Showing posts with label MUMIA ABU-JAMAL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MUMIA ABU-JAMAL. Show all posts

Saturday, March 16, 2019

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Now! “Progressive” D.A. Continues State Vendetta


[American Left History publishes or re-publishes articles and notices of events that might be of interest to the liberal, left-liberal and radical public. That has been the policy generally since the publication due to financial constraints went solely on-line in the early 2000s as the Internet has allowed new and simply outlets for all kinds of material that were almost impossible to publish when it was solely hard copy going back to the early 1970s.

Over the past couple of months American Left History has received many comments about our policy of publishing materials and notices of events without comment. More than a few comments wondered aloud whether the publication agreed with all, or most of what has been published. Obviously given that we will republish material from sources like the ACLU, the movement for nuclear disarmament and established if small left-wing organizations formally outside the main party system in America unless we were mere by-standers to the political movements many of the positions are too contrary to agree with all of them.   

Policy: unless there is a signed statement of agreement by one of our writers, me or the Editorial Board assume that the article or notice is what we think might be of interest of the Left-wing public and does not constitute and endorsement. Greg Green, site manager]    


*************

Workers Vanguard No. 1149
22 February 2019
 
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Now!
“Progressive” D.A. Continues State Vendetta
On January 25, Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner announced that his office was appealing the December 27 ruling of Judge Leon Tucker of the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, in which Mumia Abu-Jamal won the right to challenge his frame-up conviction. A former Black Panther spokesman, MOVE supporter and award-winning journalist, Mumia has been in prison hell for 37 years—30 of them on death row—falsely convicted of killing Police Officer Daniel Faulkner in December 1981. Tucker’s ruling threw out the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decisions from 1998 to 2012 that rubber-stamped Mumia’s frame-up, because a judge on that court gave an “appearance of bias.” The judge, Ronald Castille, had been the D.A. during Mumia’s first appeal of his conviction and death sentence.
We welcomed Judge Tucker’s ruling and protest Krasner’s appeal, a further demonstration of his commitment to keep Mumia entombed for life. The ink was barely dry on Tucker’s decision when a host of liberals, radical activists and reformist socialists stepped up their campaign calling on Philly’s top prosecutor “to do the right thing.” Krasner is “doing the right thing”—for the capitalist class that he was elected to serve. The D.A.’s office, no less than the cops, courts and prisons, is at the core of the state machinery of repression whose purpose is to defend the profits and rule of the bourgeoisie.
An online petition to the D.A. initiated by Mobilization 4 Mumia, which includes Workers World Party’s International Action Center, demanded that Krasner not appeal, lauding his supposed “concern for justice.” It also declared: “It was a people’s movement that paved the way for your election,” as if the “people” could take over the instrument of their own repression and wield it for their purposes. Even after Krasner filed the appeal, his supporters were undeterred. A February 6 letter sent to Krasner, now another online petition, calls on him to drop the appeal, grotesquely groveling that he could “be the one to end this pattern of racism in Mumia’s case.”
The Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee, a class-struggle, non-sectarian, legal and social defense organization associated with the SL, will not sign these appeals to the D.A. The petitions sow illusions that the Democrat Krasner could run the apparatus of the capitalist state in the interests of the oppressed.
In racist capitalist America, a key function of the state is and has been to terrorize, frame up and kill those fighting for black freedom, foremost among them members of the Black Panther Party, the best of a generation of black radicals who subjectively saw revolution as the road to black equality. The Panthers were met with surveillance, harassment, disruption, frame-up and assassination. As a teenager, Mumia was placed on the FBI’s Administrative Index designating him to be rounded up in case of a “national emergency.”
By filing the appeal, Krasner broke the hearts of those who envisioned him at the head of a class of “progressive” prosecutors. Workers World Party, which gushed that “Krasner’s election victory was significant” (workers.org, 15 November 2017), now laments: “It appears the new DA is the same as the old DAs” (30 January). Indeed! There is no such thing as a progressive D.A. Whether a liberal like Krasner or a more mainstream Democrat like Kamala Harris, who, as San Francisco D.A. and then California Attorney General, fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions, D.A.s administer capitalist “law and order,” packing people off to prison.
Last October, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) hailed Krasner’s campaign as a blueprint for how activists can help elect “progressive” D.A.s nationwide on the Democratic Party ticket. ISO leader Paul D’Amato responded that he prefers to “apply mass pressure without offering any political support” (socialistworker.org, 19 October 2018). The ISO’s strategy is pressure politics, whether helping Democrats win elections or demonstrating in the streets to beg them. Or, for that matter, attending monthly meetings of local activists with Krasner “to keep the DA aligned with the perspectives of the movement organizers” (socialistworker.org, 1 October 2018). As Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky said of the activity of such reformists, it is directed toward “training of the masses to become imbued with the inviolability of the bourgeois state.”
Krasner’s “progressive” credentials were based largely on his campaign promise to reduce mass incarceration. The reformists alibi the Philly D.A. by pointing to the pressure he is under from the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), with the ISO inventing “the contradictions of his job” (4 January). Krasner has made absolutely clear that there are no contradictions; a D.A. doesn’t have to be tight with the FOP to be on the same side. In a 9 February Intercept article, Krasner defended his decision to appeal Tucker’s ruling for the “celebrity” Mumia out of concern “about all of the unfamous, poor, nameless people whose cases deserve individual justice.” Krasner is “concerned” that those victims of capitalist injustice might go free if Mumia prevails, as the D.A. bemoaned the possibility of “having to rehear possibly thousands of cases.”
While supporting Mumia’s use of every available legal means, our approach is one of class-struggle defense and our demand is for his freedom. Ever since we took up his case in 1987, we have fought for broader social forces, centrally the multiracial proletariat, to champion Mumia’s struggle while aiming to dispel any illusions in the “justice” of the racist capitalist courts. We seek to imbue the working class with the understanding that ending capitalist exploitation and racial oppression necessitates sweeping away the ruling class and its state apparatus and establishing a workers state.
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.”

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Happy Birthday Frederick Douglass- A New Biography-In Honor Of John Brown Late Of Harpers Ferry-1859 *For Frederick Douglass On His 200th Birthday- From The Pages Of “Workers Vanguard”-Mumia Abu-Jamal Radio Interview -“Frederick Douglass Taught Us That Power Concedes Nothing Wit



Happy Birthday Frederick Douglass- A New Biography

Click on link to hear a serious biographer of Frederick Douglass the revolutionary abolitionist who broke with the William Lloyd Garrison-wing of the movement when the times called for remorseless military fighting against the entrenched slave-holders and their allies. This from Christopher Lydon’s Open Source program on NPR.
https://player.fm/series/open-source-with-christopher-lydon/behind-the-leonine-gaze-of-frederick-douglass

This is what you need to know about Frederick Douglass and the anti-slavery, the revolutionary abolitionist fight. He was the man, the shining q star black man who led the fight for black men to join the Union Army and not just either be treated as freaking contraband or worse, as projected in early in the war by the Lincoln administration the return of fugitive slaves to “loyal” slave-owners. Led the fight to not only seek an emancipation proclamation as part of the struggle but a remorseless and probably long struggle to crush slavery and slaver-owners and their hanger-on militarily. Had been ticketed at a desperate moment in 1864 to recreate a John Brown scenario if they logjam between North and South in Virginia had not been broken. Yes, a bright shining northern star black man.    




