It was a small victory in a very big war. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals decided for the second time on April 26th to uphold a 2001 federal court decision to set aside the death sentence of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a journalist, former Black Panther, and the world’s best-known political prisoner. The court had already ruled in 2008 that, due to improper instructions to the jury in Mumia’s 1982 kangaroo-court trial, his death sentence is to be replaced by life without the possibility of parole, unless the State of Pennsylvania holds a new jury trial on sentencing within 180 days. If the state fails to hold such a hearing within the time limit, the sentence automatically becomes life without the possibility of parole. Now, acting under orders from the US Supreme Court to reconsider, the Third Circuit panel reached the same decision once again.
Category Archives: Statements and Articles
Abolish the Racist Death Penalty! No to “Life Without Parole”! For Labor Action To Free Mumia!
August 2010. The case of internationally renowned death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal is now before the Third Circuit Court–on the sentencing issue only. Mumia’s 1982 kangaroo-court conviction for a crime he did not commit has already been upheld by the US Supreme Court. The sentencing issue revolves exclusively around reinstating Mumia’s death sentence, or putting him away for the rest of his life, without the possibility of parole. A ruling could come very soon.
In this context of an imminent new threat to execute Mumia Abu-Jamal, a handful of supposed death-penalty “opponents” has proposed, in a “Confidential Memorandum,” dropping Mumia’s name from anti-death penalty activities. Why? Because mentioning Mumia “alienates” potential “allies,” such as the Fraternal Order of Police! The cops, you see, might go for abolishing the death penalty that they have hitherto supported if they could be convinced that it is “too expensive.” This outrageous move to drop mention of Mumia in anti-death penalty activities was made by certain leaders without consulting their own boards of directors or memberships–hence, “the secret memo.”
The Politics of Death : Throwing Mumia Abu-Jamal Under the Bus
David Lindorff’s, The Politics of Death: Throwing Mumia Abu-Jamal Under the Bus, is an excellent exposure of the “secret memo,” and how it came to be that a few leaders of the anti-death penalty movement–acting independently of their own members and boards of directors–turned their backs on the world’s best-known death-row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal. We find it interesting that these “leaders,” identified here by Lindorff, should have picked the completely innocent Abu-Jamal to try to exclude from mention by the abolitionist movement.
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal stands squarely on the conclusion, based on the evidence, that Mumia Abu-Jamal is completely innocent of the murder charge for which he was convicted in 1982. While we have had our differences on this point with Lindorff in the past, we salute him here for this excellent denunciation of those who would treat his threatened execution–and his innocence–as if it was nothing.
Top US Court Sends Mumia Abu-Jamal Closer to Execution
February 13, 2010
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a former Black Panther, award winning journalist, behind-bars commentator on critical social issues–and an innocent man on death row. In April 2009, after more than two decades of court rulings that ignored mounting evidence of his innocence, the Supreme Court upheld his 1982 frame-up conviction without comment. Then, this January, the Court moved closer to reinstating his death sentence–which had been put on hold by lower court rulings.
The US Supreme Court has shown it will do anything necessary to support the rule of their big corporate bosses, as seen most recently in the Citizens United ruling, which threw out the ban on independent corporate spending during an election. Years of legislation was undone in a single blow, to further tighten the death grip of big money over politics in the US. But the courts also obey the commands of their armed thugs in the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), and politicians that support them, even if it means walking all over their own legal precedents and trampling on the most basic principles of justice. Continue reading
Justice Denied! The Long Struggle of Mumia Abu-Jamal
Click here for a PDF version of this article
September 15, 2009
World-renowned revolutionary journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted and sent to death row in the killing of a police officer in Philadelphia, has now gone through 27 years of fruitless appeal proceedings. Despite mounting and irrefutable evidence of Jamal’s innocence, all of these hearings have upheld his conviction in a 1982 trial, which was rightly called “a monumental miscarriage of justice from beginning to end,” by crime reporter J Patrick O’Connor.
Then, last April, the US Supreme Court finished off this cowardly charade by denying Jamal a final hearing, without so much as a word of explanation. In making this flat-out rejection of Mumia’s appeal, the Supreme Court–like the Federal Third Circuit Court a year earlier–had to knowingly violate its own well-established precedent in Batson v Kentucky–the 1986 ruling which said that purging a jury on the basis of race was unconstitutional. A violation required a new trial, even retroactively. In Mumia’s case, the prosecutor used at least ten out of 15 peremptory challenges to exclude qualified blacks for reasons that were not applied to prospective white jurors. Only one such exclusion is required to trigger a conviction reversal under Batson!