For a Mumia-Free 2000 by Marc Cooper
I make no New Year's resolution. Instead, I have a simple plea: Oh Lord, please make 2000 a year free of Mumia.
That's right. That's no typo. I said free of Mumia. Not Free Mumia.
I've had it. If I go to one more lefty event and see one more Free Mumia poster, I might just have to switch sides on this one. What collective affliction has overcome my fellow pinkos? You haven't had enough defeats and embarrassments these past two decades? Now you want to take the deathly serious issue of capital punishment and tie it to some flaky cult-member like Mumia Abu-Jamal?
Full-page ads in major metro dailies, international petition campaigns, protest caravans and nationwide days of protest to set Mumia free. Grass-addled students at Washington state's Evergreen College wildly applauding his tape-delivered commencement speech. Activists buying up his two books from death row and huddling to pore over His Words. Regular lionizations of Mumia on Pacifica Radio (for whose L.A. affiliate I do a daily talk show).
I haven't seen such madness since December 1969, when the SDS' Weatherman faction staged a "National War Council" in Flint, MI, and toasted Charlie Manson by repeatedly stabbing three fingers into the air-symbolizing the forks that Comrade Manson and his girlfriends plunged into their victims' entrails.
It's madness because the death penalty and its copious application in modern America is a barbaric outrage. It's also one of the toughest political nuts to crack, given its approval by about 80 percent of the population.
Let's be clear. When it comes to Mumia there are three separate issues at play. Is he innocent? Did he get a fair trial? Is the death penalty ever appropriate? If you answer the third question in the negative-as I do-the first two questions become irrelevant. We oppose the death penalty. Even for the guilty. Period.
As to the second question-did Mumia get a fair trial?-the answer seems to be probably no. Mumia should get another trial. As Debra Dickerson-no admirer of Mumia-recently pointed out in Salon, Mumia's supporters have a good case to make when they argue that his trial was tainted by concocted confessions, unreliable eyewitnesses and a biased judge.
It's also true that, during his trial, Mumia contributed to a carnival atmosphere with disruptive behavior described by the Philadelphia Inquirer as "as bizarre as it was suicidal."
So to those who are beating the drum for Mumia's innocence, those who are elevating this guy to the status of a political prisoner, those who are demanding that he be freed-well, those of us who wish to abolish the death penalty say to you (to paraphrase the late, great Phil Ochs): Please find another movement to be a part of. Until you do, you are confusing the issue of the death penalty itself with the rather flimsy case of a pretty wigged-out hero.
Only a few courageous left-of-center journalists have dared to publicly break with the pro-Mumia orthodoxy. Joan Walsh fired the opening shot last summer in Salon when she wrote that the "Mumia cult sickens" her. More recently Enzo Di Matteo wrote in the Toronto-based alternative weekly NOW of "The Holes in Mumia's Story."
Indeed, Di Matteo's account of the incident that landed Mumia on death row is among the best on record.
"It was in the early morning hours of December 9, 1981 that Mumia Abu-Jamal came upon his brother, William Cook, being hit with a flashlight by police officer Daniel Faulkner. Faulkner had pulled over the Volkswagen Cook was driving. What happened next depends on who you listen to. The version put forward at trial by the prosecution is that Abu-Jamal shot Faulkner in the back, and a wounded Faulkner turned as he was falling and got off a shot of his own that hit Abu-Jamal in the chest. The prosecution says Abu-Jamal gathered himself, stood over Faulkner and pumped more bullets, one practically between the eyes, into him as he lay on the sidewalk. The police arrived on the scene to find Abu-Jamal slouched on the curb with a .38-caliber revolver registered to him on the ground beside him, an empty holster slung under his arms."
The police bungled the ballistics, and in so doing gave Mumia's advocates a thin reed to which to cling. On the other hand, there is nothing in the ballistics evidence that definitively exonerates Mumia. Worse, as Di Matteo writes: "Five spent bullet casings were found in Abu-Jamal's revolver, the same hollow type removed from Faulkner's forehead." Mumia, meanwhile, has never offered an explanation for that evening's events. Perhaps a wise legal strategy-but politically it leaves much to be desired.
As do Mumia's politics in general. Though he briefly passed through the Black Panthers as a young man, Mumia's latest political incarnation is as a follower of the Philadelphia-based group known as MOVE. No serious political analyst can conclude that MOVE is anything more than an off-keel personality cult built around its politically grotesque leader, the deceased John Africa.
To suggest that Mumia is some sort of black liberation hero is to sully and dishonor the memory and sacrifice of the entire pantheon of authentic civil rights leaders. Listening to Mumia's wacky commencement speech given last year to Evergreen makes Minister Farrakhan's Million Man March discourse on numerology sound as stirring, by comparison, as the Emancipation Proclamation.
The tragic element in the Mumia craze is that while his supporters swoon over his dredlocks and his empty political posturing, some 3500 other nameless souls are wasting away on America's death rows-forgotten and abandoned. And while Mumia is being ably represented by the admirable legal talents of Leonard Weinglass, a staggering number of these other condemned men and women have no legal counsel whatsoever. Here in California, almost a full third of the 556 death row inmates are lawyer-less.
Most death row prisoners aren't so cuddly, so politically correct, as Mumia. I wonder how many of their names are even known by those still marching in circles with their Free Mumia signs. It's about time they learned.
Marc Cooper is a Los Angeles-based contributing editor to The Nation.