Click on the headline to link to the article from “Workers Vanguard” described in the title.


Markin comment:


As almost always these historical articles and polemics are purposefully helpful to clarify the issues in the struggle against world imperialism, particularly the “monster” here in America.







Thursday, December 15, 2016

From The Archives-A Small Victory- Death Penalty Abolition in New Jersey

Commentary

One of the best pieces of political wisdom I have ever received, and that from an old communist, is that a left political militant must make sure to protect the gains of the past political fights after going on to fight new battles. The nature of capitalist politics is such that no hard-fought political gain comes with an automatic guarantee that it is not reversible. Additionally, I was told that if the political tide is running against you and you cannot hold on to those hard fought gains then you must keep up the propaganda fight and not give into the reactionary flow. Enduring a seemingly never-ending stream of political and social reversals in the ‘culture wars’ over the last few decades that advice has kept my head above water.

In my ‘flaming’ at first liberal, then radical youth three issues formed the core of my political beliefs: the fight for black civil rights in the South (and later in the North); the fight for nuclear disarmament; and, the fight against the barbaric death penalty. A look at the current political landscape confirms that those struggles are still in dire need of completion. One need only look at the current fight for freedom for the Jena Six down in Louisiana, the overflowing American nuclear arsenal and the fact that 37 states and the federal government still have the death penalty on their books. This last fact is what I am interested in commenting on today.

On Thursday December 14, 2007 the New Jersey Assembly voted, apparently mainly along party lines, to abolish the death penalty in that state. As a result it only awaits the governor’s signature to become law and thus become the first state in forty years to take such action. The governor has indicated that he will sign the legislation. What is more, other states are in various stages of taking the same action. And, of course, there is an n unofficial moratorium in place while the United States Supreme Court decides whether lethal injection in the administration of the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment. So the worm turns, perhaps.

During the past decade there has been more than enough evidence from such sources as DNA testing to the results of the various Innocent Projects to convince any rationale person that the administration of the death penalty and even the idea of that ultimate act as a penalty is ‘arbitrary and capricious’, as the language of the legal decisions would have it. In the New Jersey debate one Democratic Assemblyman Wilfredo Caraballo was quoted by Tom Hester, Jr. of the Associated Press as saying “It’s time New Jersey got out of the execution business. Capital punishment is costly, discriminatory, immoral, and barbaric. We’re a better state that one that puts people to death.” Well put. I would only add that from my leftist perspective we do not want to concede to this government the power over life and death for the guilty or the innocent. Put concretely in today’s political terms we do not want the George W. Bushes of the world to have that power.

Coming from Massachusetts, the state that sent the framed-up and martyred Sacco and Vanzetti to their executions, in my youth I was strongly aware of the injustice of the death penalty. One of my early political acts in high school was to attend the annual memorial meeting here in their honor. Moreover, in my household at least, there were always whispers about the injustice done to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Not out of any political sympathy but from the traditional Catholic antipathy to the death penalty. Those were the days when we had the death penalty advocates somewhat on the run but the spirit of the Sixties barely outlasted the decade as the yahoos went on a rampage for reintroduction. Pardon me then if I see just a little glimmer of light that we may have turned the corner on this issue again. But, as noted above, we better keep fighting like hell just the same.

Saturday, December 10, 2016

*From The Pages Of “Workers Vanguard”- Free the MOVE 9 Prisoners! Remember May 1985 MOVE Massacre

Click on the headline to link to the article from “Workers Vanguard” described in the title.


Markin comment:


As almost always these historical articles and polemics are purposefully helpful to clarify the issues in the struggle against world imperialism, particularly the “monster” here in America.

*From The Pages Of “Workers Vanguard”-For Class-Struggle Defense!

Click on the headline to link to the article from “Workers Vanguard” described in the title.


Markin comment:


As almost always these historical articles and polemics are purposefully helpful to clarify the issues in the struggle against world imperialism, particularly the “monster” here in America.

Friday, December 09, 2016

*From The Partisan Defense CommitteeArchives - An Update On Class War Prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal's Case

Click on the title to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site. This information concerning Mumia is passed on from the Partisan Defense Committee. As always, free Mumia!

30 November 2009


Dear Friend,


We are now preparing for our annual Holiday Appeal for class-war prisoners. This year marks the 24th year of sending monthly stipends as an expression of solidarity to those imprisoned for standing up to racist capitalist repression and imperialist depredation. All proceeds from the Holiday Appeals go to the Class-War prisoners Stipend Fund enabling US to send stipends to 16 class-war prisoners and extra gifts to them and their families around the Holiday. Please phone us or go to our PDC website, www.partisandefense. org, and look under upcoming events for the time and location of Holiday Appeal benefits in Chicago, Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Toronto.

Support for class-war prisoners is not an act of charity, but the duty of those on the outside toward those inside prison walls. We ask at this time for all of our friends to consider becoming monthly sustainers to the PDC so we can continue our important work and ask that our loyal sustainers consider increasing their monthly donation.
At the Holiday Appeal benefits we will continue to highlight the case of death-row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. As you may know the Supreme Court summarily refused to consider the documented racist jury-rigging in turning down Mumia's appeal, while considering the prosecutors' efforts to reinstate the death sentence. In 2001, federal district court judge Yohn overturned the death sentence on the basis of faulty jury instructions, under the authority of the 1988 Supreme Court Mills decision. Upon doing so Yohn deferred ruling on Mumia's other challenges to the death sentence. This means that if his ruling on the Mills issue is ultimately reversed, Mumia's case would go back to Yohn to rule on these other issues.

Ominously, while the Court sits on the prosecutor's appeal in Mumia's case, it recently held oral argument in the case of Ohio neo-Nazi Frank Spisak, in which the prosecution sought to reverse a lower court decision overturning the death sentence on the same Mills grounds. Eighteen state attorney generals, including from Pennsylvania and California have filed an amicus brief urging the court to rule against Spisak explicitly citing Mumia as another case where they, in effect, want an execution. We don't know when or how the Supreme Court will decide. The Supreme Court could decide the Spisak appeal without addressing the jury instructions issue. But, should they restore Spisak's death sentence by overturning the lower court on the Mills issue this would represent an ominous legal development for Mumia. Should that happen, Mumia would be a step closer to the death chamber, although it would probably take at least a year for this issue to wend its way through the courts. If at the end of that round of litigation, the court ultimately reverses Yohn and restores the death penalty, the case would again go back to Yohn to rule on Mumia's other challenges to the death sentence.

