MUMIA ABU-JAMAL'S CASE
"Where Are We Now?"
by Leonard Weinglass, Chief Counsel for Mumia
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL'S CASE
"Where Are We Now?"
by Leonard Weinglass, Chief Counsel for Mumia
Mumia's case is in reality about the crisis in America. It's the crisis
that has more than a million people in prison; it's the crisis that has
nearly 500 per 100,000 of our citizens in custody-a higher percentage than
was incarcerated in South Africa under apartheid, a higher percentage than
any other place in the world today with the sole exception of the West Bank
in Israel, which is properly called an occupied territory. It's the crisis
that has built 213 prisons since 1990. It's the crisis that projects up
to 5 million in custody by 2010. This is the crisis that Mumia addressed
himself to, and this is the underlying reality of what America is today.
Mumia was an activist, broadcast journalist in Philadelphia, in the late
70s and early 80s, the leading critic of the police department, the only
person who brought forward the truth about what happened to the MOVE Nine
when they were wrongfully charged with the death of a police officer. Mumia
was the man who was fingered by the mayor of the city, former police commissioner,
who said to Mumia at a press conference, "Young man, some day you're
going to be held accountable for what you're saying and writing." And
what Mumia was saying and writing was documenting the brutality directed
against the minority and the poor community of Philadelphia by that police
department.
Was his voice alone? No. For the first time in the history of the United
Sates, the Department of Justice sued an entire police department, the police
department of the city of Philadelphia in 1979, using in that lawsuit the
very accusations that Mumia made public on public radio, which was picked
up and broadcast nationwide by NPR and Westinghouse. So it was no surprise
that in 1981, in the early morning hours of December 9th, as he was working
nights driving a cab, Mumia came upon a scene where his brother was being
beaten on the street by a Philadelphia police officer. And he stopped his
cab and he ran to the scene. (Mumia the President of the Black Journalists
Association of Philadelphia, had to drive a cab at night to support his
family because his attacks on the police and the establishment were such
that local radio stations began to drop his broadcasts.)
All of the witnesses in his case agreed, both the prosecution witnesses
and the defense witnesses, that it was the beating of his brother that brought
Mumia to that scene. The police officer's flashlight was found broken on
the sidewalk, bloodstains on the lens; Mumia's brother was located moments
later with a gash over his eye where the flashlight struck him. And as Mumia
ran to that scene, gunfire erupted; he was shot; the bullet pierced his
chest, went through his lung and his liver, and lodged in his lower back.
He fell onto the sidewalk, where he was found in a pool of blood within
five minutes by the arriving police. The officer was also shot, once in
the back and once between the eyes. He was found lying about 5 feet from
Mumia. The two were picked up and rushed to the hospital; both were operated
on. The officer died; Mumia recovered, and was charged with shooting the
officer.
The officers who brought Mumia to the hospital testified that they had difficulty
picking him up, and when they went to put him in the van they accidentally
rammed his head into a pole, and then they said they lost the grip on him
and dropped him on his face on the pavement while his arms were handcuffed
behind him, and he was near faint from the injury. And then they got him
to the hospital and they said they couldn't find a gurney, or a stretcher
or a bed in the hospital, so they dropped him on the floor, and he was found
there when the surgeons came and was brought into an operating room where
he was operated on. When he was returned to the recovery room, the nurse
who came into the recovery room gave a statement saying that there were
two police officers standing on the bag that was taking the fluids out of
his body, forcing the fluids back up into his body, and she had to remove
them.
That night, no fewer than five people told the police that they saw the
shooter run away. These five people were not together; they were in different
places on the street; one was up in a building overlooking the scene. The
police never investigated that claim despite the fact that all five had
the shooter running away on the same side of the street in the same direction;
either five people were hallucinating about the same event, or the shooter
did run away.
When Mumia was brought to trial, his trial was held before Judge Sabo, a
judge who has put more people on Death Row than any sitting judge in the
United States-twice as many as the judge who is in second place. And he
was ordered to trial immediately within the six-month limit, despite his
injury, despite his being sick, despite his lawyer, three weeks before the
trial began, openly telling the Court that he was unprepared and asking
to have an additional lawyer appointed, which was denied.
