*For Class Struggle Defense To Free Mumia- A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to an article about the need for class struggle defense in the death penalty case of black journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal.

*PROTEST THE CONGRESSIONAL ATTACK ON MUMIA ABU-JAMAL!

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THIS INFORMATION IS PASSED ON FROM THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE. I NEED ONLY ADD THAT TIME IS CRITICAL IN MUMIA'S CASE. IF THERE WAS ANY REAL JUSTICE IN MUMIA'S CASE THEY WOULD BE NAMING A STREET IN PHILADELPHIA FOR HIM FOR HIS WORK AS THE 'VOICE OF THE VOICELESS'.


Protest Congressional Attack on Mumia Abu-Jamal!
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

The following statement was issued by the Partisan Defense Committee on December 8.

The Partisan Defense Committee denounces the U.S. House of Representatives' vote on December 6 which attacked the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis for naming a street in honor of death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. The resolution, which passed 368 to 31 with support from both Republicans and Democrats, repeats the prosecution's frame-up lies against Mumia. This resolution seeks to pave the way for the legal lynching of an innocent man! The resolution also "commends all police officers in the United States and throughout the world"—and this in the wake of the NYC police killing of Sean Bell in a 50-round fusillade on November 25, and the Atlanta police's gunning down of 88-year-old Kathryn Johnston in her own home.

There are mountains of evidence proving Mumia Abu-Jamal's innocence and the police/prosecution frame-up: there is no ballistics evidence, so-called eyewitnesses were coerced and Mumia's confession was fabricated. In 2001 Rachel Wolkenstein (co-counsel for Mumia from 1995 to 1999) submitted an affidavit to the U.S. District Court detailing that evidence, including Arnold Beverly's confession that he, not Mumia, killed Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Yet all the courts to which it has been presented have refused to hear the Beverly evidence. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Mumia could raise only three issues on his appeal: the racially biased jury selection in his 1982 trial, the D.A.'s prejudicial summary argument that Mumia would have "appeal after appeal," and the grossly biased post-conviction state hearings in the 1990s before Judge Albert Sabo (who a court reporter testified had said at the time of the original trial that he would help "fry the n—r"). These challenges should be heard in court. But the harsh reality is that the Court of Appeals—like every other court in this case—has refused to hear countless other violations of Mumia's rights. Every aspect of Mumia's case shows how much the capitalist rulers want him dead.

The House of Representatives' overwhelming vote further drives home the depth of hatred the entire bourgeois state apparatus has for Mumia Abu-Jamal, a courageous, eloquent and unbroken fighter for black freedom and against racist repression. Mumia was framed up and falsely convicted for the murder of Faulkner because he is a talented journalist known as the "voice of the voiceless," a former Black Panther, a supporter of the MOVE organization and an outspoken opponent of racism.

Partisan Defense Committee spokesman Rachel Wolkenstein was invited to and spoke as part of the delegation at the street-naming in Saint-Denis this past April. That event provoked months of a renewed campaign by police and government officials against Mumia. In a letter to the mayor of Paris dated October 30, Mumia denounced efforts by Philadelphia politicians to retaliate against Saint-Denis, writing that "the merchants of death" have a "campaign to not only kill me, but to wipe my name from the face of the earth. Why else would they care about a small street in St. Denis? Or an award of Citizen of Honor from the City of Light? The Empire thinks it is Master of the World and can tell all what to do".

In response to this vicious campaign, the Comite de Defense Sociale, the PDC's fraternal legal and social defense organization in France, issued a leaflet on November 16 denouncing efforts by Philadelphia politicians to stifle growing support for Mumia: "This attack takes place when the international defense campaign for Mumia is once again gaining steam, a campaign that Philadelphia and its police are seeking to crush in the egg."

More evidence of growing support for Mumia is the statement by the Partisan Defense Committee under the headline, "We Demand the Immediate Freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal, an Innocent Man" signed by hundreds of labor activists and prominent individuals, including Nobel Prize winners Nadine Gordimer and Dario Fo, Harvard University's Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cindy Sheehan of Gold Star Families for Peace, author Michael Eric Dyson, the poet Sonia Sanchez, New York City councilman Charles Barren and Illinois Congressman Danny K. Davis. That statement was printed as a full-page ad in New York's Amsterdam News (26 October), the Nation (20 November), and also in the Chicago Defender and the San Francisco Bay View.