You may be aware, black Republican documentary film maker from Philadelphia, Tigre Hill, is preparing a movie against Mumia entitled The Barrel of a Gun. Its disgusting premise is that Mumia was itching to kill a cop since his teenage days in the Black Panthers and that he got his chance on December 9, 1981. The trailer features shots of Bobby Scale calling to "off the pig" and BPP cartoons interspersed with shots of Mumia and Faulkner. It was scheduled to be release on December 9 this year, but has been postponed so that Hill can document some important "new development."

One of the talking heads in this movie is Seth Williams, the newly elected District Attorney in Philadelphia. While it is hardly news that the Philadelphia DA's office is gung-ho to execute Mumia, Lynne Abraham, the Queen of Death, is stepping down and a black Democrat, Williams, will now replace her. Like all the other Philly DA candidates he was approached by (Obama's pal) Michael Smerconish as to what they would do if Mumia's case comes before him. Williams campaigned on the promise that he will seek to reinstate Mumia's death penalty. You will recall that if Yohn's decision stands, the DA has six months in which to go for a new sentencing or let his decision stand which gives Mumia life in prison without parole. So even if the Supreme Court does not rule against Mumia, he could be subjected to a new sentencing phase trial where prosecutors will try to get him killed.

Mumia is Innocent! Free Him Now!

As WV No. 941 said, "The stakes are high and the situation is grim, but any real fight for Mumia's freedom must be based on a class-struggle opposition to the capitalist rulers, who have entombed this innocent black man in prison for more than half his life."

Wednesday, December 07, 2016

Thursday, December 01, 2016

*Partisan Defense Committee- 23rd Holiday Appeal- Free All Class War Prisoners i

Click on title to link to the James P. Cannon Internet Archive's copy of his articel on the Scottsboro Boys from 1932, as an example of his keen understanding of the need for the international labor movement to protect its own and other oppressed segments of society. An injury to one is an injury to all!

This is a repost of the 22nd Holiday Appeal in 2007. Unfortunately this issue of freedom and support of these class war prisoners is still with us. Donate generously, if you can, to this important component of the struggle for a more just, socialist world. This is our duty to those militants in prison, it is not charity.

23 November 2007


22nd Annual Holiday Appeal

Free the Class-War Prisoners!


“The class-conscious worker accords to the class-war prisoners a place of singular honor and esteem.”

—James P. Cannon, “The Cause that Passes Through a Prison,”
Labor Defender, September 1926


For the past 22 years, the Partisan Defense Committee has been sending monthly stipends as an expression of solidarity to those imprisoned for standing up to racist capitalist repression. In doing so, we have revived the tradition initiated by the International Labor Defense (ILD) under Cannon, a founding leader of the Communist Party and the ILD’s first secretary (1925-28). This year, as in years past, the PDC calls on labor activists, fighters for black rights, radical youth and defenders of civil liberties to join us in building our annual Holiday Appeal, which raises funds for this unique program.

The Holiday Appeal benefits will focus particularly on our campaign to mobilize mass protest demanding freedom for death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia currently awaits a decision by a federal appeals court on whether to reinstitute the death sentence, keep him entombed in prison for life or grant him a new trial or other legal proceedings. For those fighting for Mumia’s freedom, there must be no illusions in capitalist “justice.” Earlier this year, the capitalist courts again turned down appeals by class-war prisoners Leonard Peltier, Ed Poindexter and Mumia’s son Jamal Hart. Build the Holiday Appeal! Free all class-war prisoners!

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and an award-winning journalist known as “the voice of the voiceless.” The fight to free America’s foremost class-war prisoner has reached a crucial juncture. This past May, oral arguments were heard before the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals—the last stage before the U.S. Supreme Court. A decision could come at any moment.

9 December 2007 marks the 26th anniversary of Mumia’s arrest for a killing that the cops know he did not commit. Mumia was framed up for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. More than six years ago, Mumia’s attorneys submitted to the courts the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner, but to the racists in black robes, a court of law is no place for evidence of the innocence of this fighter for the oppressed.

Mumia faces the racist death penalty or life in prison because he has always spoken for the oppressed, like the Jena 6 or those left to die in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Workers, immigrants, minorities and all opponents of racist oppression must redouble their efforts to free Mumia now!

Leonard Peltier is an internationally revered class-war prisoner. His incarceration for his activism in the American Indian Movement has come to symbolize this country’s racist repression of its native peoples, the survivors of centuries of genocidal oppression. Peltier’s frame-up trial for the deaths of two marauding FBI agents in what had become a war zone at the South Dakota Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975 shows what capitalist “justice” is all about. Although the lead government attorney has admitted: “We can’t prove who shot those agents,” and the courts have acknowledged blatant prosecutorial misconduct, the 63-year-old Peltier is still locked away. In separate lawsuits, early this year federal courts in New York and Minnesota kept under government seal thousands of FBI documents, once again covering up the racist frame-up that has already stolen 30 years of his life.

Jamal Hart, Mumia’s son, was sentenced in 1998 to 15 1/2 years without parole on bogus firearms possession charges. Hart was targeted for his prominent activism in the campaign to free his father. Although Hart was initially charged under Pennsylvania laws, which would have meant a probationary sentence, Clinton’s Justice Department intervened to have Hart thrown into prison under federal laws. Hart was transferred to Minersville, PA, where prison officials subjected him to repeated provocations and improperly adjusted Hart’s security level to deny him transfer to a lower level security facility; a transfer to Loretto, PA, has finally been granted. In October, the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals summarily turned down Hart’s habeas corpus petition which would have freed him after more than ten years in prison.

Eight MOVE members, Chuck Africa, Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, Janet Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Africa, Eddie Africa and Phil Africa, are in their 30th year of prison. They were sentenced to 30-100 years after the 8 August 1978 siege of their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops’ own cross fire. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops. In 2008, the MOVE prisoners will be eligible for parole, but without massive calls for their freedom can only expect continued imprisonment.

Jaan Laaman and Thomas Manning are the remaining anti-imperialist activists known as the Ohio 7 still in prison, convicted for their roles in a radical group that took credit for bank “expropriations” and bombings in the late 1970s and ’80s against symbols of U.S. imperialism such as military and corporate offices. Before their arrests in 1984 and 1985, the Ohio 7 were targets of massive manhunts. Their children were kidnapped at gunpoint by the Feds.

The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of radicals during the Vietnam antiwar movement and by New Leftists who wrote off the possibility of winning the working class to a revolutionary program and saw themselves as an auxiliary of Third World liberation movements. But, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. From a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not a crime. They should not have served a day in prison.

Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha, Nebraska, National Committee to Combat Fascism. They were victims of the deadly FBI COINTELPRO operation under which 38 Black Panther Party members were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges. Poindexter and Mondo, railroaded to prison for a 1970 explosion which killed a cop, were sentenced to life and have now served more than 35 years in jail. In September, a Nebraska court denied a new trial for Poindexter despite the fact that a crucial piece of evidence excluded from the original trial, a long-suppressed 911 audio tape, proved that testimony of the state’s key witness was perjured.

