|
Recent
Stories
April
23, 2003
Anthony
Gancarski
When Young Mothers Die in Combat
Chris
Floyd
Desolation Row: Bush's Barbarians Teach
by Example
Marjorie
Cohn
Tax the War Profiteers
William
Lind
The Fourth Generation of Modern War
Dave Marsh
Nina Simone: Freedom Singer
Binoy
Kampmark
Malayasia's America: the War on Iraq
David Vest
Who's Looting Whom?
Standard
Shaefer
Super Imperialism: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Andrew
Rodman
Lawn Poem
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/23
Website
of the Day
Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East
April
22, 2003
Edward
Said
The Appalling Consequences of the Iraq
War are Now Clear
Sam
Hamod
What's the Deal with This War?
Kurt
Nimmo
Shi'a Will to Power
Gary
Leupp
At last! The Necessary Evidence
Carl
Estabrook
Oblivious Americans: They Distort,
We Subside
John
Stanton
Iran's Reza Pahlavi: a Puppet of the US and Israel?
Ramzy
Baroud
What Else Hasn't Israel Told America?
Steven
Sherman
About That Cuba Letter
Wayne Madsen
Bush's "Christian" Blood Cult
Stew
Albert
Creep
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/22
Website
of the Day
Critical Media Literacy in Times of War
April
21, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
An Administration in Contempt
Gary
Leupp
Easter Thoughts on Liberation, Jesus
and Kanaka WaiWai
Roger
Witherspoon
Why Michigan Needs Affirmative Action
Uri Avnery
At Midnight, a Knock on the Door
Col. Dan
Smith
Early Lessons from Iraq
Jo
Freeman
After the Protest Comes Politics
Michael
Berry
The Friedman Absurdities
Gray
Brechin
Hang Black Banners: Mourning the Cultural Loss
Bob Riedel
The Taliban from Texas
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/21
April
19, 2003
Gary
Leupp
The Rape of History
Saul
Landau
Shop, Go to Church, Support Bush's
War, Wait for Armageddon
Michael
J. Fellows
Off With Their Heads: the Constitution According to Scalia
Pablo
Mukherjee
Roadmap to Resistance
Omar
Barghouti
Sharon's Bloody Beat
Anthony
Gancarski
Tony Blair: the Most Powerful Man in the World
Mickey
Z.
Animals: the Other Collateral Damage
Will
Potter
When Police Attack Journalists
William
MacDougall
America's In-Bedded Journalism
Neve
Gordon
Haunted by History
Adam
Engel
Wal-Mart and Peace
Dr.
Susan Block
Art Bombs: American Libertines for Peace
Poets'
Basement
Albert, Buono, Guthrie
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/19
Song of
the Weekend
Baghdad to Basra
April
18, 2003
Uri
Avnery
Operation "Syrian Freedom":
This One's Not About Oil
Jorge
Mariscal
"They Died Trying to Become
Students": the Future of Latinos in an Era of War and Occupation
Mickey
Z:
Coalition of the Unindicted: Only Losers Get Tried for War Crimes
Hussein
Ibish
Syria and the Road to World War IV
Reza Ladjevardian
Tarqeting Iran? Do It With TV, Not Cruise Missiles
Matania
Ben-Artzi
You Are Not Protecting My Son's Rights: a Letter to the President
of Israel's Supreme Court
Bruce Jackson
Jews Like Us
Joe
Allen
My Lai Revisited
Carl Estabrook
Support Our Euphemism
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/18
Website
of the Day
Meet the Victims of War
April
17, 2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Patriot Gore: the Fatal Flaws in
the Patriot Missile System
Joanne
Mariner
Looting Antiquity: the Legal Implications
for the Pentagon
Issam
Nashashibi
Zalmay Khalilzad: the Neocon's Bagman
to Baghdad
Wayne Madsen
Another Sign of the "End Times" for American Journalism
Robert
Fisk
The Army of Occupation
Boris
Kagarlitsky
Virtual Saddam Takes Aim
Biljana
Vankovska
A Personal View of Iraq: Where
is the Truth?