The House resolution against Mumia comes at a crucial juncture in the legal proceedings. Mumia has submitted the final papers in his appeal of a federal court decision that affirmed his frame-up conviction while overturning the death sentence. After oral argument, the court could decide within months whether to reinstate the death penalty, to condemn him to the living death of life in prison or to grant a new trial. The latest offensive by Congress and the city of Philadelphia against Mumia underlines the need to mobilize now for his freedom.

On December 9 in Philadelphia, the Partisan Defense Committee will join a rally called by the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal on the 25th anniversary of Mumia's arrest. The PDC understands that the capitalist state and its courts are not neutral institutions but organs of repression against the working class and the oppressed. Mumia's freedom will not be won through reliance on the rigged "justice" system or on capitalist politicians, whether Democratic, Republican or Green. Our PDC contingent will march under the slogans: "For Class-Struggle Defense to Free Mumia Now! There Is No Justice in the Capitalist Courts! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!"

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-"Abolish The Racist Death Penalty"

Click on the title to link to an on line copy of the "Workers Vanguard" article on the subject mentioned in the headline.

*FREEDOM NOW FOR MUMIA ABU-JAMAL

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I AM PASSING ON THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT RECENTLY RECEIVED FROM THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE. I NEED ONLY ADD THAT THE POINT MENTIONED ABOUT THE NEED TO CALL FOR MUMIA'S FREEDOM RATHER THAN THE CALL FOR A NEW TRIAL RETAINS ALL ITS VALIDITY. FINALLY, IF YOU DO NOTHING ELSE IN YOUR POLITICAL LIFE STAND BY THIS INNOCENT MAN. SUPPORT, ORGANIZE, RAISE FUNDS FOR HIS DEFENSE.


FREEDOM NOW FOR MUMIA ABU-JAMAL

The fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal is at a critical juncture. A prize-winning journalist, former Black Panther Party spokesman, supporter of the MOVE organization and defiant opponent of racist state terror, Mumia was railroaded to death row in 1982 on false charges of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. On July 20, Mumia filed his opening legal brief in the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, which last December put his case on a "fast track" for decision. The forces of the capitalist state have long been determined to carry out Mumia's legal lynching as a warning to those who challenge racist cop repression, to fighters against U.S. imperialist depredations, to workers who stand up for their rights on the picket lines. The Partisan Defense Committee—a legal and social defense organization associated with the Marxist Spartacist League—calls on all opponents of racist injustice, and in particular the labor movement, to mobilize for freedom now for Mumia!

Mumia's life is in grave danger. The court is expected to rule in a matter of months whether he will live, die or have further legal proceedings. Both Mumia and the prosecu­tion are appealing a 2001 ruling by U.S. District Court judge William Yohn, who overturned Mumia's death sentence but upheld every aspect of his frame-up conviction. The Third Circuit has refused to hear any evidence of Mumia's innocence and has only allowed him to challenge three of the more than two dozen constitutional violations in his case. For more than five years, state and federal courts have refused to hear the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Daniel Faulkner. In an affidavit reprinted in the PDC pamphlet The Fight to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal—Mumia Is Innocent!, Beverly says that he was hired to kill Faulkner, who was reportedly interfering with prostitution, gambling, drugs and police payoffs, and that "Jamal had nothing to do with the shooting."

The courts have suppressed the Beverly evidence because it demonstrates that the injustice done to Mumia was not the work of one rogue cop, prosecutor or judge but the workings of a "justice" system whose purpose is to repress the working class, minorities and the poor on behalf of the capitalist ruling class. The fight to free Mumia must be waged on the basis that he is an innocent man, the victim of a political and racist frame-up. The need to mobilize around this understanding is underscored by the fact that Beverly's confession and other proof of Mumia's innocence—including the suppression and coercion of eyewitnesses by police and prosecutors and their fabrication, some two months after his arrest, of a phony "confession" by Mumia—cannot even get a hearing in the capitalist courts.

