New Papers Filed in U.S. Supreme Court

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!

Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 822, 19 March 2004.

On March 8, death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal filed a petition for a writ of certiorari (review) with the U.S. Supreme Court. Robert Bryan, attorney for Jamal, seeks to overturn last October's Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision upholding Jamal's conviction and death sentence. Jamal's petition cites the overt racial bias of the trial and appellate courts in whose hands Jamal's life has rested. These papers describe courts where even the formal distinction between judge and prosecutor is totally obliterated; where the trial judge blithely pronounces his racist animus toward Jamal; where one of Jamal's key prosecutors becomes one of the appellate judges who rules on whether Mumia is to live or die. They paint a picture of courts more commonly associated with those of the Deep South of the Jim Crow era.

The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal is a textbook example of a classic racist political frame-up. An outspoken champion of the oppressed, Jamal was a target of the Philadelphia police and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI from the time he was a Black Panther Party (BPP) spokesman at the age of 15. An award-winning journalist known as the "voice of the voiceless" and a supporter of the predominantly black, back-to-nature MOVE organization, Jamal continues to speak out from death row in commentaries carried in Workers Vanguard and other papers across the country, condemning racist cop atrocities, denouncing imperialist war and voicing his support for the battles of striking workers.

In recent years, numerous death row prisoners have had their convictions tossed out due to DNA evidence, eyewitness testimony of innocence, recantation of prosecution witnesses who originally testified under police coercion, and other forms of prosecutorial misconduct. Not Jamal. Despite conclusive evidence that he is innocent, Mumia still sits in a six by nine foot cell on death row.

For over two years, both Pennsylvania state courts and federal courts have refused to even consider testimony from Arnold Beverly that he, not Jamal, shot and killed Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Beverly's confession, which he has allowed to be recorded on video, is supported by a series of affidavits and hundreds of pages of memoranda prepared by Partisan Defense Committee counsel Rachel Wolkenstein and Jonathan Piper, another attorney associated with the PDC. Jamal was convicted in 1982 on frame-up charges of killing Faulkner on 9 December 1981, at a time when the Feds were conducting at least three investigations of corruption in the Philadelphia Police Department. Beverly's confession states he was "hired, along with another guy, and paid to shoot and kill Faulkner" because Faulkner had reportedly been "a problem for the mob and corrupt policemen." Beverly added, "Faulkner was shot in the back and then in the face before Jamal came on the scene." When Jamal arrived, he was shot in the chest and nearly bled to death.

Jamal's innocence has been evident from the outset. The PDC and the Spartacist League have repeatedly exposed the D.A.'s case, which rested on three legs: eyewitness accounts that were secured through police manipulation, coercion and outright terror; a purported "confession" by Jamal while he was lying near death in the hospital, which didn't surface until two months after the killing; ballistics "evidence" concocted by the police that the bullets that killed Faulkner were fired from Jamal's gun. But Jamal was saddled at trial with a lawyer he didn't want—and who did not want Mumia's case; a judge, Albert Sabo, known as the "king of death row"; an overwhelmingly white jury; a prosecutor's office that concealed and fabricated evidence and threatened witnesses.

Also pending in the federal courts is Jamal's application for habeas corpus relief. Two years ago federal district court judge William Yohn overturned Jamal's death sentence while affirming his conviction, condemning him to a life of prison hell. Jamal's attorneys appealed that decision, seeking to overturn the conviction. The state appealed as well, seeking to uphold Jamal's death sentence. Jamal still sits on death row. His federal appeal is on hold while the Pennsylvania state court decision is appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Lynch Law Justice

The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal is nothing but Texas lynch law justice—up North. Not only have the courts barred Beverly's confession, but they have rejected the evidence discovered only two years ago of the sworn account of court stenographer Terri Maurer-Carter of a conversation she overheard in the courthouse where Mumia was tried. In that conversation, Judge Sabo declared in regard to Jamal's case, "I'm going to help 'em fry the n----r." Last October, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court refused to even consider Maurer-Carter's testimony on the grounds that Sabo's bias had already been litigated and ruled upon in Mumia's 1995 PCRA (Post-Conviction Relief Act) appeal—before the same Judge Sabo, who exonerated himself of any racist animosity and prejudice toward Mumia!

