Workers Vanguard No. 851	8 July 2005

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Now!

Court Rejects New Evidence of Mumia's Innocence, Again

The black-robed judges of the racist capitalist courts have taken another step toward sealing the fate of death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mountains of proof of frame-up and conspiracy have been compiled for the world to see, including the confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Jamal, killed officer Daniel Faulkner on 9 December 1981. But not one court will even look at the evidence. From the courthouse to the White House to the boardrooms, the capitalist rulers want to see the execution of this former Black Panther Party spokesman, award-winning journalist, fighter for black rights and outspoken voice for all the oppressed—the legal lynching of an innocent man.

On May 27, Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas Judge Pamela Dembe announced her intent to dismiss Jamal's third Post-Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) petition seeking to overturn his frame-up conviction and death sentence. Claiming the court lacked jurisdiction, Dembe's decision turned down Mumia's efforts to bring forward two pieces of evidence that have come out since her 2001 decision denying Mumia's earlier PCRA petition. The evidence further blows to bits key parts of the government frame-up: the false testimony of prostitute Cynthia White that she saw Mumia shoot Faulkner and the patently false claim that Mumia confessed to the shooting. On June 16, Mumia's attorneys submitted a motion to reconsider.

It has long been known that White had been coerced into her lying testimony, and other witnesses have testified that White was far from the scene. In early 2002, a new witness, Yvette Williams, testified in a sworn affidavit submitted in federal courts: "I was in jail with Cynthia White in December of 1981 after Police Officer Daniel Faulkner was shot and killed. Cynthia White told me the police were making her lie and say she saw Mr. Jamal shoot Officer Faulkner when she really did not see who did it."

Mumia also wanted to bring out the testimony of Kenneth Pate, stepbrother of Priscilla Durham, the Jefferson Hospital security guard who joined in the cops' lie that Mumia "confessed." In fact, the cop assigned to guard Jamal while he lay bleeding in the hospital reported at the time, "During this time the negro male made no comments." The bogus "confession" was cooked up two months later at a round-table meeting called by the D.A.'s office to orchestrate the cops' trial testimony. In an April 2003 declaration, Pate described how Durham told him that when Mumia was brought to the hospital, he was "bloody and the police were interfering with his treatment, saying 'let him die'." Cops pressured her that, as a security guard, she "had to stick with them" as part of the "brotherhood of police," and to "say that she heard Mumia say that he killed the police officer, when they brought Mumia in on a stretcher." Durham told her brother, "All I heard him say was: 'Get off me, get off me, they're trying to kill me'."

The pretexts for burying proof of Jamal's innocence are recent state and federal restrictions on death row appeals. The most significant of these is the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) enacted under Democratic president Bill Clinton. Pennsylvania's version was explicitly adopted to prevent Mumia from challenging the jury-rigging, coercion of witnesses, fabrication of evidence and wholesale violation of rights that constituted his "trial" before Judge Albert Sabo, known to Philadelphia attorneys as a "prosecutor in robes." Dembe claimed the evidence wasn't "new," and therefore she was barred from considering it. In Kafkaesque fashion, Dembe ruled that since Mumia had insisted from the beginning that the "confession" was a fabrication and that White's testimony was coerced by the cops, the testimony of Pate and Williams would not constitute "new facts" but merely "newly discovered or newly willing sources"!

In Jamal's previous PCRA, Dembe refused to consider the sworn account of court stenographer Terri Maurer-Carter of a conversation she overheard in which, referring to Jamal, Judge Sabo said: "Yeah, and I'm going to help them fry the n----r." According to Dembe, such a blatant statement of racist bias was insignificant!

Still pending in the federal courts is Jamal's application for habeas corpus relief. While affirming Jamal's frame-up conviction, federal district court judge William Yohn overturned Jamal's death sentence in December 2001. The prosecution appealed seeking to reinstate the death penalty, while Jamal appealed seeking to overturn the conviction. Under Clinton's AEDPA, Judge Yohn had the authority to not only turn down Jamal's habeas corpus petition but also limit which issues, if any, Jamal could then raise on appeal—in this case, Mumia is allowed to only raise the exclusion of blacks from the jury. On June 30, Jamal's attorneys filed a motion in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals asking the court to also consider additional issues on appeal—the ineffectiveness of Jamal's trial counsel, denial of Mumia's right to represent himself at trial, the removal of Mumia from the courtroom and Judge Sabo's blatant bias.

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 1985 murder conviction of Thomas Miller-El by a jury of eleven whites and one black on the grounds that prosecutors contrived to exclude blacks from the jury. Two weeks later, the Court decided to reconsider the stringent rules on presenting new evidence of innocence. These are welcome developments. But it would be foolish to pin hopes for Mumia on favorable outcomes in these legal challenges. Court after court has disregarded its own precedents when it comes to Mumia, and the U.S. Supreme Court has already turned Jamal down three times. In 1992 the Supreme Court threw out the death penalty conviction of one 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. But the same court refused to even hear Jamal's appeal that his Black Panther Party membership was central to the state's argument for the death penalty.

Mumia's case is a textbook example of what the capitalist state is all about. The state consists at its core of armed bodies of men—the cops and military and their adjuncts, the courts and prisons—whose role is the suppression of one class by the other. While the state vendetta against Jamal shows that there is no justice in the bourgeois courts, the reformists of Workers World Party and Socialist Action continue to promote illusions in the courts, subordinating the call to free Mumia to the demand for a "new trial." As Partisan Defense Committee counsel Rachel Wolkenstein noted in her speech at an April 23 rally for Mumia in Harlem:

"Not only should it be clear that Mumia should have never spent a day in court, but to talk about a 'fair trial' only breeds illusions in the capitalist courts. These illusions demobilized a movement which once had millions around the world. The mass movement has to be built anew on the basis that Mumia's conviction and death sentence were political, and it is in the interests of all working people, black and white, citizen and immigrant, to join together and fight for his freedom."

Now more than ever, what's needed is mass protest, based on the social power of the multiracial labor movement organized independently of the capitalist parties and their spokesmen. Free Mumia! Abolish the racist death penalty!