanctity on an unjust and inefficient process, than it did on the dictates of justice and the sacredness of human life. I think about Geronimo Ji Jaga (Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt) - often referred to as Americas "Nelson Mandela" - who spent almost 27 years in prison for a crime that federal authorities knew that he did not commit!
And then there are the countless number of other political prisoners in the U.S., some whose cases go back 20, 25, 30 years, while others - like Sheikh Umar Abdur Rahman, Dr. Mazen al-Najjar, and the unknown number of political detainees under the Bush Administration's new "laws"- represent the new wave of political imprisonment in the U.S.
Last, but certainly not least, I think about the upcoming trial of Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, and the common thread that binds all of these disturbing cases together. For this writer that common thread is undergirded by a very important lesson, and the lesson is quite simple. It is far better, and far less expensive, in time, energy and resources, to do whatever possible to prevent an injustice from happening in the first place, than to try to undo an injustice once it has occurred.
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