Dan Brook
Oil War: Fueling the Empire
Stanley
Heller
Bomb and Steal: This is What Privatization Looks Like
Tim Robbins
A Chill Wind is Blowing Through This Nation
Harold
A. Gould
Iraq After the War
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/17
Hot Stories
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
April 26,
2003
At Last! The Book
We've Been Waiting For
The Mumia Case,
In True Colors
By SCOTT HANDLEMAN
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a famous prisoner of the left,
in the tradition of Sacco and Vanzetti and the Rosenbergs. NowKilling
Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal
by Dave Lindorff, (Common Courage Press, $19.95) offers us the
first credible, carefully researched narrative of the case. The
book is commendable for its allegiance to truth, even as it describes
how Abu-Jamal, a black man in the clutches of a racist criminal
justice apparatus, has seen justice repeatedly thwarted for twenty-one
years. Lindorff brilliantly managed the hardest play of all,
which is to have written a book with good politics which isn't
just a hero-gram about an icon of the left.
A Black activist and radio journalist,
he was arrested in 1981 for the shooting death of a Philadelphia
cop, Daniel Faulkner. Since then, his case has gradually become
a popular cause. I remember my first march for Abu-Jamal, in
the summer of 1995 when the clock was ticking down on a death
warrant. Maybe a thousand protesters carried a torchlight vigil
through foggy San Francisco streets, among us a hefty contingent
from Food Not Bombs, a freedom-loving cohort of unwashed food
servers then on bad terms with the SFPD. A couple of dumpsters
were torched so the police cornered the crowd, arrested over
200 people and charged them with arson. A few of us escaped into
a sympathetic stranger's apartment building, just ahead of a
 mad cop in riot gear pounding
on the door. Years later, on his birthday in 1999, I went to
the Millions for Mumia March in Philadelphia. Intervening years
of organizing bore fruit with the large multi-racial crowd, respectfully
treated by police. It seemed like tens of thousands clogged the
streets. Bus after chartered bus came from New York and other
cities, and I even ran into a couple of friends who had flown
up from Florida. I remember a festive and chaotic atmosphere,
bowls smoked among friends; a fiery speech by Zack de la Rocha;
and Mumia's deep voice sounding eerily from speakers as a hush
descended on the crowd.
Another thing I remember about my friends
was that our sketchy knowledge about the case did not dampen
our readiness to agitate for his freedom. This enthusiasm stemmed
from a sense of history-a state that shot down Fred Hampton and
put Huey Newton on death row could easily frame the former Black
Panther Abu-Jamal-and a laudable mistrust of authority figures.
Why credit the state's word that Abu-Jamal is a murderer, when
he is one of us, in the sense of being a radical, and the people
on our side are proclaiming his innocence? Abu-Jamal's partisans
put out compelling flyers highlighting the oddities and injustices
of his trial; listed together on a page, these glaring facts
strongly suggested a frame-up. Then, too, there was the thought
that criminal sentences in the United States are excessive: even
if Abu-Jamal did shoot Faulkner, decades wasting in a death row
dungeon is punishment enough; why demand a new trial if we aim
for his release.
But the zeal of Abu-Jamal's staunchest
advocates to proclaim his innocence is unlikely to persuade a
broad audience of the justice of his cause. Killing Time
is a refreshing contrast. In thorough and systematic fashion,
Lindorff lays out the facts of the crime and then analyzes the
trial, appeals, and extra-legal maneuverings of the various parties.
Plowing through reams of court transcripts, interviews and secondary
sources, he analyzes prosecution and defense theories, exposing
implausible arguments and contradictory testimony on both sides.
A key player in Abu-Jamal's case is the U.S. criminal justice
establishment, so Lindorff explores the legal and cultural context
of the trial, showing how, as a black murder defendant, the balance
of power was stacked against him through devices transparent
or apparent. Not hesitating to report the outrageous rulings
of Abu-Jamal's judges, suspicious conduct of police and prosecutors,
and craven acts of his own counsel, Lindorff is equally unstinting
in his criticism of foolish decisions and unconvincing statements
by Abu-Jamal himself. None escape the scythe of Lindorff's truth-finding
pen, not even the widow Maureen Faulkner, who lied to the media
about a devilish gesture that Abu-Jamal could not have made at
her. The book has its fair share of villains, but no uncomplicated
victims or heroes, except perhaps for the slain officer.