The Beverly confession has been derided by liberals like the writer Dave Lindorff and all but ignored by reformist left organizations. Many liberals object to Mumia's treatment in the courts but see it as at most an "aberration" in an otherwise fair and just legal system, and they regard the idea that the cops would frame up an innocent man as absurd.

But to see that such frame-ups are routine procedure requires looking no further than a special prosecutor's report released on July 19, which examines nearly 150 cases in which Chicago cops used electroshock, suffocation and torture to beat bogus confessions out of black "suspects." Although the Chicago report is mainly a damage-control job, it nonetheless confirms that there was widespread torture and that police brass knew about it and gave a commendation to the cops who were doing it. It was well-documented at the time of Mumia's trial that the Philly police used similar methods.

Mumia's frame-up was not only racist—it was politically driven as well. The police and FBI had Mumia in their sights since his Black Panther youth and continued their vendetta as he became known as "the voice of the voiceless" for his searing commentaries on racism, poverty and repression—a role Mumia continues to play through his writings from death row.

The three issues covered in Mumia's new brief point to the racist and political bias that saturated his trial and appeals, proving that Mumia, like Dred Scott in 1857, has no rights that a court is bound to respect. One issue is the racist bias of the late hanging judge Albert Sabo, a member of the Fraternal Order of Police (F.O.P.) who presided over Mumia's 1982 trial and again at his post-conviction (PCRA) hearings in the 1990s. The court filings highlight a 2001 affidavit of court reporter Terri Maurer-Carter, who disclosed that at the time of the trial she overheard Sabo say, "I'm going to help them fry the n---r." During the 1995 PCRA hearings, Sabo routinely quashed Mumia's subpoenas, sustained prosecution objections and found all of Mumia's witnesses "incredible." Sabo jailed PDC attorney Rachel Wolkenstein, then a member of Mumia's legal team, and told another defense lawyer, "Counselor, justice is just an emotional feeling."

The brief also exposes the prosecutor's racist jury-rigging at the trial. Excluding black jurors was an official policy of the Philadelphia DA.'s office, codified in a 1987 training video directing prosecutors to strike "blacks from the low-income areas" from juries because they have "a resentment for law enforcement." Statistical studies prove that this was the practice throughout the 1980s. Mumia's brief documents that for his trial "a black person's odds of being struck were ten times higher than someone who is white" (emphasis in original).

Mumia's third challenge strikes at the prosecution's outrageous closing argument that the jury should err on the side of convicting Mumia because he would have "appeal after appeal." This argument blatantly erased the reasonable doubt standard, telling the jury that in case of doubt they should convict Mumia. Mumia's brief also responds to the prosecution's own appeal of Judge Yohn's 2001 ruling, which seeks to reverse the overturning of Mumia's death sentence. Yohn found the sentence to be unconstitutional because the sen­tencing form and jury instructions did not allow jurors to freely consider all the "mitigating circumstances" weighing against a death sentence. Yet Mumia has remained on death row this entire time.

Mumia's case is what the death penalty is all about. It is a legacy of chattel slavery and the ultimate weapon in the government's arsenal of repression aimed at the working class and oppressed. The capitalist rulers want to see Mumia dead because they see in him the spectre of black revolution, a voice of defiant opposition to their system of racist oppression. Acting as their spearhead is the F.O.P., which has tried to intimidate Mumia's sup­porters at every step.
On July 19, the day before Mumia filed his court brief, more than 130 British lawyers released a letter to the court calling to overturn his conviction. Their letter emphasizes that the courts' blatant bias against Mumia must be seen "in the light of the Katrina hurricane disaster in New Orleans, when television viewers in every country of the world witnessed an unparalleled display of racism on a massive scale, allowed (some would say enabled) by the US government." The National Lawyers Guild and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund will be filing amicus (friend of court) briefs on Mumia's behalf.

The frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal is an object lesson in the class character of the capitalist state—centrally the cops, courts, prisons and military—which is an apparatus of violence used to preserve bourgeois rule by suppressing the working class and oppressed. An international movement of millions stayed the executioner's hand in 1995 after Mumia's first death warrant was issued. But that movement was systematically demobilized by reformist organizations that tailored their appeals to the liberal "mainstream," to those who saw in Mumia's case a "miscarriage of justice" that could be remedied if only he got a new, "fair" trial. As Rachel Wolkenstein stated earlier this year, in a talk printed in The Fight to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal:

"This meant tying Mumia's defense to what Democratic Party politicians would accept, like the need for a new trial to clean up the image created by Sabo's indisputably racially biased trial and PCRA proceeding. This meant denying the truth about the capitalist state and its vendetta against black militants, the COINTELPRO targeting of Mumia, the murderous attacks on the MOVE organization.

"Appealing to the 'mainstream' also meant ambiguity on the question of Mumia's inno­cence—and on whether he lives or dies, is entombed for life or goes free—so long as there is a new trial. It meant rejecting the very reasons that millions around the globe had taken up Mumia's cause: revulsion with the injustices inherent in capitalism— poverty, racial and ethnic bias, war. There was broad identification with Mumia's fight against the 'system' and for justice for all of humanity."

Every legal remedy must be pursued on Mumia's behalf. But Mumia himself told the French Communist Party's newspaper L'Humanite (25 April) that he had "very little hope in a favorable decision" by the Third Circuit court. Since first taking up Mumia's cause in 1987, the PDC has warned against any illusions in bourgeois "justice," placing all our faith in mobilizing the social power of the working class and the oppressed in defense of Mumia. If successful, the fight for Mumia's freedom would, as Wolkenstein stated in her talk, "strike a blow against the government's 'anti-terror' campaign and the evisceration of democratic rights. It would give labor a sense of its own power. The fight for Mumia is the fight for black liberation, for the liberation of us all, part of the struggle for socialist revolution."

We must mobilize now to make Mumia's fight once again a rallying cry against racist "legal lynching," against black oppression, against government repression. Free Mumia! Abolish the racist death penalty!

Join the Fight to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Contact the Partisan Defense Committee.
e-mail: partisandefense@earthlink.net • Web site: www.partisandefense.org New York: PO. Box
99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013-0099 • (212) 406-4252 Chicago: PO. Box 802867, Chicago, IL 60680-2867 • (312) 563-0442 Bay Area: RO. Box 77462, San Francisco, CA 94107-0462 • (510) 839-0852

*MOBILIZE LABOR'S POWER TO FREE CLASS-WAR PRISONER MUMIA ABU-JAMAL

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THIS ARTICLE FROM PARTISAN DEFENSE NOTES WAS PASSED ON TO THE WRITER BY THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTTEE, P.O. BOX 99 CANAL STREET STATION, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10013. Check at right for link to site.

THERE IS NOTHING THAT I NEED TO ADD EXCEPT THAT IF YOU OPPOSE THE DEATH PENALTY THIS IS THE KEY CASE TODAY. ALL MILITANTS OPPOSE THE DEATH PENALTY- FOR THE GUILTY AS WELL AS THE INNOCENT. IT IS JUST EASIER TO HIGHLIGHT A POLITCAL CASE LIKE THIS. IN ANY CASE- MUMIA IS AN INNOCENT MAN. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.

TAKE ACTION TODAY- MAKE A CONTRIBUTION TO HIS DEFENSE. ORGANIZE PROTESTS. PASS MOTIONS IN YOUR UNIONS, SCHOOL COMMUNITY OR RELGIOUS ORGANIZATION DEMANDING MUMIA’S FREEDOM. HAVE THE ORGANIZATION MAKE A CONTRIBUTE TO HIS DEFENSE. PUBLICIZE THIS CASE FAR AND WIDE

Join the Campaign!

Twenty-four years after Mumia Abu-Jamal was sent to death row, framed up on charges of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, his case has entered what is likely the final stage of legal proceedings. Last December the Third Circuit federal appeals court put his case on the "fast track." Before the court are appeals from the December 2001 ruling by federal judge William Yohn that overturned Mumia's death sentence but overruled every challenge to the frame-up conviction. Mumia appealed, seeking to overturn the conviction, and the Philly district attorney appealed to reinstate the death sentence. In a matter of months, the court will decide what lies next for this innocent man, former Black Panther Party member, MOVE supporter and renowned journalist: death, life in prison, or more legal proceedings.

