The Future is
Unwritten
Planet Waves | By Eric FrancisPosted Oct. 16, 1999 Update: Death Warrant is Stayed by Federal Court in Philadelphia .......On Weds., Oct. 13, Pennsylvania's Governor Thomas Ridge signed a death warrant for Mumia Abu-Jamal, the black broadcaster and journalist who has lived on Pennsylvania's death row for 15 years. Many of you have heard of the case. It has now taken a new turn. With the stroke of a pen, Ridge has exercised his power to end a person's life, setting Dec. 2 as Mumia's date to die. Some people feel Mumia deserves it. The police and the courts have said he shot a cop in the face. The evidence doesn't say much of anything, and several witnesses have admitted, on the record, that they were forced to lie by the police during Mumia's trial.
....... Mumia was convicted and sentenced to death, but at best it was in a very sloppy process in which most of his civil rights were violated, rendering the whole thing null and void. He was not allowed to attend his own trial, for example, much less defend himself; in our free country, you have a right to do both. Mumia's entire defense, legal fees included, was financially on par with what it cost the other side to present a couple of highly-paid expert witnesses against him. For his own experts (including a medical expert and a ballistician to prove Mumia could not possibly have committed the crime), he had about $200 granted to him by the court. Indeed, Mumia's whole defense probably cost about what 10 minutes of OJ's went for. He was convicted based upon an alleged hospital-bed confession that no one heard him make at the time, and which a police officer spontaneously "remembered" at a strategy meeting six weeks later. We can rest assured that the confession story is a lie because, had Mumia admitted to such a crime the night of the shooting, headlines would have been screaming COP KILLER CONFESSES while the body was still warm.
....... At worst, Mumia, who had been under investigation since he was a young teenager for being a politically involved student during the Vietnam War, was taken political prisoner for his beliefs and and set up for a state killing. The cops had been tracking him for a long time. Articles he wrote and newspapers he edited were filed away by the FBI, even as a high school student. When he was finally arrested one night for allegedly shooting Police Officer Daniel Faulkner, he was at work investigating an unrelated case in which the Philadelphia police had just sent nine black activists to jail for up to a century not knowing which one of them committed the alleged crime. Mumia spent his nights driving a taxicab, and his days dogging public officials, writing and doing radio broadcasts, and meanwhile interviewing people like Alex Haley. He was, as well, president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Broadcasters, a powerful organization of which Geraldo Rivera was then a young member.
....... The main thing that Mumia has going against him is that he was convicted of murder. It is a difficult distinction to bear. There was, indeed, a crime, as well as an arrest and a trial; a judge and jury sat there and everything was certified properly by the court stenographer. The mill of justice turned, and one afternoon Mumia became a cop killer.
....... Mumia has survived a decade and a half on death row, doing battle with the court system. He has written articles and books in prison, and done a series of broadcasts for National Public Radio that is now available on CD. He is accused of being a "celebrity killer" by an organization called the Fraternal Order of Police, a wealthy, PAC-like, pro-cop lobby group, which is waging a national campaign demanding Mumia's death. Government officials and businessmen hold black-tie benefit dinners to raise funds for the cause. With marvelous PR finessing, the Howard Stern show became a place where Trial By Media was waged and Mumia lost. Sam Donaldson, in another Madison Avenue miracle, did a single TV segment and declared him guilty. Most Americans have heard little else of the case.
.......Over the years, Mumia's appeals process was repeatedly derailed by a bunch of top state judges whose election campaigns were endorsed by none other than the Fraternal Order of Police; this, after being convicted before a judge who, as a cop back in the old days, was a member of the FOP, and which organization supported his bid to get on the bench. The FOP naturally feels there is no need to waste taxpayer money on any further court proceedings; it's time for the execution. That would pretty much close the case, or at least it's their best hope.
