[Marxism] Mumia Abu-Jamal court decisions protested internationally

[Walter Lippmann]

On Friday there were coordinated world-wide demonstrations protesting
the latest court decision in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Here in New
York, where I'm winding up my visit, there were two protests, one at
the federal building, organized by the Partisan Defense Committee,
which I attended and spoke at, as did Mumia's 30-year-old daughter.
and others.

About a hundred people participated in the protest, which was very
well-organized and spirited. It was freezing cold and there was a
terrible chill in the air, but spirits of those participating were
very high. I understand that the Harlem demonstration was larger,
with 200 participants from what I heard from two sources very
different from one another. The most important thing is to keep up
work to break the media blockade about Mumia and try to get some
coverage of the case and his struggle, which is ongoing.

The relentless activity of groups like the Partisan Defense Committee
have been responsible for keeping Mumia and the case alive over these
many years. In my remarks to the PDC rally I pointed this out, adding
that Mumia has long been an uncompromising supporter of the Cuban
Revolution. His book, WE WANT FREEDOM, A LIFE IN THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY, 
Is in print. Just as Mumia Abu-Jamal is imprisoned for a crime he did
not commit, but for his revolutionary activism, so are the Cuban Five
imprisoned for crimes which they did not committee either. Chants
about freedom for the Cuban Five were intermingled with chants for
freedom for Mumia, for his son Jamal Hart, for the Move 9 and other
political prisoners in the U.S. Congratulations to the Partisan Defense
Committee for this excellent protest mobilization. Below some further
analyses of the case which came in the last several hours.


Walter Lippmann
New York, New York
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GRANMA ARTICLE ON MUMIA YESTERDAY (English and Spanish):
http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs1853.html

PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE NEWS RELEASE:
http://www.partisandefense.org/pubs/press/2008-03-27.html 
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From: Nattyreb <nattyreb at comcast.net>
Sent: Mar 29, 2008 3:11 PM
To: Nattyreb <nattyreb at comcast.net>
Subject: [TheBlackList] !*3/31 Philly 4 MUMIA + More!

There will be a press conference on Monday, March 31, 2008, 11 am at the  
Federal Bldg, 6th & Market.  Pam Africa and International Concerned  Family 
and 
Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal will fully address this latest bogus  decision of

the courts.
Please try and attend!
Monday, March 31,  2008
Federal Building
6th & Market
11 am
==============

MUMIA COURT DECISION:

Monday, March 31 Press  Conference in Philadelphia, 11am, 
6th & Market

Monday, March 31  Emergency Planning Meeting, 6pm, Calvary 
Church, 48th &  Baltimore

According to AP reports today, the Third Circuit of  
Appeals Court ruled that while Mumia's guilty conviction 
should not be  overturned, that he deserved a resentencing 
hearing due to flawed  instructions that the original jury 
received during the original trial,  upholding the federal 
district's court ruling in December 2001.  One  article 
goes on to say, "If prosecutors don't want to give him a 
new  death penalty hearing, Abu-Jamal would be sentenced 
automatically to life  in prison"  This is a terrible 
ruling but should come to no  surprise.

There is no victory in this ruling!  It is appealible,  but 
only to the Supreme Court, full of right-wing Bush  
appointees.

A major demonstration is being planned for Sat., April 26  
in Philadelphia.  There will be a press conference at the 
Federal  Building at 6th & Market Sts. at 11am on Monday, 
March 31 and also an  Emergency Mobilizing Meeting at 6pm 
on Monday, March 31 at Calvary Church,  48th & Baltimore to 
plan for April 26th and other events.

We  need everyone's participation now, more than ever! 
Free Mumia and all  political prisoners!!!

============================================================

Third Circuit Court Rejects Abu-Jamal Appeal:
The "Mumia Exception"
by Dave Lindorff, OpEdNews.com

After spending almost a year's time deliberating following a hearing
last May 17, a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit Court of
Appeals in Philadelphia has shot down all three claims by death row
prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal challenging his conviction for the 1981
murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. At the same
time, the appeals court upheld a 2001 decision by Federal District
Judge William Yohn that had overturned former Black Panther and
Philadelphia journalist Abu-Jamal's death sentence, agreeing with the
lower court judge that the form used by the trial jury in 1982 to
establish whether jurors felt there were any mitigating circumstances
was flawed, and could have left panelists mistakenly believing that
before they could consider any such mitigating factors in their
deliberations, they would all have to agree such a factor existed. In
fact, by law if even one juror believes that there is a mitigating
factor, that factor can be considered by jurors in deciding on death
or life in prison.