Jamal's petition to the Supreme Court points out, "Where a judge in the trial of an African-American defendant expresses in ugly racist terms his intention ‘to help 'em fry the n----r,' even the appearance of justice is not satisfied. To the contrary, such a trial is a sham. In the context of a case involving the death penalty, it is essentially a lynching party." Jamal's papers need only cite a handful of Sabo's numerous actions evidencing his bias: he denied Jamal's motion to remove a white juror who had stated he could not be impartial; he improperly removed a black juror; he barred Mumia from representing himself and took over questioning of prospective jurors; he permitted improper cross-examination of character witness Sonia Sanchez, a renowned poet who was smeared as a "friend of cop killers." The papers also cite the improper cross-examination of Jamal during the penalty phase of his trial. In this instance, Sabo encouraged the prosecutor's interrogation regarding Jamal's past membership in the Black Panther Party—a gross violation of Jamal's First Amendment rights of speech and association. The prosecution argued that Jamal's BPP membership proved he was planning to kill cops for the past 12 years.

The second ground cited by Mumia's petition is the refusal of Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice Ronald Castille to recuse himself from participating in that court's deliberations and last year's decision denying post-conviction relief to Jamal. Castille was the Philadelphia District Attorney from 1986-91, at a time when his subordinate Jack McMahon made an infamous videotape instructing members of the D.A.'s office on how to dismiss blacks from juries—as was done in Mumia's case. Jamal's petition states, "As District Attorney, he appeared in the appellate briefs that argued for the upholding of the conviction and Petitioner's execution, and supervised the successful effort to uphold the conviction and death sentence." As a member of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Castille joined in turning down Jamal's appeal of Sabo's denial of his PCRA in 1997. Jamal's attorneys highlight, "For the same person to function as both prosecutor and judge in a capital case violates the due process clause and mandates that the conviction be reversed."

Another example of Sabo's bias cited by Jamal's attorneys was his refusal to admit 600 pages of FBI files on Mumia. These files document over a decade of surveillance, harassment and frame-up attempts by the FBI's COINTELPRO terror operation—working in conjunction with the Philadelphia police headed by racist demagogue Frank Rizzo—aimed at "neutralizing" black and leftist militants. A 24 October 1969 FBI report urging that Jamal be placed under high-level surveillance noted:

"In spite of the subject's age (15 years), Philadelphia feels that his continued participation in BPP activities in the Philadelphia Division, his position in the Philadelphia Branch of the BPP, and his past inclination to appear and speak at public gatherings, the subject should be included on the Security Index [list of those deemed a threat to national security]."

When Mumia told MOVE's side of the story following a bloody 1978 cop siege of their Powelton Village home, Rizzo fingered a "new breed" of journalists such as Jamal, who he threatened would one day "be held responsible and accountable for what you do." Three years later, on a dark Philadelphia street at four in the morning, the cops finally got the chance they'd been waiting for.

First as police commissioner and then as mayor, Rizzo ran the city for more than a decade as a local police state. In 1964, when the black ghetto in Philadelphia was one of the first in the U.S. to explode, the police set up the notorious Civil Defense (CD) squad, which worked with the FBI to infiltrate or spy on virtually every civil rights or political organization in the city. Lieutenant George Fencl, who headed the CD unit, boasted that "we have some 18,000 names" on file. Fencl's "counter-intelligence" program served as a model for the FBI's COINTELPRO operations against the Panthers and other black activists.

For those who scoff at the notion that Mumia's prosecution was a political vendetta and that the massive government surveillance of Jamal was not "relevant" to the trial, consider this interruption in the proceedings just as the prosecution's key witness, prostitute Cynthia White, was about to testify:

"THE COURT: Just a minute. Fencl is on the phone.