Mumia's life is in grave danger. He is up against the vast resources of the capitalist state and its mouthpieces in the bourgeois press who howl for his blood. The capitalist rulers who vilify striking transit workers as "thugs," black hurricane victims as "looters" and immigrant workers as "illegal," seek the legal lynching of the man known as the "voice of the voiceless." Shredding their own precedents, court after court has rubber-stamped the wholesale trampling of Mumia's rights at his 1982 sham trial, and barred proof of Mumia's innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner.

With a death warrant hanging over Jamal's head, in August 1995 mobilizations of millions around the world stayed the executioner's hand. "They have tried to break this entire movement up," Pam Africa of International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal told an April 21 meeting in Philadelphia. "But there's a lot of us that are strong and able to stay here and will keep it going no matter what." As Mumia's critical court battle looms, we must mobilize now! As the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee have stated since we first took up Mumia's defense in 1987: while every legal remedy must be pursued on Mumia's behalf, what's needed is a campaign of mass labor-centered united-front actions, uniting a broad spectrum of political views while assuring all the right to have their say. Millions of voices must once again be heard demanding: Free Mumia Abu-Jamal now! Abolish the racist death penalty!

The April 21 meeting greeted a French delegation including Marie-George Buffet, National Secretary of the French Communist Party (PCF), and Jacky Hortaut of the CGT trade-union federation. Rachel Wolkenstein, Partisan Defense Committee counsel and formerly one of Mumia's attorneys, presented a detailed report on the Beverly confession and the other evidence of Mumia's innocence.Wolkenstein has also been invited to speak on the Beverly evidence at an April 29 ceremony in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis to name a street after Mumia leading to the Nelson Mandela Stadium. The ceremony will also feature Mumia's current attorney Robert Bryan, Pam Africa and Ramona Africa, the sole adult survivor of the government's 1985 bombing of Philadelphia MOVE. In January, a French coalition including the PCF, CGT and other labor, anti-racist and left groups kicked off a drive to raise 100,000 euros ($123,000) for Mumia's defense. Most importantly, that fund drive should aim to spur labor action on Mumia's behalf, internationally and especially in the U.S.

Mumia Abu-Jamal Is an Innocent Man!

On March 16, the prosecution filed its opening brief, ostensibly to address the relatively technical legal issue of whether the instructions and the verdict form given to the jury at the death sentence hearing were proper. While Mumia is barred from presenting evidence that he had nothing to do with Faulkner's death, the prosecution's papers predictably open with a venomous, trumped-up "statement of the facts"—every one of which was long ago refuted—to portray Mumia as a premeditated cop killer. This vicious lying attack is a testament that the racist capitalist state will say and do anything to see Mumia executed.

In reality, a mountain of evidence proves Mumia's innocence, including Beverly's confession that he was hired to kill Faulkner because the cop was reportedly interfering with prostitution, gambling, drugs and police payoffs. Beverly's confession is corroborated by the ballistics and physical evidence and the testimony of many other witnesses, several of whom said the shooter fled the scene. Notably, Beverly was wearing a green army jacket that night, which is what at least five witnesses said the shooter wore! Mumia was wearing a red quilted ski jacket with wide vertical blue stripes. There is no green army jacket in the police evidence.

The cops, prosecutors, gutter press and liberals alike have dismissed Beverly's account of a mob hit as "ridiculous." But in December 1981, there were at least three ongoing federal probes of the Philly cops, with targets that included the entire chain of command for the "investigation" of Faulkner's shooting: the head of Homicide, the Central Division commander and the ranking officer at the scene of the shooting, Alfonzo Giordano. Giordano was a longtime henchman of the notoriously racist police chief and later Philly mayor, Frank Rizzo, targeting the Black Panther Party and leftists and overseeing the 1977-78 siege of MOVE's Powelton Village house. Giordano knew exactly who Mumia was, and had both motive and opportunity to frame him up.