Hugo Pinell is the last of the San Quentin 6 still in prison. He was a militant anti-racist leader of prison rights organizing along with his comrade and mentor, George Jackson, who was gunned down by prison guards in 1971. Despite hundreds of letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 26 years, Pinell has repeatedly been denied parole, most recently in November 2006. Now in his 60s, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence at the notorious Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit in California.

Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeals will go to the Class-War Prisoners Stipend Fund. Send your contributions to: PDC, P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013; (212) 406-4252.

* * *

(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 903, 23 November 2007)

Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.

Thursday, May 05, 2016

*From The Pages Of The “Workers Vanguard” Archives- Free the MOVE 9 Prisoners! Remember May 1985 MOVE Massacre

Click on the headline to link to the article from “Workers Vanguard” described in the title.


Markin comment:


As almost always these historical articles and polemics are purposefully helpful to clarify the issues in the struggle against world imperialism, particularly the “monster” here in America.

Monday, January 16, 2012

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Mumia Abu-Jamal Is Innocent—Free Him Now!-Drive to Execute Mumia Halted- Mumia Must Not Die In Prison!

Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League website.

Markin comment on this article:

I wish to emphasize the point made in the article (bold-faced below) about “not forgetting” our class-war prisoners a situation highlighted today by Mumia’s case. Once the death penalty is not hanging over the heads of our brothers and sister whole layers of former sympathizers head for the hills (or the next radical or liberal chic cause). That has been transparently the case with Ruchell Macgee, Angela’s Davis’ co-defendant around the George Jackson events back in the early 1970s, who has languished in jail for over thirty years. (The American Communist Party played its usual despicable role purposefully putting his case on the “back–burner” to highlight the more glamorous and palatable Davis case.) The same is true for George Jackson‘s San Quentin Six comrade, Hugo Pinell, who has languished in the California prisons of over forty years. Enough. Free all our class-war prisoners! They must not die in prison!

From James Cannon:

“The workers who had rallied to Mooney and Billings were soothed by the sinister argument that imprisonment for life was, in any event, better than execution. They were told that we would have to be satisfied for the while with one victory, and that the final release of the two fighters would be won later. But after ten years there remain only a few who still keep alive the memory of these buried men and who are pledged to continue the work for their freedom.”
*******


Workers Vanguard No. 993
6 January 2012

Mumia Abu-Jamal Is Innocent—Free Him Now!-Drive to Execute Mumia Halted

After 29 years and 363 days, Mumia Abu-Jamal no longer lives under the executioner’s shadow. On December 7, Philadelphia district attorney Seth Williams announced that his office was dropping efforts to execute America’s foremost class-war prisoner. While this brings to an end a legal lynching campaign that began with Mumia’s arrest and false conviction for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, Mumia remains condemned to spend the rest of his life in prison with no chance of parole, despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence.

In a recent letter to the Partisan Defense Committee, Mumia aptly characterized his new home at the Mahanoy Correctional Institution in Frackville, PA, as “‘slow’ Death Row.” A Black Panther Party leader in his youth and later an award-winning journalist, Mumia has spent over 40 years fighting for the oppressed. He must not be forgotten and left to rot in prison hell! Trade unionists, radical youth and fighters for black rights must demand: Freedom now for Mumia Abu-Jamal!

The state forces that have tried for decades to silence this powerful voice for the oppressed are certainly not going to forget him. Appearing with Williams when he made his announcement were prosecutors who helped railroad Mumia to death row, officials of the Fraternal Order of Police (F.O.P.), long the spearhead of the drive to execute him, and F.O.P. mouthpiece Maureen Faulkner, the slain policeman’s widow. Spewing the venomous racism that has motivated the persecution of Mumia, Faulkner described him as a “seething animal” and ranted, “I am heartened by the thought that he will finally be taken from the protected cloister he has been living in all these years and begin living among his own kind; the thugs and common criminals that infest our prisons.” This is the voice of the cops who stop and throw black youth against the wall for “walking while black,” who have consigned generations of young blacks and Latinos to prison hell in the “war on drugs,” who carry out street executions with impunity.

For Mumia, being “cloistered” on death row the past 30 years has meant confinement almost 24 hours a day in an eight-by-twelve-foot cell, severe limits on phone calls, separation from visitors by thick Plexiglas and, until recently, being manacled during visits. Mumia has been unable to embrace his wife Wadiya or bounce grandchildren on his knee. In 1985, Mumia learned that the Philly cops and the Feds, on orders from black Democratic mayor Wilson Goode, firebombed the Osage Avenue home of his comrades in the predominantly black MOVE back-to-nature commune, killing eleven people, including five children. A little over a decade later, Mumia saw his son Jamal Hart railroaded to prison for 15 years by the Clinton administration on bogus gun-possession charges—retaliation for Hart’s prominent activism on his father’s behalf. Until Jamal Hart’s release last year, prison regs even prohibited Mumia and his son from corresponding with one another.

As described in the Partisan Defense Committee statement printed below, Mumia is an innocent man who was subjected to a racist and political frame-up. For three decades, police, prosecutors and government officials of both the Democratic and Republican parties have been screaming for Mumia’s head. From the right-wing tabloids to the Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Times, newsrooms across the country have treated the prosecution’s lying account of Faulkner’s killing as gospel.

Court after court has refused to even consider the massive amount of evidence proving Mumia’s innocence. In 2001, Mumia’s attorneys presented in state and federal courts the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that “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.” At the time of Faulkner’s killing, the Philadelphia police were under three corruption investigations by the Feds, encompassing virtually the entire chain of command that oversaw the “investigation” of Faulkner’s death.

First taking up Mumia’s defense in 1987, the PDC and the Spartacist League made his case known to a wide range of death penalty abolitionists, student groups, black activists and the labor movement through publicity and protest. From the beginning, we have fought for the understanding that the power of labor must be brought to bear to win Mumia’s freedom. Indeed, it was an outpouring of protest internationally including trade unionists that helped win a stay of execution for Mumia in August 1995.

Mumia had become a central focus of the fight to abolish the racist death penalty. His black skin and meager means are the demographic of most of those selected for death row. At the same time, Mumia’s radical political activism incensed the bourgeoisie. And with Faulkner’s shooting, the cops and prosecutors saw the opportunity to place Mumia in the company of executed labor militants and radicals—from the Haymarket martyrs in 1887 to Joe Hill and Sacco and Vanzetti early last century.

As Marxists, we oppose the barbaric institution of capital punishment on principle—for the guilty as well as the innocent. The death penalty is the ultimate sanction of a “justice” system that is not only stacked against workers and the poor but also, in a society founded on slavery and maintained on a bedrock of black oppression, racist to its core. The manifest unfairness of Mumia’s trial, the racist and political motivation for his conviction and sentence, the outrageously biased court proceedings—all provided a focus for death penalty abolitionists. Most compelling and magnetic, however, was the voice of the man known as the “voice of the voiceless.” Mumia’s incisive, compassionate and compelling commentaries from death row, which appeared in black press across the country, inspired thousands upon thousands to demand that such a man not be executed. Mumia’s writings spoke as well to the humanity of those he encountered behind prison walls and on death row.