The court was unanimous in rejecting Abu-Jamal's claim that the trial
judge, Albert Sabo, had been prejudiced against him and in favor of
the prosecution when he presided over a Post-Conviction Relief Act
hearing in 1995-6. It was also unanimous in rejecting Abu-Jamal's
claim that Prosecutor Joseph McGill had improperly diminished the
jury's sense of responsibility during the conviction phase of the
trial by telling them that their decision would not be final as there
would be "appeal after appeal." The appellate judges didn't say that
McGill's statement was proper, or even that it might not have
impacted jurors' decision on guilt, but rather agreed that by court
precedent they had only used evidence of such prosecutorial
misconduct to overturn death sentences, not convictions. (Arguably,
in the unlikely event that the Philadelphia DA were successful in
getting the US Supreme Court to reverse the Third Circuit and
reimpose Abu-Jamal's death penalty, he could go back and appeal the
sentence based upon this statement to the jury by McGill.)

But on Abu-Jamal's third claim-that the prosecution had improperly
violated his Constitutional right to a fair trial by his peers by
barring 10 qualified African-American potential jurors from serving
on his jury through the use of what are called "peremptory
challenges"-there was a dissent, making the vote 2-1. Judge Thomas
Ambro, a Clinton appointee to the bench-chastised his two colleagues,
Chief Judge Anthony Scirica and Judge Robert Cowan-- both Reagan
appointees--saying that they were applying a different, and
unattainable standard of proof to Abu-Jamal than they had been using
for other cases brought before them.

In rejecting Abu-Jamal's claim of racial bias in jury
selection-something known as a Batson violation, after the Supreme
Court's 1986 decision in Batson v Kentucky-the court majority wrote
that Abu-Jamal had not made a timely protest over prosecutor McGill's
rejection of 10 black jurors without cause (McGill used 15 of his 20
available peremptory challenges to remove at least 10 qualified black
and 5 qualified white jurors). The majority also proposed that
because Abu-Jamal had not provided the court with the racial makeup
of the jury pool, it was impossible to know whether perhaps
two-thirds of that pool might have been black, giving an "innocent
explanation" to McGill's 66.7% black rejection rate. (Local attorneys
scoff at such a notion, saying they've never seen a jury pool so
skewed racially.)

Judge Ambro blasted this logic, saying that the US Supreme Court had
established that "excluding even a single person from a jury because
of race violated the Equal Protection Clause of our Constitution."
Significantly, the nation's High Court just affirmed that position
March 19 with a powerful 7-2 ruling in a Louisiana death penalty case
(Snyder v. Louisiana).

Judge Ambro then accused his robed colleagues of having a double
standard, saying "Our Court has previously reached the merits of
Batson claims on habeas review in cases where the petitioner did not
make a timely objection during jury selection-signaling that our
Circuit does not have a federal contemporaneous objection rule-and I
see no reason why we should not afford Abu-Jamal the courtesy of our
precedents." He added, "Why we pick this case to depart from that
reasoning I do not know."

Going further, Judge Ambro writes, "We have repeatedly said that a
defendant can make out a prima facie case for jury-selection
discrimination by showing that the prosecution struck a single juror
because of race.In fact, in United States v. Clemons, we explained
that 'striking a single black juror could constitute a prima facie
case even when blacks ultimately sit on the panel and even when valid
reasons exist for striking other blacks.'...Yet the majority focuses
on the absence of information about the racial composition and total
number of the venire[jury pool], claiming that this statistical
information-from which one can compute the exclusion rate-is
necessary to assess whether an inference of discrimination can be
discerned in Abu-Jamal's case. Such a focus is contrary to the
nondiscrimination principle underpinning Batson, and it conflicts
with our Court's precedents, in which we have held that there is no
"magic number or percentage [necessary] to trigger a Batson inquiry,"