Despite this mountain of evidence, Mumia's opening brief, due July 13, is limited by the courts to three issues: the D.A.'s racist jury selection which kept black jurors off Mumia's 1982 trial; the D.A.'s prejudicial closing argument stating that the jury should convict because Mumia would get "appeal after appeal," and the grossly biased state post-conviction hearings before the notorious hanging judge Albert Sabo, who was overheard at the time of the 1982 trial declaring with regard to Mumia, "I'm going to help 'em fry the n — r."

The Spectre of Black Revolution

The fight for Mumia's freedom must be premised on the clear understanding that this is a racist political frame-up of an innocent man. It must be understood that the forces of the capitalist state are unified in their thirst for Mumia's blood and why that is so. Those struggling for Mumia's life and freedom must have no illusions in the bourgeois courts or the representatives of the bloody capitalist rulers — whether they be Democrats, Republicans or Greens.

The capitalist rulers want to see Mumia dead because they see in him the spectre of black revolution, defiant opposition to their system of racist oppression. From 1 969, when he was a teenaged spokesman for the Black Panther Party, Mumia was a marked man in the eyes of the capitalist state. In 1968, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover vowed, "The Negro youth and moderates] must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teachings, they will be dead revolutionaries." Because of his political views, because of what he wrote and said, Mumia was targeted by the Feds' notorious COINTELPRO (Counter-intelligence Program), under which 38 Panthers were murdered and hundreds more railroaded to prison. On 9 December 1981, the cops saw their chance, shooting Mumia, beating him, and then framing him up for Faulkner's murder.

Mumia's frame-up is an object lesson that the capitalist state — centrally, the cops, courts, prisons and military — is an apparatus of organized violence used to preserve capitalist rule through the suppression of the working class and oppressed. At the pinnacle of this system of state terror is the racist death penalty, a barbaric legacy of chattel slavery, the system that laid the basis for the special oppression of black people in the U.S. The "legal" lynching of Stanley Tookie Williams by the state of California in December, despite a worldwide outcry, signaled the American rulers' determination to fortify their death machine, not least against Mumia.

Mumia's case is what the death penalty is all about. The impulse behind the death penalty is the impulse to genocide. To see the murderous brutality of the racist capitalist system, you need look no further than New Orleans, where the city's black and poor were left to die as Hurricane Katrina hit. As an integral part of our fight for Mumia, the Spartacist League and Labor Black Leagues sponsored a Black History month speaking tour with talks on "The Fight to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal" and "Race, Class and Socialist Revolution: Class-Struggle Road to Black Freedom." These forums underlined our commitment to abolish the death penalty as part of the fight for black equality, just as our fight for Mumia's freedom is part of our perspective of revolutionary integrationism — that the multiracial working class must combat every instance of discrimination while understanding that black liberation will be won only through socialist revolution.

For Class-Struggle Defense!

The key to Mumia's freedom lies in the social power of labor. The proletariat has every interest in fighting against the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal and all instances of racist oppression. It also has the social power to bring production to a halt. The three-day New York City transit strike crippled America's financial capital, while two months of massive protests and strikes in France this spring forced the government to scrap the hated First Employment Contract. Think if that power were mobilized behind Mumia's cause!

Mumia's fight is labor's fight. Every repressive law and court decision bolstering the capitalist state will ultimately be directed at the working class. The fight against racist discrimination, in defense of immigrant rights and all the oppressed is the fight for the unity of the working class against its common class enemy. Taking up Mumia's defense helps to promote proletarian class unity by combatting the racial and ethnic divisions fostered by the ruling class to weaken the working class. It strikes a blow at the capitalist rulers, who are shredding civil liberties in the name of the "war on terror" and pursuing imperialist war in Iraq and elsewhere.

To give an idea of what Mumia is up against: judges of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, in whose hands Mumia's case now rests, testified en masse for the reactionary Samuel Alito during his January Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Among the members of this court is Marjorie Rendell, wife of Pennsylvania's Democratic governor Ed Rendell, the former head of the Democratic National Committee and the Philadelphia D.A. during Mumia's frame-up trial.

A labor-centered campaign on Mumia's behalf must be built on the principle of political independence of the working class from the capitalist class enemy and its state. Mumia's freedom will not be won through reliance on the rigged "justice" system or on capitalist politicians. The labor tops' allegiance to the capitalist system is one of the chief obstacles to unleashing labor's power in its own defense and in defense of all the oppressed.