While placing no faith in the rigged “justice” of the capitalist courts, we have also advocated pursuing all possible legal proceedings on Mumia’s behalf. The legal issue that removed Mumia from death row was the unconstitutional jury instructions issued at his 1982 trial, which did not allow jurors to freely consider mitigating circumstances weighing against a death sentence. This issue was first raised in a 1990 legal memo by PDC attorney Jonathan Piper to Steven Hawkins of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, then part of the legal team. This was the basis of a 2001 decision by Judge William Yohn, who overturned Mumia’s death sentence while upholding his frame-up conviction. After the Supreme Court in October let stand Yohn’s ruling, which mandated a new sentencing hearing, the D.A.’s office called a halt to the execution drive.

It has been many years since thousands took to the streets for Mumia. Now, as the PDC declared in its December 10 statement, “the state authorities hope with the latest decision that Mumia’s cause will be forgotten and that he will rot in prison hell until he dies. This must not be Mumia’s fate.” In 1927, James P. Cannon, the first national secretary of the International Labor Defense, warned of the lessons of the cases of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, labor leaders falsely accused of murder in 1916. In 1918, Mooney’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison, the same sentence as Billings’. Cannon wrote:

“The workers who had rallied to Mooney and Billings were soothed by the sinister argument that imprisonment for life was, in any event, better than execution. They were told that we would have to be satisfied for the while with one victory, and that the final release of the two fighters would be won later. But after ten years there remain only a few who still keep alive the memory of these buried men and who are pledged to continue the work for their freedom.”

—Labor Defender, July 1927

The frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal was not some aberration in American “justice” but the workings of a legal system that defends the rule and profits of the capitalist class through repression of the working class and oppressed minorities. Following the Philly D.A.’s decision, the New York Times (12 December 2011) ran an editorial demanding that the state of Pennsylvania now move to abolish its death penalty. The liberals at the Times have long opposed capital punishment while favoring life without parole as a “humane”—and more frugal—alternative. While the editorial was titled “The Abu-Jamal Case,” it pointedly said nothing about Mumia’s case beyond the issue of improper jury instructions. The hard truth of Mumia’s case—the frame-up of and death sentence for an innocent black man who stood out as an eloquent opponent of racist U.S. imperialism—cuts too close to the bone of what the capitalist state is all about.

For the liberals, removing Mumia from the sanction of death vindicates their belief in the ideal of American justice. But in no way can this be seen as just. In continuing to publicize Mumia’s case and pursue the fight for his freedom, we seek to imbue the multiracial working class with the understanding that it must destroy the monstrous, racist machinery of capitalist repression root and branch and erect in its place a workers state, in which those who labor rule.

Monday, August 22, 2011

From The Partisan Defense Committee-New Move to Reinstate Death Sentence for Mumia-Free Mumia Now! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!

Workers Vanguard No. 984
5 August 2011

Free Mumia Now! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!

New Move to Reinstate Death Sentence for Mumia

The Philadelphia district attorney’s office recently petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate the death sentence for black political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. The D.A. is seeking to reverse an April 26 ruling by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which for the second time upheld a 2001 decision by District Court judge William Yohn overturning the sentence on the grounds of faulty jury instructions (see “Federal Appeals Court Orders New Sentencing Hearing,” WV No. 980, 13 May). Yohn simultaneously upheld every aspect of the frame-up conviction that sent Mumia—a former Black Panther Party spokesman and later a MOVE supporter and award-winning journalist—to death row on false charges of killing Philly police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981. From top to bottom, the courts have repeatedly refused to hear the overwhelming evidence of Mumia’s innocence, including Arnold Beverly’s confession that he was Faulkner’s killer.

The D.A.’s petition reviles the Third Circuit for obstructing the legal lynching not just of Mumia but also of many others, largely black and poor, railroaded to death row “up South” in Philadelphia. The brief rants that the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, signed by Bill Clinton to speed up the pace of executions, “will remain ineffective in the Third Circuit until the circuit court enforces it.” The prosecution calls on the Supreme Court to order the Third Circuit to apply the 1996 law to foreclose virtually any federal habeas corpus challenge to Pennsylvania death sentences. Where the Supreme Court stands on ruthless application of the death penalty was seen on March 28, when it turned down the appeal of Troy Davis, a black inmate in Georgia, despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence.

In its own way, the D.A.’s brief highlights that Mumia’s case is crucial in the struggle to abolish the death penalty. The ultimate sanction wielded by the capitalist rulers in their repression of workers and minorities, the death penalty is a barbaric legacy of medieval torture. In the U.S., capital punishment can be traced directly back to chattel slavery, when black people could be put to death for any act deemed “insolent” or a challenge to slaveholders. Since then, the death penalty has gone hand in hand with KKK lynchings and summary executions carried out by cops on the street. Over 3,200 sit on death rows across the U.S., 54 percent of them black or Latino.

The cops, prosecutors, lawmakers and their mouthpieces in the bourgeois press will not rest until Mumia is strapped onto an execution gurney. Mumia’s fight for life and freedom is not for him alone. By executing this eloquent spokesman for the oppressed, the forces of the state want to send a message to all who would fight against the exploitation, oppression and imperialist war inherent in the decaying capitalist system that they, too, are in the state’s gun sights. The only “alternative” to execution held out by the courts is that Mumia rot in prison for the rest of his life, without the possibility of parole. As the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee have always insisted, fighters for Mumia’s freedom must place no reliance on the racist capitalist courts but must look instead to link Mumia’s cause to the class struggles of the multiracial proletariat. To put a final halt to the grisly workings of the capitalist rulers’ machinery of death will take nothing less than proletarian socialist revolution.

Monday, August 08, 2011

From The "Partisan Defense Committee" Website- Free the MOVE 9! Free Them Now!

Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website


Free the MOVE 9!

The following June 27 protest letter was sent by the Partisan Defense Committee to Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole chairman Catherine C. McVey.

The Partisan Defense Committee yet again joins with those supporting the release of the eight surviving political prisoners who have been collectively known as the MOVE 9.

By any of your standards—ties to the community and a support network outside to “ease their transition”—there is absolutely no reason that any one of these men and women should be denied parole.

Up to this point, the pretext for keeping the MOVE members locked behind bars is their refusal to express “remorse” for the killing of police officer James Ramp. This is a well-known ruse to deny parole to those who have been imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. After the trial, when presiding judge Edwin Malmed was asked, “Who shot James Ramp?” he replied, “I haven’t the faintest idea.” Evidence released over time has clearly shown that Officer Ramp was killed in the massive crossfire by nearly 600 police officers who besieged the MOVE home on 8 August 1978.

It is an injustice that these men and women were ever incarcerated at all. Their continued confinement compounds that injustice on a daily basis. We call once more for the immediate, unconditional release of Debbie Africa, Janine Africa, Janet Africa, Chuck Africa, Eddie Africa, Phil Africa, Delbert Africa and Mike Africa.