Mumia watched this. He was a court reporter. He knew what was happening.
So three weeks before the trial began, he asked to be his own attorney,
and the judge granted it, because the judge had to. But what the judge didn't
realize was that he had before him one of the most skilled broadcast voices
in the country. And the judge sat there watching Mumia select a jury, and
he saw Mumia speak to the jury and he saw the jurors responding. Within
a day and a half, he removed Mumia's right to speak and ordered him silenced.
Why? Because one juror, an elderly white woman, said that she was afraid,
and the judge asked her, "Why are you afraid?" and she said, "Because
of his hair." Rather than admonish this juror that in the United States
people aren't judged by their hair, but by the evidence, he readily agreed
with the juror, and he said to Mumia, "You're frightening the jury,
I'm taking away your right to speak for yourself." Then he imposed
on Mumia the lawyer who said he was unprepared. That lawyer immediately
asked to be released. And the judge said no, you're going to try the case.
This is the opening day of the trial, plus one and a half days. This lawyer
testified in 1995 that he tried this case without talking to a single witness,
that he had not read all of the documents, that he was utterly unprepared,
and indeed he tried three times to be excused from the case, after he was
ordered to proceed.
The prosecution presented eyewitnesses. Their lead witness was an unfortunate
young woman who had 38 prostitution arrests, two pending trials on prostitution,
and was then incarcerated for prostitution in the city of Boston. She had
given five different accounts of what she saw. She is the only witness to
say that she saw Mumia with a gun shoot the officer.
Mumia did have a gun, and they had his gun, and they used it to good advantage.
They said this was the murder weapon, even though they could not connect
the gun to the bullet that killed the officer. Mumia's gun was a legal weapon.
He had a permit. He had been robbed several times. Like all cab drivers
working through the night in Philadelphia, he had a gun. But what was not
presented to the jury was that in the autopsy report, the doctor who removed
the fatal bullet from the officer's brain noted specifically that the bullet
was a .44 caliber bullet. Mumia's gun was a .38 caliber gun. You cannot
shoot a .44 caliber bullet with a .38 caliber gun. Wasn't that persuasive?
No, because the jury never heard that. Mumia's lawyer never read the autopsy
report.
Then the prosecution presented as its final thrust against Mumia, a so-called
confession that Mumia, a trained court reporter and journalist, blurted
out for everyone to hear, when he was lying on the floor in the hospital-that
he shot the officer and he hoped he died. That testimony was produced by
the officer's partner, plus a security guard who wanted to be a police officer.
More than two months later, they remembered that Mumia had said that. But
the officer who had arrested Mumia that night and who was with him gave
an oral report which was recorded. He said, "The male Negro made no
comments." Well, wasn't that convincing? No, because the jury never
heard from that witness. When Mumia went to call that police officer, they
said he was on vacation and unavailable. We found him and put him on the
stand in '95, and he said, "I was technically on vacation, but I was
at home in the city of Philadelphia, twenty minutes from the courthouse,
and I would have come if they had called me." They didn't call him,
but said he was unavailable. So the jury never heard from that witness.
The prosecution had what they said was the murder weapon; they had eyewitnesses;
they had what they said was a confession; they had a jury from which the
prosecution removed 11 qualified African Americans in a city that was at
that time 49% African American. The jury was made up of ten mainly elderly
whites, which included one man who cared for his neighbor for ten years
who was a Philadelphia police officer who had been shot while on duty, and
another juror who was married to a Philadelphia police officer. These jurors,
not hearing a defense, not hearing from Mumia, hearing only the prosecution's
version of the case, retired to deliberate and came back in two hours. They
asked the judge to be reinstructed on the law of manslaughter because their
thinking was this was a fight on the street that escalated into gunfire.
They didn't know who shot who first, or exactly how it happened, but if
Mumia was the shooter, there was no premeditation here; his brother was
being beaten, and it was nothing more than manslaughter. Mumia would have
been released seven years ago if he had been convicted of manslaughter.
Instead, the judge told the jurors, premeditation in the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania can be found in the fraction of a second it takes to pull a
trigger. And so the jury retired and came back with first degree murder.
