There Is No Justice in the Capitalist Courts

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!

Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 846, 15 April 2005.

The following talk, edited for publication, was given on April 2 by Rachel Wolkenstein of the Partisan Defense Committee at Goucher College in Maryland to students largely unfamiliar with the background or particulars of the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia Abu-Jamal—a former Black Panther Party member, MOVE supporter and eloquent journalist known as the "voice of the voiceless"—is an innocent man who has been on death row since 1982, framed up for the murder of a Philadelphia cop.

Rachel Wolkenstein was a member of Mumia Abu-Jamal's legal team from 1995 through June 1999. She resigned from the legal team when then-lead attorney Leonard Weinglass refused to present crucial evidence of Mumia Abu-Jamal's innocence. Another man, Arnold Beverly, had come forward and confessed that he, and not Mumia Abu-Jamal, had shot and killed police officer Daniel Faulkner. Beverly's affidavit is published in a PDC pamphlet, Mumia Abu-Jamal Is an Innocent Man! New Evidence Explodes Frame-Up, which also includes supporting evidence in affidavits by Rachel Wolkenstein, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and others. The Partisan Defense Committee, a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization in accordance with the political views of the Spartacist League, vigorously fights for Mumia Abu-Jamal's freedom and the abolition of the racist death penalty.

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The circumstances of the prosecution and conviction of Mumia Abu-Jamal epitomize the injustices committed every day by the capitalist legal system. At the same time, it is a very special case of political persecution and intended to be a lesson to any who dare to speak out against the injustices and inequities of American capitalism.

Let me begin with what the state and legal institutions represent in this society. Far from being neutral arbitrators that can be pressured to act on behalf of labor and minorities, the capitalist state is the machinery of repression and violence in defense of the propertied rich minority that rules over this society against all the exploited and dispossessed. This machinery includes the police and the courts, which enforce laws based on defense of the capitalist order. In the U.S., the forcible subjugation of the black population at the bottom of society is key.

How many of you have seen TV shows like "The Shield" or cop movies that show that police don't actually carry out justice, but shoot people on the street, set up and "silence" people because of their beliefs? I promise you that nothing you may have seen in the movies comes close to what happens in real life, and what happened in the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

In 1968, when Mumia was 14 years old, he was arrested and beaten by undercover police while he was protesting a presidential candidate by the name of George Wallace. George Wallace was famous at the time for barring black children from going to school, for standing in the schoolhouse door and vowing, "segregation forever!" Wallace came to South Philly, which was at that time a white racist bastion policed by a racist demagogue named Frank Rizzo, who was then Philadelphia police chief and later mayor of Philly. J. Edgar Hoover, then-FBI chief, declared war on black youth through a program called COINTELPRO. This was the Counter-Intelligence Program by the FBI, established to set up, frame up, harass, jail, and even murder black youth and disrupt their political organizations. Their prime target was the Black Panther Party. Hoover declared in 1968: "The Negro youth and moderate[s] must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teachings, they will be dead revolutionaries." As a member of the Black Panther Party, Mumia did consider himself a revolutionary, and, from the point of view of the FBI and the Philadelphia cops, he was a dead man on leave.

In 1995, the Partisan Defense Committee managed to obtain from the FBI over 700 pages of records that the FBI had collected on Mumia. That's only what they released to us; it's not the entirety of it. We found in these FBI files the statements proving that the FBI had begun watching Mumia on a daily basis from the time he was 15 years old and in high school. Why did they target him? Was it because he had weapons and threatened to kill anyone? No. They put him under surveillance because of his speaking and writing skills.

Here's a quote from an October 1969 FBI report:

"In spite of the subject's age (15 years), Philadelphia feels that his continued participation in BPP [Black Panther Party] 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."

The Security Index was a list that the FBI compiled of people who were to be taken into detention and put into concentration camps in the event of a national emergency. It was a secret list. Mumia was in the gun sights of the FBI, targeted for his ability to speak and write. The reports in the FBI files include all sorts of attachments of clippings and articles written by Mumia. And the FBI noted that he "made the BPP look good because his approach was very positive." They recorded that there was no evidence of a propensity to violence yet they labeled him as "armed and dangerous."

