Mumia Abu-Jamal will not be put to death. For all that is a relief to people with conscience, there is no reason for anyone to be grateful. He had no business being arrested in the first place, much less convicted and sentenced to die. And everybody who can tell his or her elbow from a hot rock knows it.
If the name doesn’t happen to ring a bell with you, Abu-Jamal was railroaded to death row in 1981 for supposedly having murdered Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. It was a sickening sham of fabricated testimony, phony evidence, and an obviously biased judge — who didn’t bother to hide his prejudice.
This sloppily thrown together frame job was so clear that an outcry went up all around the world. In the wake of international protest, the reason he had been legally lynched came glaringly to light.
The Philadelphia Police Department and the Philadelphia City Attorney’s Office had it in for Mumia Abu-Jamal, fueled by an ongoing grudge. He was, in the patently racist City of Brotherly Love, a former Black Panther, member of MOVE, and an outspoken public radio journalist who put his foot in the storm-trooping Philadelphia Police Department’s behind every chance he got.
And didn’t stop after he got locked up.
He attested, in 2004, “Do you see law and order? There is nothing but disorder, and instead of law there is the illusion of security. It is an illusion because it is built on a long history of injustices: racism, criminality, and the genocide of millions. Many people say it is insane to resist the system, but actually, it is insane not to.”
When Abu-Jamal was found at the site where Office Faulkner was slain, cops and the district attorney fell over themselves rushing him to so-called justice, leaving a trail of malfeasance a mile wide. Including falsifying the report of an officer who originally cleared Abu-Jamal of the crime.
Don’t take my word, go look it up. There’s a ton of information about which Supreme Court justices and U.S. presidents, right up to affirmative action HNIC (House Negro In Charge) Barack Obama, have done exactly jack.
Though it was surprising that a federal court overturned the death sentence, the writing on the wall said it was a matter of time before it gets reinstated. In that same sense of things, it is nowhere near enough that, after all these years, Mumia Abu-Jamal’s life finally has been spared.
For one thing, the only reason Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams (another sad, sorry excuse for a Black man) quit pursuing the case hasn’t a damn thing to do with Abu-Jamal’s innocence. In fact, this horse’s ass admitted that continuing to seek the death penalty could lead to “an unknowable number of years” of appeals and that witnesses have died or are unavailable after almost 30 years.
Says Williams, “There’s never been any doubt in my mind that Mumia Abu-Jamal shot and killed Officer Faulkner. I believe that the appropriate sentence was handed down by a jury of his peers in 1982. While Abu-Jamal will no longer be facing the death penalty, he will remain behind bars for the rest of his life, and that is where he belongs.”
Talk about a sell-out: Williams couldn’t be more bought and paid for by the criminal injustice system if somebody in city hall had a receipt for him.
There should be no let up. Activists who have been protesting Mumia Abu-Jamal need to keep right on until he either dies behind bars or is released. I’ll give you pretty good odds on which will happen first.
Dwight Hobbes welcomes reader responses to P.O. Box 50357, Mpls., 55403.
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