Award winning journalist and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal was convicted in 1982 of killing a Philadelphia police officer, and was sentenced to death. Recent court hearings have raised very serious questions about his trial and the evidence used against him. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court is now set to rule on the 26 issues raised in his appeal for a new trial. Throughout this process there has been an orchestrated campaign to obscure the facts and expedite his execution, including a recent full-page advertisement in the New York Times.
Should Mumia Abu-Jamal be executed . . . Or should he receive a new trial? YOU BE THE JUDGE
* The prosecution claimed that Jamal loudly confessed at the hospital where he was taken after being shot by the slain officer and beaten by police.
BUT THE JURY NEVER HEARD from police officer Gary Wakshul who was guarding Jamal at the hospital and reported "the Negro male made no comments."(1)
When called as a defense witness, the prosecution contended that he was on vacation and unavailable. The judge refused a continuance so he could be brought in, when in fact he was home and available.
TODAY WE KNOW that no police officers claimed to have heard this "confession" until two months after it allegedly occurred, and after Jamal had filed police brutality charges.(2) The attending physician also denies that Jamal said anything.
* The prosecution claimed that ballistics evidence proved that Jamal was the shooter.
BUT THE JURY NEVER HEARD the written Findings of the Medical Examiner which contradicted other prosecution testimony by stating "shot w/ 44 cal" (Jamal's gun was .38 caliber). Jamal's court appointed attorney said he didn't see that portion of the report, so he never raised it.
TODAY WE KNOW that the police never tested Jamal's gun to see if it had been recently fired, never tested Jamal's hands to see if he had fired a gun, have never shown Jamal's gun to be the fatal weapon, and have lost a bullet fragment removed by the medical examiner.
* The prosecution claimed that eye-witnesses identified Jamal as the shooter.
BUT THE JURY NEVER HEARD from a key eye-witness, William Singletary, who saw the whole incident and has testified that Jamal was not the shooter. Singletary, a local businessman, was harassed by police when he reported this, and he subsequently fled the city.(3)
TODAY WE KNOW that the key witnesses Veronica Jones, Cynthia White, and Robert Chobert testified falsely in 1982, and we know why. Jones, who now testifies in support of Jamal, was threatened with the loss of her children if she did not support the police story.(4) Chobert, a white cab driver, first told the arriving police that the shooter ran away.(5) Later he told police that the shooter was 225 pounds and six feet tall.(6) Jamal, who weighed 170 pounds, was found a few feet from Chobert, sitting on the curb, critically wounded. In court, Chobert changed his story to say that the shooter ran only a few steps and collapsed. White backed the whole police story, but none of the other witnesses can remember seeing her at the immediate scene. Both Chobert and White received very special treatment, including exemptions from criminal prosecutions.(7) By contrast, when Veronica Jones testified in Jamal's support, she was arrested before leaving the courtroom.
* The prosecution denies any political motives in targeting Jamal for the death of a police officer.
WHAT THE JURY DID HEAR was that 12 years earlier Jamal had been a member of the Black Panther Party. This was raised by the prosecution as an argument for imposing the death penalty, a practice later condemned as unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in another case.
TODAY WE KNOW the FBI and Philadelphia police had amassed hundreds of pages of surveillance files on Jamal, beginning when he was 15 years old, for his outspoken opposition to racism and police brutality.
Not only the "evidence," but the process itself made a sham out of Jamal's right to a fair trial.
THE JUDGE was blatantly biased, even according to Philadelphia newspapers. Six former Philadelphia prosecutors have sworn in court documents that no accused could receive a fair trial in the court of Judge Albert Sabo.
THE JURY was empanelled only after eleven qualified African-Americans were removed by peremptory challenges from the prosecution, a practice that was recently revealed as having been taught to prosecutors in a special training video tape.
THE DEFENSE ATTORNEY testified that he didn't interview a single witness in preparation for the trial and he informed the court in advance that he was not prepared. Jamal was also denied the right to act as his own attorney.
THE DEFENSE INVESTIGATOR quit the case before the trial began because the meager court allocated funds were exhausted. Neither a ballistics expert or pathologist could be hired because the court refused to allocate sufficient funds.
Should this sort of procedure take away someone's life?
Recently, an anonymous advertisement appeared in the New York Times. It reflected the views of the Fraternal Order of Police who have campaigned relentlessly for Jamal's execution. It used selective snippets from the 1982 trial transcript and did not dare quote the transcripts from the 1995 and 1996 hearings that impeached this 1982 testimony. It attacked the hundreds of legal scholars, clergy, artists, writers, unions, Amnesty International, business men and women, and government officials from around the world who have called for a new and fair trail for Jamal, calling them "uninformed Hollywood celebrities and California legislators."
Will executions now be decided by mass advertising campaigns funded by anonymous political action committees?
Unless Mumia Abu-Jamal gets a new trial, justice will not be done.