In December 1969, the FBI was making hits on Black Panther Party headquarters across the country. Ultimately, 38 Panthers were killed nationwide and hundreds railroaded to jail on frame-up charges. In Chicago, the FBI and the Chicago police murdered two young Black Panther Party leaders: Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. They were shot in their beds. Years later, in a civil rights lawsuit, it was proved that the FBI was involved in this. Then the families got some financial compensation.

Mumia went to Chicago and viewed Hampton and Clark's shot-up apartment. He returned to Philadelphia with other Black Panther Party members and spoke out in protest against their murders. Shortly afterward, in early January 1970, the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer—an establishment newspaper in Philly—ran an article about Mumia, who was then 16, sitting in the Panther office and talking about the role of the Black Panther Party and the government's attacks against it.

At the time, the Panthers had made a turn toward community service and were very involved in things like breakfast programs for poor kids in churches, reading programs and those kinds of things. They understood from experience that the police were not their friends, that the police were shooting them up.

The Panthers adopted certain slogans of Mao Zedong, then the leader of China, such as "all power to the people," and "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." The latter was intended to mean that, in a historic sense, all states come into being through force. In this context, in reference to the United States government, it is seen in the eradication of the Native Americans in the area that became the United States, and in the institution of slavery and what was done to black slaves as part of building the American social system.

Political Repression, Lynch Law "Justice"

Some years later, Mumia was an up-and-coming radio journalist known as "the voice of the voiceless." He was listed in Philadelphia Magazine as a rising talent, one of their "people to watch" in 1981. Just a few months later, he was arrested for the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner. The headlines in the papers were amazing with regard to someone accused of killing a police officer. They said: "The Suspect—Jamal: an Eloquent Activist Not Afraid to Raise His Voice." That's a pretty unusual description of somebody who's just been accused of killing a cop. The articles described his work in various communities, his Panther Party background, and his support for the MOVE organization, a back-to-nature commune that was harassed and persecuted. In 1985, the Philadelphia police in collusion with the FBI dropped a bomb on them.

The main argument used by the prosecution to get Mumia sentenced to death in 1982 was the statement he had made as a 16-year-old Panther Party member—a decade before Daniel Faulkner was killed—that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" and "all power to the people." The D.A. argued to the jury that these views meant that Mumia had always intended to kill a cop. When we discovered that the basis for sentencing Mumia to death was his membership in a political organization and manipulation of a statement he made when he was 15 or 16 years old, the PDC was compelled to take up Mumia's defense. We took up Mumia's case as emblematic of the death penalty, of its inherent racism from its origin to its application in the U.S. And we took up Mumia's defense as part of a broader fight against labeling people "terrorists" and sentencing them to death based upon their political beliefs, expression or organizational membership.

Now, this may not seem so outrageous to you at this time. After all, this is the post-September 11 period and we now live in a time when laws are passed declaring that, if you give support to somebody the government deems some kind of "terrorist," it makes you a terrorist too. There's a lawyer in New York named Lynne Stewart who was just convicted of giving material aid to terrorism because she represented Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was convicted of involvement in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. And because she vigorously defended her client, and didn't adhere to restrictive conditions by the government that said she couldn't speak to the press about her client's views, she was convicted of giving material aid to terrorism and conspiring to defraud the U.S. government. She now faces decades behind bars. We are also fighting to overturn her conviction and the conviction of her translator, Mohamed Yousry, and her paralegal, Ahmed Abdel Sattar.

When we began work on Mumia's case back in 1987, there was a long bloody history of extralegal terror and murder by the government against black people. What was shocking about Mumia's case was the overt use of the legal machinery of state repression to sentence a man to death because of his political beliefs. But today, going after people for their political beliefs, saying that they are "unlawful combatants," throwing them into detention camps in Guantánamo—or, like Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen slammed into a military brig without access to a lawyer, without charges, under totally unproven allegations of connections to Al Qaeda—for the U.S. government, this is now the norm.

Taking up Mumia's case was, in the first instance, a statement of our opposition to the racist death penalty. The death penalty is the most extreme version of state repression that there is and in this country it is the legacy of slavery. In 1987, about the same time we took up Mumia's case, the United States Supreme Court ruled in McCleskey v. Kemp that overwhelming evidence of racism in the application of the death penalty was irrelevant. It was not relevant to the highest court in the land that if you were black and convicted of killing a white person, you were four times more likely to be sentenced to death than if you were a white man convicted of killing a black person. According to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, as of January 2005, black people make up some 42 percent of inmates on death row—that's about three times the percentage of blacks in the population of the U.S.

