Workers Vanguard No. 1134
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18 May 2018
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“Progressive” D.A. Shafts Appeal
Mumia Abu-Jamal Is Innocent—Free Him Now!
On April 30, lawyers for Mumia Abu-Jamal were once again in a Philadelphia courtroom fighting to overturn his 1982 frame-up conviction on charges of killing Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Once again they found their path blocked by the same machinations of the cops, prosecutors and judges who condemned this innocent man to death row for 30 years and subsequently to the “living death” of life without parole. This time around the vendetta is being led by Larry Krasner, a “progressive” Democrat, whose election as district attorney last November was hailed by a coterie of liberals and reformist socialists. Krasner wasted little time before stepping into the wingtips of his predecessors in working to squelch any possibility of Mumia’s freedom.
Mumia has been in the crosshairs of the capitalist state since he was a teenage Black Panther Party spokesman in the 1960s. The Philly cops’ venom toward Mumia only grew in the 1970s when, as an award-winning journalist known as the “voice of the voiceless,” he exposed the racist police vendetta against MOVE, the largely black back-to-nature group he came to support. His trial and conviction were a classic frame-up involving close collaboration of cops, lying prosecutors and hanging judges: racist jury-rigging; terrorizing of witnesses; concealment of evidence; phony ballistics and other manufactured prosecution “evidence”; a “confession” concocted by cops and prosecutors. Presiding over the trial was Albert Sabo, who was overheard by a court reporter vowing to help the prosecution “fry the n----r.” At his 1982 trial, Mumia was sentenced to death explicitly for his political views.
Federal and state courts have repeatedly refused to consider evidence of Mumia’s innocence, especially the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot Faulkner. After a federal court decision rescinded the death penalty and ordered a new sentencing hearing, state authorities in December 2011 dropped their efforts to carry out Mumia’s legal lynching, recognizing the unlikelihood of again procuring a death sentence.
The frenzied campaign to bury Mumia exemplifies the racist rulers’ determination to silence through state terror those fighting against black oppression, which is the bedrock of American capitalism. In this country, the first line of repression is directed at black people, with the aim of keeping workers divided along racial and ethnic lines to hamper joint class struggle against the capitalist exploiters. When Mumia faced execution in 1995, trade unions throughout the world, representing millions of working people, took up his cause. It is crucial that the labor movement defend this eloquent voice of defiant opposition. The fight to free Mumia from the clutches of the capitalist state is in the interest of the multiracial proletariat.
Currently in court is the Post Conviction Relief Act petition Mumia filed in 2016 challenging the judicial bias of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which has repeatedly denied his appeals. Mumia’s challenge is based on a 2016 decision, Williams v. Pennsylvania, in which the U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged that Pennsylvania’s judicial system was infected with potential bias because of the elevation of Ronald Castille, Philadelphia’s D.A. of the late 1980s, to the state’s Supreme Court in the 1990s. From that perch, Castille ruled on the legality of the very convictions and sentences he and his office secured. One of the cases in which Castille acted as both prosecutor and judge was Mumia’s. Castille served as a senior Assistant D.A. in 1982 during Mumia’s trial, and as the D.A. during Mumia’s direct appeal. Then as a state Supreme Court judge, Castille went on to rubber-stamp the gross violations of Mumia’s rights that he perpetrated as prosecutor.
To prevail, Mumia must show that while in the D.A.’s office, Castille had significant personal involvement in Mumia’s case, as he did in Williams’s case. Castille claims that he “didn’t have anything to do” with Mumia’s prosecution and that Mumia’s attorneys never “asked me to recuse myself on appeal when I was a justice. To me it was just another case” (Legal Intelligencer, 30 April). In fact, in 1998 Supreme Court Justice Castille wrote a lengthy decision denying a motion for his recusal from Mumia’s appeal.