Wednesday, June 01, 2011

*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Free Mumia Abu-Jamal

Click on the headline to link to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.

Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month

Markin comment (reposted from 2010)


In “surfing” the “National Jericho Movement” Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a “The Rag Blog” post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.

That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a long time supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.

Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!

Monday, May 02, 2011

From The Partisan Defense Committee- Third Circuit Court of Appeals Orders New Sentencing Hearing-Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Now!

Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.

28 April 2011

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Now!

Third Circuit Court of Appeals Orders New Sentencing Hearing


On April 26, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit turned down the Philadelphia district attorney’s appeal to reinstate the death penalty for political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. The Court ordered the Pennsylvania trial court to convene a new trial solely to determine whether Abu-Jamal should be sentenced to death once again or left to rot in prison for life. The D.A.’s office has announced it will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Third Circuit decision upheld the 2001 decision by U.S. District Court judge William Yohn that overturned the death sentence while upholding the frame-up murder conviction. Yohn found the sentence to be unconstitutional under the precedent of the Mills v. Maryland decision because the sentencing form and jury instructions did not allow jurors to freely consider the mitigating circumstances weighing against a death sentence.

Yohn’s ruling had been upheld by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in March 2008. But in January 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the Third Circuit decision, ordering the Third Circuit to review the case in light of its ruling that reinstated the death sentence for neo-Nazi Frank Spisak, whose sentence had also been overturned due to improper jury instructions.

Mumia Abu-Jamal is an innocent man who should not have spent a day in prison. Free Mumia now! (For more, see “Appeals Court Hearing on Death Sentence for Mumia Abu-Jamal,” Workers Vanguard No. 966, 8 October 2010.)

3rd Circuit Appeal Ruling For Abu-Jamal confronts US Supreme Court

Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.

3rd Circuit Appeal Ruling For Abu-Jamal confronts US Supreme Court

by freemumia
(No verified email address) 26 Apr 2011

The federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, in a stunning smack at the U.S. Supreme Court, has issued a ruling upholding its earlier decision backing a new sentencing hearing in the controversial case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the convicted killer of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner.

Published on This Can't Be Happening (http://thiscantbehappening.net)

3rd Circuit Appeal Ruling Favoring Abu-Jamal Smacks Down US Supreme Court
3rd Circuit Appeal Ruling Favoring Abu-Jamal Smacks Down US Supreme Court

by:
Linn Washington Jr.

The federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, in a stunning smack at the U.S. Supreme Court, has issued a ruling upholding its earlier decision backing a new sentencing hearing in the controversial case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the convicted killer of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner.

The latest ruling, issued on Tuesday April 26, 2011, upholds a ruling the Third Circuit issued over two years ago siding with a federal district court judge who, back in 2001, had set aside Abu-Jamal’s death penalty after determining that death penalty instructions provided to the jury, and a flawed jury ballot document used during Abu-Jamal’s 1982 trial, had been unclear.

The U.S. Supreme Court had ordered the Third Circuit to re-examine its 2009 ruling upholding the lifting of Abu-Jamal’s death sentence.

The nation’s top court had cited a new legal precedent in that directive to the Third Circuit, a strange order given the fact that the Supreme Court had earlier consistently declined to apply its own precedents to Abu-Jamal’s case.

The Associated Press was the first to report the Third Circuit’s latest dramatic ruling and in fact, as of the morning of the ruling’s release, the decision had still not been posted on the appeals court’s website.

Abu-Jamal’s current lead attorney, Prof Judith Ritter of the Widener Law School, could not be reached for comment.
Mumia Abu-JamalMumia Abu-Jamal

The Third Circuit’s ruling, if left standing, requires Philadelphia prosecutors to call for a whole new sentencing hearing if they want to try and reinstate the death penalty. That would require the impaneling of a whole new jury, to hear and consider evidence regarding mitigating circumstances and aggravating circumstances in the case, and then to decide for either execution of life-without-possibility of parole--the only two options legally available. Abu-Jamal has exhausted his avenues of appeal of his conviction, absent new evidence in the case.

If prosecutors opted against holding new hearing then Abu-Jamal’s sentence would be converted automatically to a life sentence, which in Pennsylvania means no chance of parole. Abu-Jamal would have to spending the remainder of his life behind bars, though not on death row.

Experts contend a new sentencing hearing would be problematic for prosecutors. Although the issue of guilt or innocence would not be on trial, the defense could bring in witnesses to explain exactly what they saw happen the night of the shooting--witnesses whose testimony could ultimately raise new questions about the validity of the underlying conviction.

It is almost a certainty that prosecutors will appeal the Third Circuit’s latest ruling back up to the Supreme Court. Furthermore, prosecutors concede that current and yet unresolved legal issues in this case, which continues to attract unprecedented international scrutiny, will keep it in courts for years. For example, there are several avenues of appeal of Abu-Jamal's death sentence which were never adjudicated by the Federal District court, which mooted them after the Judge, William Yohn, found in favor of one argument and tossed out the death sentence.

In early April 2011 the NAACP Legal Defense Fund publicly announced it was joining the Abu-Jamal defense team and working with Professor Ritter. NAACP lawyers had joined Ritter last fall during the hearing where she argued the legal point just upheld by the Third Circuit in its latest ruling.

Recently Abu-Jamal recorded yet another birthday (4/24) inside a death row isolation cell. Abu-Jamal and the 222 other Pennsylvania death row inmates spend 23-hours per day every day isolated inside minimalist cells.

Since 1983 Abu-Jamal has languished in the confinement of death row, following his controversial July 1982 conviction for the murder of Officerl Faulkner.

Now 57, Abu-Jamal has spent nearly 29 years of his life in prison for a crime he has consistently denied committing--a crime that ample evidence conclusively proves could not have occurred as police and prosecutors have proclaimed.

Authorities, for example, claim Abu-Jamal fired four shots at the policeman, while straddling the officer as he lay defenseless on a sidewalk, striking him only once with a fatal shot in the face.

However, police crime scene photos and police reports make no reference of any bullet marks in that sidewalk around the fallen officer--marks that should have been clearly visible if Abu-Jamal fired three shots at almost point-blank range into the sidewalk as witnesses and the prosecutor claimed.

As detailed in an thorough investigative ballistic test released in September 2010 by This Can’t Be Happening! (See our film at the bottom of the home page), it is impossible to fire high-velocity bullets into a sidewalk without leaving any marks. TCBH! test-fired each kind of .38-caliber bullets referenced in police reports about the 1981 crime scene into a slab of old city sidewalk, and each of those bullets left easily visible marks…marks totally contradicting claims by authorities that Abu-Jamal wildly fired into the sidewalk without leaving bullet marks.

Rulings by federal and state courts denying Abu-Jamal the legal relief routinely granted other inmates who had raised the same appeals claims are the least-examined element of this internationally-condemned injustice.

The same Philadelphia and Pennsylvania courts that found major flaws by either defense attorneys, police, prosecutors and/or trial judges in 86 Philadelphia death penalty convictions during a 28-year period after Abu-Jamal’s December 1981 arrest declare no errors exist anywhere in the Abu-Jamal case – an assertion critics call statistically improbable.