The Supreme Court ruled that the evidence presented in the McCleskey case was not relevant because the argument, "taken to its logical conclusion, throws into serious question the principles that underlie the entire criminal justice system." In other words, the court agreed that it is true that blacks are treated different from whites, and that it is true that they are sentenced disproportionately to death. But because this racial disparity is fundamental to the American legal system, the Supreme Court would not overturn McClesky's death sentence because that would overturn the whole system of American "justice." The Supreme Court ruled it wasn't relevant because it was absolutely, totally relevant.

As Marxists, our opposition to the death penalty does not begin or end with racial disparity in its application. We simply do not accord to the state the right to determine who will live and who will die. The death penalty and repressive laws in general cannot just be attributed to the Bush administration or the Republican Party or people that you consider to be conservatives. The former Democratic Party president, Bill Clinton, signed into law the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which essentially gutted the right of death row prisoners to challenge their death sentences. During the 1992 presidential election campaign, Clinton flew back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a brain-damaged black man, Ricky Ray Rector, as an election year ploy. Democratic Party politicians, every bit as much as Republicans, stand in defense of the ultimate action of state repression, which is the death sentence.

The Partisan Defense Committee made a video, From Death Row, This Is Mumia Abu-Jamal, to step up an international campaign on behalf of Mumia in the summer of 1990. This video was translated into many languages to introduce Mumia's case to a whole generation of young people and workers, trade unions and civil liberties organizations all over the world. So, by the time legal papers were filed in a Pennsylvania court in June 1995 to overturn Mumia's conviction, and a death warrant issued around then by the Pennsylvania governor for Mumia's execution a couple of months later, he was known internationally and did not go down as another nameless, faceless victim of racist injustice. There were international protests in the summer of 1995. Tens of thousands of students, workers, socialists, activists, death penalty abolitionists, and unions representing tens of thousands of workers worldwide, demanded: Mumia Abu-Jamal must not die! These protests, and the legal proceedings that accompanied the protests, helped stay the hand of the executioners. Mumia is still alive today, though still on death row.

Cops and Courts Work Hand in Hand

What I'd like you to have some appreciation of is this: for the better part of a decade, Mumia was under surveillance by local police, the local Red Squad, and the FBI every day, from the time he was a 15-year-old supporter of the Black Panthers through his last year of freedom as an award-winning journalist, speaking out against police brutality in Philadelphia. He was known. When Mumia broadcast and wrote against the bloody 1978 police siege of MOVE's Powelton Village home, Mayor Frank Rizzo blamed 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, the cops, the SWAT team—which in Philadelphia is called the "Stakeout Squad"—got the chance they had been hoping for all these years to silence Jamal. These were the forces that were on the street on the night of 9 December 1981 when police officer Daniel Faulkner was killed and Mumia Abu-Jamal was shot and framed up for a crime he did not commit.

As in other cities, in Philadelphia there was a great deal of co-mingling between the local police and the mob. At the time of Mumia's arrest, there were no fewer than three on-going federal investigations of corruption in the Philadelphia Police Department. This is vital to remember when you read the confession of Arnold Beverly—the evidence the courts refuse to hear—on why he shot police officer Daniel Faulkner and who hired him to do it. Jamal was driving a cab that night, when he heard gunshots. He saw people running, saw his own brother, and got out of his cab to help him. A uniformed cop shot Mumia and he was severely wounded. Mumia was beaten on the street, in the police paddy wagon, beaten again at the door to the hospital and shackled to a hospital bed. In his sworn affidavit, Jamal says, "I never confessed to anything because I had nothing to confess to."