Following the stay of Mumia's execution in 1995, a movement of millions in his defense was systematically demobilized by the reformist socialist organizers of protests for Mumia. Groups like Workers World Party and Socialist Action tailored their appeals to what would be "acceptable" to Democratic Party liberals. For years these reformists subordinated any demand to free Mumia to calls for a new "fair" trial, as if Mumia would suddenly receive "justice" from the same courts that have kept him on death row for 24 years! The fruit of the reformists' liberal program is that the annual demonstrations on Mumia's birthday on April 24 have dwindled since 1999, with no outdoor demonstrations on that date this year, even as the critical court battle looms.

When the Beverly confession became public in 2001, many of these same supposed socialists assisted the bourgeois media blackout by ignoring or downplaying this explosive evidence. This led Mumia to comment: "Many of you have said that you don't believe in the system, yet, in your hearts you refuse to let it go." Liberals fled Mumia's campaign in droves because they could not stomach that Beverly's confession exposed the fraud of American "justice" and showed the unity of purpose between the cops, the courts and the capitalist rulers.

As PDC counsel Rachel Wolkenstein stated in her Philly speech: "We need to rebuild a mass movement on the basis that Mumia's conviction and death sentence were political and that it is in the interest of all working people—black and white, citizens and immigrants—to join together and fight for his freedom." Raise your voice and join the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Organize now in your union, on your campus, in your community to demand: Freedom now for Mumia Abu-Jamal!

*From The Partisan Defense Committee- Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Now!

Click on the title to link to a "Workers Vanguard" article on the fate of this black liberation fighter and death row inmate, Mumia Abu-Jamal.

*Free The Class War Prisoners- Support The Partisan Defense Committee

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Free the Class-War Prisoners!

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 836, 12 November 2004.

These are the class-war prisoners who have received or currently receive monthly stipends from the PDC.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: Former Black Panther Party spokesman, well-known supporter of the MOVE organization and award-winning journalist known as the "voice of the voiceless," Jamal was framed up for the 1981 killing of police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. December 9 marks 23 years of incarceration for a killing the cops know he did not commit. More than three years ago, Jamal's attorneys submitted to the courts the sworn confession of professional hitman Arnold Beverly that he, not Jamal, shot and killed officer Faulkner. But to the racists in black robes of both the Pennsylvania and federal judiciaries, a court of law is no place for evidence of the innocence of a fighter for the oppressed like Jamal.

As the U.S. Supreme Court issues ominous rulings on the death penalty, and with his final federal appeals in motion, Mumia remains on death row, just a short walk from the death chamber. Workers, minorities and all opponents of racist capitalist repression must now redouble their efforts on his behalf. Free Mumia Now!

Jerry Dale Lowe: The Partisan Defense Committee continues its support to the West Virginia United Mine Workers union militant. Lowe was framed up for the shooting death of a scab contractor at Arch Mineral's Ruffner mine during a seven-month strike in 1993 and sentenced the following year to eleven years with no possibility of parole. Jerry was recently allowed into a halfway house, having served nearly the entirety of his frame-up sentence.

The bullet that killed the scab had come from an area where armed company thugs from Elite Security had been positioned. When it became clear that prosecutors had no evidence to convict Lowe under state law, the Clinton Justice Department stepped in to railroad Lowe to prison on charges of "interfering with interstate commerce."

We urged the UMWA and other militants everywhere to take up Lowe's cause, but the leadership of the UMWA, along with the rest of the union bureaucracy, abandoned Lowe to face the wrath of the labor-hating government alone. More than a decade has been stolen from this class-war fighter.

Eight MOVE members, Chuck Africa, Michael Davis Africa, Debbie Sims Africa, Janet Holloway Africa, Janine Africa, Delbert Orr Africa, Edward Goodman Africa and William Phillips Africa, are in their 27th year in prison. They were sentenced to 30-100 years after the 8 August 1978 siege on their Philadelphia home by over 600 heavily armed cops, having been falsely convicted of killing a police officer who died in the cops' own crossfire. Convicted of the same charges, Merle Africa died in prison in 1998.