....... Mumia's international coalition of supporters and his legal team are asking for just one thing: That he be given a real trial. It sounds reasonable. The problem with this idea is that a real trial might just expose the real truth, or make the official truth look pretty stupid. The trial would probably receive astonishing publicity because the whole thing would be so bizarre. The mere possibility of that is, I am sure, terrifying to the many public officials in this case who play it cool on the outside and then sweat their balls off the rest of the time.
....... A trial for Mumia would be very anxious for the good old boys who stashed him away. And inconvenient. Perhaps impossible. How could you have a trial without all but two of the many bullets originally recovered from the crime scene (the rest were lost by the cops), or without the appropriate immediate tests to determine whether Mumia had fired a gun (they were never done), and with witnesses whose original testimony is no longer good because they came forward and said they had been forced to lie against Mumia by the police? God, that would look dumb. And we pay for this?
....... To do this would be taking the American public on a televised back-room tour of the sausage factory at which justice is made, and making them eat the stuff raw. And it would all unfold in the context of state-sanctioned murder; the government's most solemn and coveted privilege. In other words, not just the fact that this is a death penalty case would be front and center, but moreover, that it is a death penalty retrial.
.......The United States is unique among the supposedly free and civilized nations of the world in that we alone have a peacetime death penalty. Thirty-eight states and the federal government execute people in general, as normal business, including those who committed their crimes as children; and we execute the mentally disabled who are, by our own cultural definitions, sick and need medical treatment. We execute people who are learning from their experience in prison; who have been certified by credible ministers to have repented their crimes before the official American God of the Protestant church; and those on whose behalf the Pope personally intercedes for clemency. Mostly, though, we murder the black and the poor.
.......And, it turns out, we execute a lot of innocents. This has been studied in the past, when an accounting was made of how many of those killed by the state turned out to have been innocent all along. Today the story has a different twist. The Innocence Project at Northwestern University Law School is currently tracking 76 cases of people who were convicted of capital crimes, sentenced to die, and then were freed by some other factor besides the trial. A witness came forward, a fact was discovered, or, as journalism students at Northwestern University recently discovered, the actual criminal -- in that case, a double murderer who'd been on the lam for years -- could be located with a few interviews and phone calls as part of class project. There, in the state of Illinois, since use of the death penalty was resumed a few years ago, half of the inmates who have left death row were wheeled out on gurneys. The other half walked out as free men and women, because it turned out they were innocent. One of them is a man named Anthony Porter, who owes his life to some college students who did their homework.
......."I've always been opposed to the death penalty because I think it's barbaric," said one of those students, Sean Armbrust, commenting on her fall semester 1998 class assignment, which freed Porter. "But I think this case taught me that morally it's still wrong, and practically, it's not working. However you feel about it, no one wants innocent people to die. No one wants poor people to be executed at a rate nine times more than everyone else. You have to think about that reality, regardless of whether you agree with the 'eye for an eye' concept."
.......What will happen to Mumia Abu-Jamal?
.......Nobody knows. His supporters are inspired, intelligent and organized. They represent many countries of the world. They can be found organizing in parks, at concerts and on city streets, as well as the halls of Congress and the European Parliament. The marches and protests I have attended have been joyous events. Those who want to kill Mumia seem to be possessed by the worship of death and revenge. The struggle has been interesting so far, with many twists and turns. It will get stranger.
......."The case has come to be a certain trial of strength between the people and the government on this whole issue," says Clark Kissinger, journalist and scholar with the organization Refuse & Resist, which has been carefully tracking and publicizing Jamal's case for years. "It's very embarrassing for them when they have to come forward and admit that there was a wholesale miscarriage of justice, and that it was probably done deliberately."
....... Mumia's case is already being compared to that of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were executed for treason in America's anti-commie fervor of the 1950s. The cases are parallel: political motives, accusations of prosecutorial misconduct, racial minorities (the Rosenbergs were Jews), incomplete evidence, international outcry from the intellectual community. But the comparison doesn't quite make it. Mumia ain't dead yet. The book of history stands open. The future is unwritten.++
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