The life of revolutionary journalist and former Black Panther Mumia Abu Jamal is on the line.
Two years ago the US federal court found that the original trial judge misled the jury, rendering proceedings constitutionally unfair. But in January 2010 the US Supreme Court vacated that decision and sent the case back to the Court of Appeals, who will hear it on 9 November. At issue is the death penalty. Lawyers have also filed an action at the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on prosecutorial abuses, focusing on ballistics, and are awaiting a response in that case.
For nearly 30 years the racist US authorities have been attempting to silence and destroy Mumia, who has devoted his life to reporting on and supporting the struggles of the oppressed in the US and across the world, earning himself the description ‘the voice of the voiceless’. In 1981, Mumia was framed for killing police officer Faulkner. The trial was a farce, witnesses changed their statements, vital evidence was suppressed and death threats made against the legal team. Mumia was convicted of a crime he did not commit and has remained on death row ever since.
This is despite the fact that in 2001, Arnold Beverley made a signed confession that he and an accomplice were hired to kill Faulkner by corrupt officers because Faulkner was an obstacle to their pay-off racket. He stated clearly: ‘Jamal was not involved’.
Mumia continues to speak out against imperialism, racism and injustice everywhere. Most recently, in Jailhouse Lawyers, he writes:
‘This is the story of law learned, not in the ivory towers of multi-billion-dollar endowed universities [but] in the bowels of the slave-ship, in the hidden, dank dungeons of America – the Prisonhouse of Nations.
‘It is law learned in a stew of bitterness, under the constant threat of violence, in places where millions of people live, but millions of others wish to ignore or forget.
‘It is law written with stubs of pencils, or with four-inch-long rubberised flex-pens, with grit, glimmerings of brilliance, and with clear knowledge that retaliation is right outside the cell door.
‘It is a different perspective on the law, written from the bottom, with a faint hope that a right may be wronged, an injustice redressed.’
It is time to redress the vast injustice being carried out against Mumia.
Cat Alison
There will be a demonstration outside the US Embassy in London on Tuesday 9 November. For further details of this and other activities in Britain contact the Free Mumia Abu Jamal Defence Campaign UK at [email protected]
Jailhouse Lawyers: prisoners defending prisoners v the USA by Mumia Abu Jamal, with a foreword by Angela Davis, was published in Britain in July and is available from Crossroads Books, £9.99.
FRFI 217 October/November 2010