One thing Judge Ambro didn't mention in his 41-page dissent was the
evidence presented by Abu-Jamal to the court of a clear history of
deliberate race purging of juries by the Philadelphia DA's office,
and by prosecutor McGill in particular. That evidence, developed by
academic researchers and by attorneys at the Federal Defenders'
Office in Philadelphia, show that between 1977 and 1986, while Ed
Rendell was Philadelphia's District Attorney, local prosecutors used
peremptory challenges to strike qualified blacks from juries in death
penalty cases 58 percent of the time, compared to 22 percent of the
time for qualified whites. During the same period of time, prosecutor
McGill himself struck qualified black jurors 74 percent of the time
in death penalty cases he tried, compared to 25 percent of qualified
white jurors. This is seriously damning evidence of racial bias in
jury selection.

Interestingly, one of the Third Circuit precedents referred to by
Judge Ambro was a 2005 case heard by Judge Sam Alito, now elevated to
the Supreme Court. In that case, Brinson v Vaughn, Alito overturned
the appellant's death penalty conviction, writing that "...a
prosecutor may violate Batson even if the prosecutor passes up the
opportunity to strike some African Americans jurors." Alito further
stated in that decision that "a prosecutor's decision to refrain from
discriminating against some African Americans does not cure
discrimination against others." (Significantly, the High Court's
latest Snyder decision opinion was also penned by Justice Alito, who
shows himself to be a passionate opponent of racism in jury
selection.) What appears to be happening here, and what obviously
upset Judge Ambro, is that the other two judges, Scirica and Cowan,
are demonstrating another example of what my colleague,Philadelphia
journalist Linn Washington, has dubbed the "Mumia Exception."

Washington has noted that on several occasions during Abu-Jamal's
epic 26-year battle to survive Pennsylvania's death row machine, the
state's courts have altered the rules to keep him locked up and on
course for execution. Pennsylvania's top court in 1986 overturned a
death sentence where McGill, the same prosecutor in Abu-Jamal's case,
had made the same closing statement to jurors at the conclusion of a
murder trial presided over by Judge Sabo, the same trial judge who
presided in Abu-Jamal's case. The court, declaring that the
prosecutor's language had "minimize[ed] the jury's sense of
responsibility for a verdict of death," had ordered a new trial that
time. Three years later in 1989, despite this precedent and presented
with an identical situation involving the same characters, the same
court reversed itself, though, upholding Abu-Jamal's conviction.
Eleven years later, Pennsylvania's highest court reversed track
again, barring such language by prosecutors "in all future trials,"
but not making their decision retroactive to include Abu-Jamal.

Another example of this judicial "special handling" where Abu-Jamal's
case is concerned, involves the right of allocution - the right of
the convicted to make a statement without challenge before
sentencing. One month before initially upholding Abu-Jamal's
conviction in March 1989, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a
ruling declaring the right of allocution to be of "ancient origin"
and saying that any failure to permit a defendant to plead for mercy
demanded reversal of sentence. Abu-Jamal's appeal claimed Judge Sabo,
by allowing the prosecutor to question Abu-Jamal on the stand after
the convicted defendant had made just such a statement to jurors,
violated his allocution right during the '82 trial. The state's high
court, however - for the first time in its history - ruled that the
"right of allocution does not exist in the penalty phase of capital
murder prosecution."

This flip-flopping on allocution, on acceptable language for
prosecutors and on other legal precedents all led Amnesty
International to conclude in its 2001 report on Abu-Jamal's case that
the state's highest court improperly invents new standards of
procedure "to apply it to one case only: that of Mumia Abu-Jamal."
Justice, that is to say, has not always been blind in this case. A
"Mumia Exception" had been established.

And now this stain on Pennsylvania jurisprudence appears to have
migrated to the federal court system, at the Third Circuit. Says
Washington, "This decision once again shows that in the Abu-Jamal
case, evidence is not important. As with the Pennsylvania courts,
this federal court ignored its own precedents in reaching a result
that is contrary to the facts and to the law. The reason for this is
what Amnesty International pointed out in their 2001 report: The
Abu-Jamal case is hopelessly polluted by politics, which precludes
any justice in this case." Robert Bryan, Abu-Jamal's lead attorney,
said the third Circuit Court's upholding of the death penalty
reversal was a "major victory," but he said, "The fact that the court
majority turned a blind eye to the racially discriminatory practices
of the DA's office is outrageous."