The prosecution of Mumia Abu-Jamal is a textbook case of lynch law "justice," up North. So-called "eyewitness accounts" were secured through police manipulation, coercion and outright terror. Witnesses whose accounts punched holes through the police frame-up of Jamal were hounded out of town. The prosecution concocted a purported "confession" Jamal made while he was lying near death in the hospital, the night of the killing. This "confession" was such a hoax that it didn't even surface until two months after the killing! Ballistics "evidence" does not match Mumia's gun to the shooting or support the prosecution's theory of how the cop or Mumia were shot! Jamal was saddled at the trial with a lawyer he did not want, and refused to participate in this show trial. The judge, Albert Sabo, was known as the "king of death row," a real hanging judge who had sent more people to death row than any other judge in the country. A court stenographer, Terri Maurer-Carter, has made a sworn statement that she heard Judge Sabo say, "I'm going to help 'em fry the n----r." The Pennsylvania Supreme Court refused to hear her testimony and upheld Jamal's conviction and death sentence.

In pursuit of Jamal's freedom, my investigation, as part of the legal defense team, located Arnold Beverly. He passed a lie detector test and his confession is supported by other evidence in the case. This is what Arnold Beverly said and what the courts refuse to hear:

"I have personal knowledge that Mumia Abu-Jamal did not shoot police officer Faulkner.

"I was hired, along with another guy, and paid to shoot and kill Faulkner. I had heard that Faulkner was a problem for the mob and corrupt policemen because he interfered with the graft and payoffs made to allow illegal activity including prostitution, gambling, drugs without prosecution in the center city area.

"Faulkner was shot in the back and then in the face before Jamal came on the scene. Jamal had nothing to do with the shooting."

Arnold Beverly's deposition states that by pre-arrangement, police officers helped him escape the scene.

What you have here is a case that, from beginning to end, is about the government targeting an articulate black man who is a political opponent of the government. And the long arm of the capitalist state—the police, the prosecution, the judge—all worked together to see Jamal convicted and sentenced to death for his political beliefs.

Join the Struggle! Free Mumia!

What can be done at this point is important. First of all, it is necessary to make very clear that the nature of this prosecution is a political frame-up. It is necessary to mobilize the widest possible support, including the social power that the labor movement actually has to fight for Mumia's freedom. The PDC has worked to publicize and assist in all legal proceedings and avenues open to fight for Mumia's freedom and against the death penalty. But we know that there is no justice in the capitalist courts! The power to save Mumia's life, the power to set him free, is going to come from the social power of working people. That means labor strikes and mass protests and demonstrations organized around the power of the integrated labor movement in this country and internationally. Unions representing tens of thousands of workers around the world have taken up the cause of Jamal's freedom. Supporters of the Partisan Defense Committee and the Spartacist League in South Africa were instrumental in getting the powerful COSATU union federation to support Jamal and fight lynch law in America.

To unleash the power that labor has in this country requires a political struggle against union bureaucrats, and even people who call themselves socialists, who subordinate every movement against injustice to the Democratic Party. A lot of union bureaucrats favorably view police and prison guards as their fastest-growing dues base. We say that the guardians of the racist capitalist system have no place at all in the labor movement. Cops out of the unions! While the AFL-CIO organizes them, the cops are busting some strikers' picket line and gunning down black youth in the ghetto, or turning in non-citizens to immigration. As for supposed socialists, many of them jockeyed for position to control the Iraq antiwar movement and ran it headlong into the dead end of support for the pro-war capitalist Democratic Party. In the past, they've done likewise in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and subordinated the call to "free Mumia" to calls for a "new trial," while peddling dangerous illusions in the justice of the very courts that have time and again upheld the racist frame-up of this innocent man and courageous fighter for the oppressed.

Our fight to free Jamal and abolish the racist death penalty is part of our perspective to win workers and youth to see clearly that the capitalist state, its cops and courts do not serve society as a whole, but exist to defend the class rule and profits of the rulers against those whose labor they exploit. The reality of class exploitation in America is masked with lofty language about "democracy" and the aggressive division of the working class along race lines. Black oppression, the forcible segregation of masses of black people at the bottom of this society, is intrinsic to American capitalist rule. It's essential to win the multiracial working class to the understanding that the fight for black freedom is central to the struggle for the emancipation of labor and all the oppressed in this country.

To put a final end to the legacy of slavery in this country—be it the barbaric death penalty or the routine execution of minority youth on the street by cops who act with impunity as judge, jury and executioner—will require a thoroughgoing socialist revolution. That's not just a question of numbers or militancy, but crucially a question of consciousness—revolutionary socialist consciousness. We're building a party for that purpose, and mobilizing to free Mumia Abu-Jamal and abolish the racist death penalty is an important part of that fight.