MR. McGILL: Off the record.

(A discussion was held off the record.)

THE COURT: Did you work it out?

MR. McGILL: There's no problem."

As coached by prosecutor McGill & Co., White went on to falsely testify to seeing Mumia shoot Faulkner. Nobody on the scene remembered seeing White near the shooting. With a police record a mile long, and awaiting trial on three charges at the time of Jamal's arrest, White was particularly susceptible to police coercion. Veronica Jones, another prostitute who knew White, testified she was offered a deal similar to that given White to falsely testify against Jamal: "They were trying to get me to say something that the other girl said...and they told us we can work the area if we tell them." Sabo struck this testimony which went to the heart of White's credibility and police misconduct as "not relevant."

No Justice in the Capitalist Courts

From the moment a critically wounded Jamal was handcuffed to a hospital bed 22 years ago, court after court trampled on Jamal's constitutional rights, including making Jamal's case an exception to their own rules to keep him in the shadow of death. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1990 refused to hear Jamal's petition for review of the initial Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision. The petition challenged the prosecution's use of his past membership in the Panthers in securing the death sentence. About a year later, the same court reversed the death sentence of David Dawson on the grounds that the prosecution improperly used his political affiliation as a member of the racist White Aryan Brotherhood to prejudice the jury.

The "justification" used by both the federal and Pennsylvania state courts for slamming the door shut on Beverly's confession was that it wasn't submitted to the courts within the time limitations for newly discovered evidence set by recent laws to cut off death row appeals —Democratic president Clinton's 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and a 1995 Pennsylvania law. Adopted at a time when it was well known Jamal would soon be filing for post-conviction relief, the latter was explicitly intended to cut off Mumia's appeal rights. Nearly 150 years after the infamous Dred Scott decision, a fighter for black freedom like Jamal has no rights which the capitalist courts are bound to respect.

The capitalist rulers want to see Mumia dead because they see in this eloquent journalist, MOVE supporter and former Panther spokesman the spectre of black revolution, defiant opposition to their system of racist oppression. They seek to execute Jamal in order to send a chilling message to all those who challenge vicious cop repression in the ghettos, who stand up for labor's rights on the picket lines, who protest imperialist mass murder from the Balkans to Iraq. Jamal's case throws a spotlight on the barbaric, racist death penalty, a form of institutionalized state terror directly descended in the U.S. from the system of black chattel slavery.

The death penalty is the ultimate sanction employed by this repressive system as it seeks to contain the explosive pressures generated by the growing gap between a handful of filthy rich and those on the bottom. The parties of capital, Democrats and Republicans, join in pushing racist "law and order" campaigns aimed at intensifying capitalist repression, including through the grotesque speedup on death rows across the country. As Marxists, we are unequivocal opponents of the death penalty, regardless of innocence or guilt; we do not accord the state the right to determine who lives or who dies.

We seek to mobilize working people, minorities and all opponents of racist capitalist repression in protest actions centered on the social power of the labor movement to demand Jamal's freedom. Our fight to free Jamal and abolish the racist death penalty is part of our perspective of winning workers to the understanding that the bourgeois state, with its cops and courts, is not some "neutral" agency which serves society as a whole, but rather exists to defend the class rule and profits of the capitalists against those they exploit. Those who subordinate the call to "Free Mumia" to one for a "new trial" peddle dangerous illusions in the justice of the very courts which have repeatedly upheld the racist frame-up of this courageous fighter for the oppressed.

To put a final halt to the grisly workings of capitalism's machinery of death —be they the guardians of death row or the cops who operate as "judge, jury and executioner" in gunning down minority youth on the street—requires sweeping away this entire system based on exploitation and oppression. The social power to do that lies in the hands of the multiracial working class, with its numbers, organization and discipline—and most importantly, its capacity to bring the wheels of the profit system to a grinding halt. Free Mumia Abu-Jamal now! Abolish the racist death penalty!