It is preposterous for Castille to claim that he was just a bystander to Mumia’s case. Capital prosecutions and appeals are not “just another case,” but priorities for prosecutors, subject to strict oversight by D.A.s. In Philadelphia, there was no higher priority than Mumia’s case—for three decades the D.A.’s office worked hand in hand with the Fraternal Order of Police to secure Mumia’s death sentence.
Yet the Common Pleas judge now hearing Mumia’s petition, Leon Tucker, has placed the onus of establishing Castille’s involvement on Mumia’s attorneys. And they are to do this based on documentary evidence, which is in the possession of the D.A.’s office. Predictably, Krasner’s office claims that no such evidence exists.
Tucker has reviewed some of the files in chambers and discovered a March 1990 report to Castille from a Deputy D.A., Gayle McLaughlin, on the status of pending capital cases, including a discussion of Mumia’s appeal. Shortly after receiving McLaughlin’s report, Castille wrote to then Governor Robert Casey, urging him to jump-start Pennsylvania’s death row in order to “send a clear and dramatic message to all police killers that the death penalty actually means something.” McLaughlin’s report was written in response to a memo by Castille. The judge, Tucker, had ordered the D.A.’s office to produce the Castille memo to which McLaughlin was responding. But Krasner’s office claims that Castille’s memo has disappeared!
At the April 30 hearing, a phalanx of cops filled a row in the courtroom in solidarity with Krasner’s prosecutors and to counter protesters, including supporters of the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee, who came out to defend Mumia. Tucker continued the case to August 30 to allow Mumia’s attorneys to take McLaughlin’s deposition testimony.
Grotesquely, the ascendance of Krasner to top prosecutor was hailed by the reformists in the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Socialist Alternative (SAlt) and Workers World (WWP) as a victory for the oppressed. The ISO cheered the electoral win of Krasner, and other “progressive” Democrats, last November, writing that it reflected “a desire for a political alternative to the status quo.” They even offered a pre-emptive alibi for him: “Everyone around him in his new position will fight tooth and nail against the least measures for reform he tries to introduce” (SocialistWorker.org, 14 November 2017).
After Krasner won the Democratic Party primary last May, SAlt’s Philadelphia branch headlined, “Krasner Wins! Keep Building The Resistance!” WWP declared that “Krasner’s election victory was significant,” while also noting that “huge questions remain about Krasner’s ability to fulfill his supporters’ demands” (Workers World, 15 November 2017). They went into overdrive fueling illusions in this “new and more progressive DA,” urging activists to “keep up the pressure” so Krasner’s prosecutors would “do the right thing.”
On May 4, ISO supporter Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor joined Krasner and Bernie Sanders for a roundtable that appeared on The Dig podcast, which is produced by the Democratic Socialists of America-sponsored Jacobinmagazine. The purpose of this gathering was to convince Democratic Party “socialist” Sanders, a capitalist politician, to deal with race as he again seeks the Democrats’ presidential nomination in 2020. While Krasner recounted the well-known “past practices” of racist cop brutality and prosecutorial cover-ups, neither Taylor nor the Jacobin host could muster even a whimper in protest against Krasner taking up the baton in the imprisonment of Mumia.
For the capitalist class whose interest he was elected to serve, D.A. Krasner did the “right thing” in pursuing Mumia’s continued incarceration. No less than the cops, courts and prisons, the D.A.s and U.S. federal attorneys are at the core of the capitalist state, an apparatus of violence whose purpose is to defend the class rule and property of the capitalist rulers against the working class and oppressed.
The Partisan Defense Committee, a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, has long fought for Mumia’s freedom. Ever since taking up Mumia’s cause in 1987, we have fought for his struggle to be taken up by broader social forces, centrally the multiracial proletariat, while aiming to dispel any illusions in the “justice” of the capitalist courts. We urge our readers to donate to Mumia’s legal defense. Checks payable to the National Lawyers Guild should be sent to the Committee to Save Mumia Abu-Jamal, Johanna Fernandez, 158-18 Riverside Drive W., Apt. 6C-50, New York, NY 10032, earmarked “For Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Legal Defense.”
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