The federal Third Circuit, for example, declined to grant Abu-Jamal a new trial based on solid legal issues from racial discrimination by prosecutors in jury selection to documented errors by trial judge Albert Sabo, the late jurist who relished his infamous reputation for pro-prosecution bias.

The Third Circuit’s 2008 ruling faulting Sabo for his inability to provide the jury with simple death penalty deliberation instructions included the contradictory conclusion that Sabo had adequately provided the jury with instructions about a highly complicated legal issue involving misconduct by the trial prosecutor.

Faulting Sabo for that flawed instruction on prosecutorial misconduct would have required the Third Circuit to give Abu-Jamal a whole new trial. Unwilling to do that, the court sidestepped its duty to ensure justice, by deciding to just eliminate Abu-Jamal’s death sentence, instead.

Pennsylvania state courts have released three Philadelphians from death row (half of Pa’s death row exonerations to date) citing misconduct by police and prosecutors…misconduct that was less egregious than that documented in the Abu-Jamal case. One of those Philadelphia exonerations involved a man framed by police for a mob-related killing, who was arrested six months before Abu-Jamal.

While many people in Philadelphia may feel Abu-Jamal is guilty as charged, millions around the world question every aspect of this conviction, citing facts that proponents of Abu-Jamal’s conviction deliberately dismiss as irrelevant.

This widespread questioning of Abu-Jamal’s guilt is the reason why pro-Abu-Jamal activities occurred around the world commemorating Abu-Jamal’s 4/24 birthday, including people in San Francisco attending a screening of the “Justice on Trial” movie examining ignored aspects in the case, and people marching for Abu-Jamal’s freedom in the Brixton section of London.

Officials in the French city of Saint-Denis will stage a ceremony rededicating a street they named for Abu-Jamal during the last weekend in April.

The ire erupting over Abu-Jamal’s prominence on the part of advocates of his execution contains contradictions that are as clear as the proverbial black-&-white.

The U.S. Congress engaged in color-coded contradiction approving a May 2006 resolution condemning far off Saint-Denis for its honoring Abu-Jamal by placing his name on a small one block long street.

Over a decade before that anti-Saint-Denis outrage, over 100 members of Congress had battled to block the U.S. government from deporting a white fugitive convicted of killing a British Army officer in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

That officer’s killing had occurred during an investigation into the murder of another Belfast policeman.

Incidentally, the U.S. Congress did not erupt angrily when the City Council of New York City voted to place the name of that fugitive – Joseph Doherty – on the street corner outside the federal detention center then housing him.

In 1988 – six years after Abu-Jamal’s conviction – more than 3,000 Philadelphians signed petitions asking federal authorities to grant Doherty special permission to leave his federal detention cell for one day to allow Doherty to serve as Grand Marshall of Philadelphia’s St Patrick’s Day Parade.

One Philly supporter of suspected convicted cop killer Doherty was the then-President Judge of Philadelphia’s trial courts, Edward J. Bradley.

Judge Bradley told a reporter in 1988 that he had no problems as a jurist reconciling his support for a convicted felon because he questioned the “fair treatment” Irish nationals received in English courts.

Judge Bradley’s concern about fairness for IRA fighters in English courts is not parallelled by any concern about fairness in Philadelphia courts with regard to the case of former Black Panther Party member Abu-Jamal. Judge Bradley's double standard highlights the gross unfairness of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania state court judges.

Critics who castigate those who contribute to Abu-Jamal’s defense fund, especially by Hollywood stars, did not object to fund-raising on behalf of one of the white Los Angeles policemen convicted in federal court for the 1991 beating of Rodney King. That criminal cop was allowed to keep nearly $10-million in sales from his book and from a fund-raising campaign on his behalf – monies generated mainly after that the former police sergeant's imprisonment following a civil rights violation conviction.

One reason the decades-old Abu-Jamal case continues to generate support and rage is Abu-Jamal himself.

A charismatic figure who is articulate, with a level of education and intelligence atypical of the mainly illiterate denizens of death row, Abu-Jamal is able to explain his case, as well as to expose the horrors of the nation's prison system and its death rows.

While on death row Abu-Jamal has written six critically acclaimed books (including one on jailhouse lawyers), produced thousands of commentaries, learned two foreign languages, earned two college degrees, including a masters, and developed a loyal support network comprising millions worldwide.

Even the prosecutor at Abu-Jamal’s 1982 trial – Joseph McGill – described him during that trial as the most “intelligent” defendant he’d ever faced.

And another prosecutor, during Abu-Jamal’s tainted 1995 appeals hearing, said he didn’t think “the shooting of Officer Faulkner is characteristic of this defendant.” (Abu-Jamal had no record of violence or criminal acts before his 1981 arrest.)

Supporters applaud Abu-Jamal’s defense of the downtrodden, particularly his poignant criticisms of America’s prison-industrial complex, that incarcerates more people per capita than any other country on earth.

Abu-Jamal’s stance highlighting the deprivations of the have-nots, predated his arrest, and had earned him the title of “Voice of the Voiceless” during his professional broadcast reporting career, which ran from 1975 till his December 1981 arrest.

Abu-Jamal rarely uses his world-wide platform to speak about his own plight, preferring to focus instead on the injustices endured by others.
Source URL: http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/579

Friday, April 22, 2011

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- Supreme Court Gives Green Light to Troy Davis Execution-Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!

Workers Vanguard No. 978
15 April 2011

Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!

Supreme Court Gives Green Light to Troy Davis Execution

In a supreme act of racist contempt, on March 28 the highest court in the U.S. greased the skids for the execution of Troy Davis when it refused to consider his appeal. This latest and probably last appeal for Davis sought to reverse a Georgia federal district court ruling last August upholding his conviction and death sentence. Expressing how cheap America’s capitalist rulers consider the life of a black man, the Supreme Court made no reference to the extensive evidence of Davis’s innocence presented at the district court hearing, dismissing his appeal out of hand. With the stroke of a pen, another black life is to be disposed of.

Davis’s sister, Martina Correia, who has campaigned around the world for her brother’s exoneration, responded to the Supreme Court ruling by describing the sham evidentiary hearing held last June in Savannah: “Once the judge opened his mouth and looked at my brother with disgust I knew that no matter what Troy’s lawyers had to present the judge had already made his decision to deny Troy, so he was just going through the motions like a puppeteer.”

Sentenced to death in 1991 for the killing of off-duty Savannah policeman Mark MacPhail, Davis was convicted based on questionable “eyewitness” identifications, dubious accounts that Davis confessed to the killing and testimony coerced by the cops. Seven of the prosecution’s nine witnesses have since recanted. The only holdouts are one man who may be the actual killer and another who initially denied being able to identify the shooter only to pin it on Davis at trial two years later. At last year’s hearing, some of these witnesses were finally able to tell how they were forced by the cops to falsely implicate Davis. But the federal court decision sneered that this testimony was “smoke and mirrors” and declared the accounts of police/prosecution coercion—a regular feature of the capitalist justice system—were not credible…because the cops said it didn’t happen that way! (For more on that hearing, see “Troy Davis Appeal Turned Down,” WV No. 965, 24 September 2010.)

