Philadelphia. Attorneys for death row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal today asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to order Mumia’s prior Chief Counsel, Leonard Weinglass, to answer under oath 112 questions concerning charges that he was responsible for the “intentional burying of evidence that proves Appellant Jamal’s ‘actual innocence’ of the crime of which he has been convicted.”

Mumia’s attorneys charge in their 43-page motion that conflicts of interest on the part of Mr. Weinglass were responsible for his “intentionally failing to raise numerous meritorious claims” that Mumia was deprived of a fair trial, fair appeal and fair post-conviction proceedings. Mumia’s attorneys also charge that Weinglass “intentionally sabotaged” claims for relief that he did present.

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Philadelphia, PA. Attorneys for death row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal submitted an unusual motion to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on May 7, 2003, asking the court to order its “prothonotary” (court clerk) to file a “remand motion” they had previously submitted on April 24, 2003, but which the clerk had refused to file. According to Mumia’s attorneys, the clerk’s refusal to file the motion was “an unlawful act of bureaucratic usurpation” which violated Mumia’s rights under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The remand motion requests that Mumia’s case be ordered back to a lower court to take testimony from Kenneth Pate who states in a sworn declaration that, in a telephone conversation with his half-sister, Priscilla Durham, in 1983 or 1984 she repudiated her testimony for the prosecution at Mumia’s 1981 trial for the murder of Police Officer Daniel Faulkner.

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Philadelphia, PA. Yet another witness has come forward to expose the police frame-up which has kept celebrated journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal on death row for over 20 years. In a declaration filed last week in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit by Jamal’s attorneys, Kenneth Pate swears that his half-sister, Priscilla Durham, in a telephone conversation with Pate in 1983 or 1984, repudiated her testimony against Jamal at his 1982 trial for the murder of Police Officer Daniel Faulkner.

Durham, a security guard, was on duty at Jefferson Hospital on December 9, 1981, when Jamal and Faulkner were brought into the emergency room with gunshot wounds. According to Pate, Durham told him that the only statement Jamal made at the hospital was, “Get off me, get off me, they’re killing me”, when the police were interfering with his medical treatment. This directly –contradicts– Durham’s testimony at Jamal’s trial that she heard
him yell out, while surrounded by numerous police, “I shot the motherf—er and I hope he dies.” Continue reading →