Judge Pamela Dembe has canceled a court hearing in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal that was scheduled for February 11, 2005. The LAC views this cancellation as ominous.

Judge Dembe had ruled previously that a comment made by Mumia’s original trial judge, Albert Sabo, at the time of the trial, that he (Sabo) was “going to help ’em fry the n—-r,” did not in any way prove bias as to Sabo’s rulings! Dembe’s ruling held that Mumia had no rights that were infringed by the trial judge’s use of the most heinous of racist epithets, nor by his clear statement of complicity with the prosecution to frame a death sentence before hearing any evidence in the case. This is essentially a restatement of the infamous Dred Scott decision–the 1857 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which held that, “The Black man in America has no rights that a white man is bound to respect.”

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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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