One day after the Supreme Court turned Davis down, the Court overturned a $14 million jury verdict awarded to black former death row inmate John Thompson against former New Orleans D.A. Harry Connick Sr. Thompson had spent 14 years on death row and came within weeks of execution, when his attorneys found evidence that prosecutors had concealed from the defense blood samples and eyewitness statements that exonerated him. According to the decision written by Justice Clarence Thomas, such frame-up methods did not constitute “deliberate indifference.” In an op-ed column he wrote for the New York Times (10 April) that powerfully recounts his ordeal, Thompson remarks: “I was lucky, and got lawyers who went to extraordinary lengths. But there are more than 4,000 people serving life without parole in Louisiana, almost none of whom have lawyers after their convictions are final.”

The broad exposure of so many men and women on death row proven innocent in recent years has given the ruling-class parties some pause in the accelerated rush to execution that has marked the 35 years since the death penalty was restored in 1976, following a nine-year hiatus. On March 9, Democratic Illinois governor Pat Quinn signed legislation abolishing capital punishment in the state. Illinois thus became the fifth state since 2004 to eliminate the death penalty, either through legislative action or through court decree. Yet some 3,200 people remain on death row, over half of them black and Latino. And while executions dropped last year by 12 percent to 46—less than half of those executed in 1999—the U.S. is still one of the world’s leaders in capital punishment.

The death row speedup launched in the mid 1980s was accompanied by a vast expansion of repressive laws and police powers, fueled in large part by the racist “war on drugs.” Untold numbers of black youth were tried, convicted and sentenced as adults. Mandatory sentencing did away with parole. The later adoption of “three strikes” laws meant that one could get life imprisonment for stealing a tape deck out of a parked car.

On top of all this, a plethora of state laws limited the right to present new evidence on appeal in capital cases, while the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996 greatly restricted the right to challenge state convictions through federal habeas corpus. Earlier this month, when the Supreme Court reinstated the California death sentence of Scott Pinholster, which had been overturned on new evidence presented in his federal court appeals, Clarence Thomas baldly stated that although state prisoners may sometimes submit new evidence in federal court, federal law “is designed to strongly discourage them from doing so.”

Among those whom Clinton’s laws help keep trapped on death row is political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. A former Black Panther Party spokesman, a supporter of the Philadelphia MOVE group and an award-winning journalist, Mumia was framed up on false charges of killing Police Officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981 and sentenced to death based on his political views. Court after court has refused to consider the mountain of evidence of Mumia’s innocence, including the confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, killed Faulkner (see the Partisan Defense Committee pamphlet, The Fight to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal—Mumia Is Innocent!). For the poor, for fighters against racial oppression, for labor militants, there is no justice in the capitalist courts.

As Marxists, we stand for the abolition of the death penalty on principle—for the guilty as well as the innocent—and everywhere. We do not accord the state the right to determine who lives and who dies. The lynching of American black men—by racist mobs and by the august courts—is deeply embedded in this country’s history, particularly but by no means exclusively in Southern states like Troy Davis’s Georgia. In the U.S., capital punishment is the lynch rope made legal, with black people making up over 40 percent of the death row population.

The death penalty stands at the apex of the machinery of repression wielded by the capitalist rulers to contain the potentially explosive contradictions between the handful of filthy rich at the top and the many at the bottom. To put a final halt to the grisly workings of the U.S. rulers’ machinery of death—from the judicial guardians of death row to the cops who operate as judge, jury and executioner in gunning down minority youth on the streets—requires sweeping away the racist capitalist system through proletarian socialist revolution.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

The Latest From The Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty

Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty


Founded in 1928, MCADP is the oldest active anti-death penalty organization in the United States.









--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Detail of Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco from the cartoon of a mural by Ben Shahn © Estate of Ben Shahn /Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Home



About MCADP



Articles of Interest



Links



Local Chapters



Request Info/Join Us



PO Box 51920

Boston, MA 02205

Telephone:

617-523-3951



email:

mcadp@earthlink.net



Contact your legislators to make your opinion known!



MCADP, MA Citizens Against the Death Penalty





for comments about this site contact WEBMASTER



last update 11/6/10



Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty

Presents the 2009

The HERBERT AND SARA EHRMANN AWARD

Honoring

The Dead Man Walking School Theatre Project

Presented by Special Guest and former Ehrmann Award Recipient,

Sister Helen Prejean

&

The HUGO ADAM BEDAU AWARD

Recognizing

Professor Professor Michael Meltsner

Matthews Distinguished Professor of Law, Northeastern

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Ehrmann Awards Presentation 4:30PM *

Reception following

Harvard University Science Center, Hall B

One Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138



Admission - Free

Space is limited, so please RSVP





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



*Please note:

MCADP is pleased to present this year’s awards in conjunction with a program presented by the

Dead Man Walking School Theatre Project at the Harvard University Science Center.



The complete program will begin at

2PM with a presentation of an excerpt of the play, followed at

3PM, by a panel discussion moderated by Sr. Helen Prejean with a number of

distinguished participants, and the program will culminate at

4:30 with the presentation of the MCADP Ehrmann/Bedau Awards.



You may join the audience at any point during the afternoon, space permitting.



Directions to Harvard Science Center

The Harvard Science Center is a large, multi-tiered building just north of Harvard Yard near the juncture of Massachusetts Avenue and Cambridge Street, a short walk from the Harvard T stop.



Copyright © 2002 Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty, Inc.\

Friday, September 17, 2010

*From Death Row, This Is Mumia Abu-Jamal-The Voice Of The Voiceless- "On Punishing Lynne" (Stewart)

Click on the headline to link to a From Death Row, This Is Mumia Abu-Jamal entry (via Workers Vanguard) on Attorney Lynne Stewart.

Markin comment:

You know it really is a crying shame when a people’s lawyer like Attorney Lynne Stewart (ya, I know she has been disbarred but a certificate of good bourgeois conduct alone does not an attorney make) has been set up in the way that she has been by the American imperial “justice” system. Look, according to all the case law and the American Bar Association’s own Code of Conduct a lawyer, even a half-baked, wet-behind-the-ears one is suppose to zealously advocate for the legal rights of her client. The key word is zealous, honored as any honest attorney will tell you more often in the breech than the observance when the court opens for business, especially if the judge has a golf date (or worst, if the attorney does).

Lynne Stewart though, like New York Attorney Conrad Lynn before her (and precious few others), a similar people's lawyer, obviously did not take that course in law school where the worldly-wise law professor tells you, no, screams at you, not to take the unpopular cases; the ones involving the poor, the desperate, and the unrepresented. The no dough cases. Take those nice trusteeship things, commercial real estate, or the like. So, in a funny way, Attorney Stewart has only herself to blame for not taking that course. No so funny though is this- Free Attorney Lynne Stewart Now!