With all three of Abu-Jamal's habeas claims for an overturning of his
conviction rejected, his case now moves to the US Supreme Court, with
a possible stop along the way for a hearing by the full Third Circuit
bench. Abu-Jamal's attorney Bryan says he plans to file a request for
such an en banc reconsideration of the ruling by the full Third
Circuit within the next two weeks. Neither the full Third Circuit,
nor the Supreme Court, are obligated to hear the case, which would
make the current Third Circuit decision the final word on his
conviction. Bryan said, "Judge Ambro's dissent in the Batson decision
was very powerful, and we will certainly be using it in our arguments
to the full Third Circuit and to the Supreme Court."

As for the overturned death penalty ruling, which the DA's office
will certainly also appeal to the High Court, should it be sustained,
there are two options. The DA could decide to leave things at
that-something McGill, interviewed shortly after Judge Yohn's initial
ruling, said was being considered-in which case Abu-Jamal would face
life in prison with no possibility of parole. He would not, however,
have to spend more time in the near solitary confinement torture of
Pennsylvania's maximum-security death row, but would be moved to a
regular prison. Alternatively, the DA could decide to go to a
Philadelphia court and impanel a new jury to conduct just a
sentencing hearing, in hopes of winning a new death penalty. Such a
limited trial would not address guilt or innocence--only punishment.

Given fairer rules regarding jury selection, and the larger minority
population in today's Philadelphia, and Abu-Jamal's having better
legal representation, it is hard to imagine the DA succeeding in
convincing 12 fairly chosen Philadelphia jurors to sentence
journalist him to death for a crime for which he has already served
26 hard years' time. Moreover, because a defendant is entitled to
subpoena witnesses in his defense, the DA would run the risk that
Abu-Jamal could use such a trial to introduce new evidence of
innocence, opening the door to further appeals of his underlying
conviction. For these reasons, an effort to win a new death sentence
seems unlikely.

The legal stymieing of Abu-Jamal's efforts to win a new trial comes
at a time of growing questions regarding his guilt, or at least the
veracity of the witnesses and the evidence used to convict him on a
first-degree murder charge.

Last year, photos were discovered that had been taken by a freelance
news photographer of the crime scene on the south side of Locust
Street at 13th Street in Philadelphia's Center Cityonly minutes after
police had arrived and after the wounded Abu-Jamal and the clinically
dead Faulkner had been taken off to Jefferson Hospital. These photos
show police tampering with evidence, including the both Abu-Jamal's
and Faulkner's guns as well as the officer's police hat. Photos of
the bloody spot on the sidewalk where Faulkner lay as he was shot by
a bullet to the face at close range show no sign of craters where
three other shots Abu-Jamal is alleged to have fired from a position
astride the officer and that missed should have left their marks in
the concrete, raising questions about the testimony of two alleged
eyewitnesses to the shooting. Those same photos also show no taxicab
parked behind Faulkner's parked squad car in the place one of those
witnesses, Robert Chobert, claimed he had been stopped. The missing
cab raises questions about the veracity of Chobert's claim to have
witnessed Faulkner's murder.

Other witnesses are still coming forward since the trial, who also
challenge the prosecution's story, but without a new trial, it is not
clear that their evidence will ever be heard.

Abu-Jamal's attorney says Abu-Jamal told him this morning that he was
"disappointed" in the result, but that he "hopes the reversal of 
the
death penalty will help others on death row, and says, 'The struggle
continues!'"

---------------------

DAVE LINDORFF is author of "Killing Time: An Investigation into the
Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal" (Common Courage Press, 2003).
His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

This is the statement from Germany:

Justice Denied: A Political Decision that Cannot Be Allowed to Stand
written by Michael Schiffmann for the 
German Network Against the Death Penalty 
and to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal

FULL GERMAN STATEMENT HERE:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/message/82558 

========================================
WALTER LIPPMANN, CubaNews
Los Angeles, California
http://www.walterlippmann.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
"Cuba - Un Paraiso bajo el bloqueo"
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