Jaan Laaman has now spent two decades behind bars. This leftist activist was part of the Ohio 7, who were convicted for their role 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 Ohio and Virginia in 1984 and 1985, they were targets of massive manhunts throughout the East Coast and Midwest. Their children were kidnapped at gunpoint by the Feds and interrogated. The government piled one sentence atop another, intent on keeping the Ohio 7 imprisoned until the day they die.

The politics of the Ohio 7 were once shared by thousands of radicals during the heyday of the Vietnam antiwar movement and the New Left, who wrote off the possibility of winning the working class to a revolutionary program and saw themselves as an auxiliary to "Third World" liberation movements. But, like the Weathermen before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the "respectable" left. From the standpoint of the proletariat, the actions of Laaman and his comrades against imperialism and racist injustice are not a crime. As the PDC has said from the time the Ohio 7 were first persecuted by the capitalist state, these courageous fighters should not have served a day in prison and should be free now.

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 George Jackson, who was murdered by prison guards in 1971. In prison for over 39 years, Pinell was this year again denied parole despite hundreds of letters of support, five job offers and a clean record for over 25 years. Now 60 years old, Pinell continues to serve a life sentence at the notorious hellhole, Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit in California.

Ed Poindexter and Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa are former Black Panther supporters and leaders of the Omaha Nebraska Committee to Combat Fascism. They were victims of a racist FBI COINTELPRO operation, framed up for an explosion in 1970 which killed a cop. Both were convicted on the basis of perjured testimony, sentenced to life, and have now spent more than 30 years apiece in jail. The Nebraska Board of Pardons refuses to lessen their sentences so that they can be considered for parole.

Jamal Hart, Mumia's son, was sentenced in 1998 to 15½ years on bogus firearms possession charges, targeted for his prominent activism in the campaign to free his father. Although initially charged under Pennsylvania laws, which would have meant a probationary sentence, Clinton's Justice Department intervened to have Hart thrown in prison. He is not eligible for parole. Hart had been incarcerated at Fairton, New Jersey, where he was subjected to abuse by brutal and racist prison guards. After numerous provocations in which he was repeatedly thrown into solitary confinement, Hart was recently transferred to Ray Brook, New York, near the Canadian border, many hundreds of miles from his family and supporters.

We recently began sending stipends to Jamal Holiday, a victim of the brutal police repression during the protests against the Republican National Convention this past summer. Holiday, a young black man arrested during these protests, spent his 20th birthday behind bars. On August 30, Holiday was part of the Poor People's March when a plainclothes cop drove an unmarked motor scooter into the crowd of demonstrators, striking at least one woman. The protesters reacted in defense against this apparently crazed individual. In standard racial profiling, Holiday was picked up the next day by police who claimed surveillance cameras showed him to be wearing the same clothing (a baseball cap and T-shirt) as an individual filmed kicking the undercover provocateur. Facing up to seven years in prison on assault charges, Holiday had his bail raised from $50,000 to $250,000 based in part on the fact that political literature was found in his home.

In addition, during this past year the Partisan Defense Committee has aided other class-war prisoners. Until he was released in September, the PDC sent monthly stipends to Sherman Austin. Austin was railroaded to prison for a year and is now serving an outrageously restrictive three-year probation for a pure and simple thought crime: hosting an anarchist Web site (www.raisethefist.com).

This year Ray Luc Levasseur, one of the Ohio 7, was released to a halfway house after 20 years of imprisonment. Like his comrade, Jaan Laaman, he remained during his two decades of imprisonment an opponent of imperialism and racist oppression.

Not long after he became a recipient of the PDC stipend fund, Palestinian activist Farouk Abdel-Muhti was released from a torturous 718 days of detention, during which he fought for the freedom of all immigrant detainees. As a result of his jailing and subsequent beatings, a hunger strike and repeated denials of medicine, Abdel-Muhti's health deteriorated. On July 21, immediately after giving a speech denouncing U.S. imperialism, he collapsed and died of a heart attack. We will not forget what was done to this courageous fighter for the oppressed.

Contribute now! All proceeds from the Holiday Appeal 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.