Lindorff shows how Abu-Jamal's trial
starred a cast of characters who are the true archetypes of American
justice: a biased judge, merciless prosecutor, bumbling defense
lawyer, overly-selected jury, and (probably) evidence-manufacturing
cops. At the same time, he explains where Abu-Jamal's own vacillations
and naïve decisions played into the hands of enemies to
secure his conviction.
For example, Lindorff relates how Abu-Jamal
selected Anthony Jackson to defend him, a politically-compatible
lawyer who had never been lead counsel on a death penalty case.
A few weeks before the start of trial, realizing Jackson's shortcomings,
Abu-Jamal demanded to represent himself, at which point Jackson
stopped preparing for trial. Over Abu-Jamal's objections, Jackson
was re-appointed by Judge Sabo on the day before the start of
trial. Lindorff points out that Jackson could have requested
a few weeks' delay to ready himself; instead, he opted to "try
and wing it". After naming Jackson's misdeeds in unambiguous
terms, Lindorff dispels the theory that Jackson was part of a
conspiracy to remove Abu-Jamal's right of self-defense, telling
how at one point he bravely honored his client's wishes in the
face of a six-month criminal contempt sentence by Judge Sabo.
Lindorff's telling of the Jackson saga exemplifies his cool,
level-headed realism: he understands that a lawyer who engages
in lazy or foolish behavior is not necessarily plotting against
his client.
While Lindorff's dedication to truth
is unwavering, he does not appeal to false ideals of even-handedness
to mask the cold brutality with which Abu-Jamal was railroaded
onto death row. Arrayed against Jackson and Abu-Jamal was the
mighty law-and-order apparatus of Philadelphia, which Lindorff
paints in floridly venal colors. Abu-Jamal's judge, Albert Sabo,
popularly known as "the hanging judge," had at the
time of his retirement sentenced more convicts to death than
any other jurist in America: 31, of whom 29 were non-white. Lindorff
investigates a court reporter's allegation that Sabo said of
Abu-Jamal, "I'm going to help them fry the nigger".
Lindorff, who devotes a chapter to the culture of police spying
and brutality that prevailed in Philadelphia in the early 1980s,
lists 17 police officers who played parts in Abu-Jamal's arrest
or investigation and who were later "disciplined, indicted
for crimes, found guilty of committing acts of corruption or
brutality, or resigned from the department under a cloud of suspicion
after being named by corrupt officers."
Lindorff treats Abu-Jamal's case not
merely as an anomaly of justice, but as an illustration of how
the rules of the game are structured to disadvantage criminal
defendants. Digressing from the story of Abu-Jamal's jury selection,
he explains how the rule of "death-qualified juries"-the
requirement that all jurors in capital cases be willing to impose
a death sentence in at least some instances-operates to the disadvantage
of defendants: it creates a pool of jurors who are "conservative
politically, tend to believe authorities and are conviction prone".
Through the methodical dissection of
evidence, Lindorff raises strong doubts in the reader's mind
about what actually happened on the night of the shooting. He
organizes the state's evidence into three sets: circumstantial
evidence; eyewitness testimony to the shooting; and accounts
of a confession that Abu-Jamal purportedly blurted out. According
to Lindorff, the eyewitness evidence was weak because "none
had seen the whole incident, . . . and each of them had her or
his own problems of credibility." One witness, Robert Chobert,
was on parole for the paid firebombing of a school, and admitted
in 1995 that he had asked prosecutor McGill for help in clearing
a suspended driver's license. (Judge Sabo did not allow the jury,
entrusted with weighing the credibility of witness testimony,
to hear of Chobert's mercenary enterprise, ruling that it was
not a crime of falsehood.) Another, Cynthia White, was a prostitute
with 38 arrests on her record. In one of many lucid appeals to
the reader's common sense, Lindorff inquires whether, "as
a prostitute with outstanding warrants and open charges against
her, is it likely that seeing the shooting, she would have hung
around until the police showed up?" Veronica Jones, a prostitute
called by the defense who unexpectedly changed her story on the
stand, admitted in the 1995 appellate hearing that police had
promised her freedom to walk the streets in exchange for fingering
Abu-Jamal. Lindorff highlights major contradictions in witness
testimony, such as the fact that Chobert and White did not recall
seeing each other on the scene of the crime.