Now the prosecutor faced a real problem. He wanted the death penalty, but
this jury was thinking manslaughter. How do you get to the death penalty
when you have a jury thinking manslaughter? Here they reached back into
their bag of tricks and pulled out something which the United States Supreme
Court has since said is not to be permitted in any courtroom in order to
gain the death penalty-one's political background. What did they do about
Mumia's political background? He was 28 years old at the time he was tried.
When he was 16, he was a member of the Black Panther Party. He was interviewed
by a media representative after Fred Hampton was assassinated by the police
in Chicago, and in response to questions he told that media representative,
quoting from Chairman Mao Tse-tung of the People's Republic of China, "Political
power grows out of the barrel of a gun." And they played that quote
to the jury and the fact that Mumia was a member of the Black Panther Party,
as if to show that somehow on this night, Mumia was exercising political
power by using a gun. That jury, within an hour on the July 4th weekend
when they were asked to deliberate, brought back a verdict of death.
We've been attempting to undo that verdict for the last four years since
I and a team have been involved in the case. One witness came forward, a
prostitute, and said she lied when she denied seeing people run away from
that murder scene; actually she saw two people run. Another witness came
forward and said that she was asked by the police to identify Mumia as the
shooter even though they knew she was nowhere near the scene. Another individual,
William Singletary, came forward to say that he told the police that night
that he saw the whole thing; he was five feet from the shooting and Mumia
was not the shooter. He said another person shot the police officer after
Mumia was shot and ran away. Singletary was literally driven out of the
city of Philadelphia; his business was destroyed, and he was unavailable
when Mumia was put on trial. This new evidence that we have been presenting
did not convince Judge Sabo, who was retired and was brought out of retirement
to hear this case. He's denied all of these motions.
Where are we now? We're now before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, asking
them to overrule Judge Sabo and grant Mumia a new trial. Pennsylvania's
Supreme Court is an elected court. They run for office, and they run for
reelection. They run with the active support and the financial support of
the powerful 30,000 member Fraternal Order of the Police union. A vote for
Mumia is a vote against the police. Philadelphia attorneys tell me that
these judges are not deciding a case when they decide Mumia's case; they're
making a career decision. If they vote for Mumia, they're finished. So we
don't expect much. We anticipate that they're going to uphold Judge Sabo
in the face of all this. And we anticipate that the present governor of
Pennsylvania, Governor Tom Ridge, will set a new date for Mumia's execution
as soon as the Supreme Court acts.
Where do we think we would always win this case? In the federal courts.
The federal courts of the United States have, since 1977, reversed 40% of
all the death cases that have come to them. There wouldn't be 3,100 on death
row now; there'd be 5,000. And that fact was not lost on the pro-death penalty
forces in the Congress. After the Oklahoma City bombing, when Congress was
asked to pass an anti-terrorism bill, they tacked on an amendment called
the Effective Death Penalty Act. That act effectively removes from the jurisdiction
of these federal judges, the right to conduct an independent review of these
state death penalty cases. So the place where we thought Mumia would finally
get a full and fair hearing has been taken from us by virtue of this 1996
Effective Death Penalty Act bill which President Clinton signed.
If this bill is not overturned by the United States Supreme Court-and it
will be challenged-then Mumia indeed will face a very serious situation,
a situation that can only be responded to effectively by you. The American
Bar Association, reviewing the cases of the 3,100 on Death Row, has called
for a moratorium on all executions. Fifty-six countries in the world have
outlawed the death penalty. The international tribunals on Rwanda and Bosnia
have outlawed the death penalty. The Bosnian Peace Accords, which were written
in Dayton, Ohio, outlawed the death penalty.
And so, with mounting world pressure, and with pressure from actions such
as the City of San Francisco and Santa Cruz, and actions in Europe, and
actions in Asia, there has to be a mounting cry for ultimately justice for
Mumia Abu-Jamal.
-This edited article is taken from Leonard Weinglass's speech at the Solidarity
with Mumia event, August 16, 1997, in San Francisco.
Dec Jan 97-98--- N.C.Xpress
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