Cornerstones of the prosecution's case
were statements of a police officer and security guard that Abu-Jamal
loudly confessed to the crime at the hospital. Lindorff is dubious
about these statements, stressing that their circumstances suggest
"a grand conspiracy to falsify evidence". Specifically,
no officer mentioned the confession for over two months, and
it contradicts the statement of Wakshul, the officer guarding
Abu-Jamal at the hospital, that "the negro male made no
comment". Jackson overlooked Wakshul's statement until the
last day of trial; Sabo refused to grant a brief continuance
so that Wakshul could be questioned about the discrepancy. Lindorff
argues that "presented to the jury as fact, the confession
. . . was a devastating blow." Juries are reluctant to impose
a death sentence for fear of dooming an innocent person, but
"a confession can prove critical in helping to ease or eliminate
those qualms".
The second half of Lindorff's book covers
events following Abu-Jamal's conviction. He devotes two chapters
to Abu-Jamal's post-conviction hearing, held before the appalling
Sabo. Tom Ridge, now head of Homeland Security, makes a sordid
cameo as Governor of Pennsylvania, signing a death warrant just
as Abu-Jamal was about to request his hearing, probably on information
from tampered legal mail. Ridge thereby gave Sabo an excuse to
rush the hearing and deny discovery requests by the defense.
Lindorff notes that Ridge became an architect of the USA Patriot
Act, which erodes the attorney-client privilege in the name of
combating terrorism.
Lindorff's following chapter, discussing
the changeover in Abu-Jamal's legal team and Abu-Jamal's decision
to make an innocence defense based on the Beverly theory, has
earned him the scorn of certain Abu-Jamal choristers. A fissure
arose within Abu-Jamal's legal team over whether he should use
Arnold Beverly's affidavit confessing to Faulkner's murder. Attorneys
Leonard Weinglass and Daniel Williams convinced Abu-Jamal not
to use the confession, on the grounds that it was not credible.
But in 1999, Williams wrote a book on Abu-Jamal's case in which,
astonishingly, he equivocated about Abu-Jamal's innocence. Lindorff
agrees that Abu-Jamal had good reason to be upset with both Williams
and Weinglass over publication of the book, noting, not emphatically
enough, that Williams' uncertainty "would seem to be an
ethically improper public stance for a defense lawyer to take
regarding his or her client". Abu-Jamal fired Weinglass
and Williams, and his new lawyers encouraged him to pursue the
innocence claim.
In the spring of 2001, Abu-Jamal issued
an affidavit proclaiming his innocence for the first time, and
publicized affidavits by his brother and Beverly. As with every
critical fact, Lindorff evaluates the affidavits with professional
skepticism, scrutinizing it in the light of common sense and
weighing it against other bits of evidence. According to Abu-Jamal's
affidavit, he heard gunshots, looked up and saw his brother staggering
in the street, exited his car and ran to help his brother, at
which point he was shot by Faulkner. Lindorff points out that
this contradicts the testimony of key witnesses that Abu-Jamal
was in the street before the first shots were fired. Abu-Jamal's
brother's and Beverly's affidavits are even more doubtful to
Lindorff.
Because Lindorff tests his facts against
each other and against intuitive truths about human nature and
the real-life functioning of the justice system, his narrative
has the ring of truth. It is a boon to Abu-Jamal's cause, far
likelier than an impassioned polemic to convince the reader that
he has not had "even the approximation of a fair trial"
or appeal. Those wanting an extra dollop of squalor should be
sure to read Lindorff's assessment of the media coverage of the
case, in which those who would have hastened Mumia into the death
chamber, such as Sam Donaldson or The Nation's Marc Cooper, are
displayed in their true unlovely colors.
So, did Abu Jamal shoot Faulkner? Possibly,
Lindorff concludes, but he is "almost certainly innocent"
of first degree murder.
Scott Handleman
is based in the Bay Area. He can be reached at scotthandle@yahoo.com
Today's
Features
Anthony
Gancarski
When Young Mothers Die in Combat
Chris
Floyd
Desolation Row: Bush's Barbarians Teach
by Example
Marjorie
Cohn
Tax the War Profiteers
William
Lind
The Fourth Generation of Modern War
Dave Marsh
Nina Simone: Freedom Singer
Binoy
Kampmark
Malayasia's America: the War on Iraq
David Vest
Who's Looting Whom?
Standard
Shaefer
Super Imperialism: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Andrew
Rodman
Lawn Poem
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/23
Website
of the Day
Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|