This response from Mumia's attorney to a NYT ad surveys the deficiencies
of the state's case for killing Mumia and provides a basis for
understanding a demand for Mumia's immediate release.
Paul Zarembka
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 23 Jun 1998 10:23:09 EDT
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Leonard Weinglass' answer to NYT Ad
Leonard I. Weinglass
Attorney At Law
Suite 10 A
6 West 20th Street
New York City, NY 10011
Phone: (212) 807-8646
Fax: (212) 242-2120
17 June 1998
To: Editor, _New York Times_
In a startling, and even disgraceful, effort to hasten and
insure the execution of an innocent man whose substantial legal
claims that he never received a fair trial are just now being
reviewed by the highest court of Pennsylvania, a previously
unknown group speaking for the Fraternal Order of Police, and
apparently headed by a slain police officer's widow, took out a
full page unsigned ad on the most prestigious page of the Sunday
New York Times of June 14th entitled, "Justice for Police Officer
Daniel Faulkner." The target of this attack, Mumia Abu-Jamal, a
renowned journalist from Philadelphia who has been on death row
for 16 years for the alleged shooting of Officer Faulkner, and
who was known as "the voice of the voiceless" for his award
winning reporting on police abuse and other social and racial
ills that afflicted the minority communities of Philadelphia, had
received worldwide support in his effort to overturn his unjust
conviction. At the time of his arrest in 1981 Jamal was serving
as the President of the Association of Black Journalists and had
previously been a founder of the Black Panther Party in
Philadelphia and a supporter of the Philadelphia MOVE group.
The advertisement for death, taken out at the cost of tens
of thousands of dollars, selectively quotes from witnesses at
Jamal's 1982 trial, all of whom have been thoroughly discredited
in subsequent court hearings beginning in 1995. Omitted are the
evidence and witnesses who have come forward to establish facts
which were kept from the jury during the 1982 trial. The ad
claims as a "fact" that two police officers heard Jamal confess
to the shooting of officer Faulkner the night of the killing. Yet
the police officer who guarded Jamal reported that very morning
that Jamal had made "no comments." That officer reportedly was on
vacation and unavailable at trial, when in fact, he was at home
waiting to testify.
Similarly, the charge that the shot which killed Faulkner
came from Jamal's legally registered .38-caliber weapon
contradicts the medical examiner's report--first entered into the
official record in 1995--that the bullet removed from Faulkner's
brain was a .44-caliber. That fact was also kept from the jury.
Moreover, a weapons expert found it incredible that the police at
the scene of the shooting failed to test Jamal's gun to see if it
had been recently fired or to test his hands to see if he had
fired a weapon.
The testimony cited in the ad of "eyewitnesses" who claimed
to identify Jamal as the shooter was equally flawed, coming from
witnesses whose testimony has now been exposed as false. One of
these witnesses, a white cab driver named Robert Chobert, first
reported to police that the shooter was 225 pounds and "ran away"
from the scene. This couldn't have been Jamal, who weighed 170
pounds and was found by the police sitting on a curb at the scene
of the shooting, bleeding profusely from a shot fired by
Faulkner. Why Chobert changed his story did not become clear
until 13 years later when, at a court hearing in 1995, he
admitted that at the time of the shooting he had been driving his
taxicab without a license while still on probation for felony
arson--throwing a Molotov cocktail at a grammar school. The jury
which presumably found Chobert truthful never heard these facts.
Furthermore Chobert revealed in 1995 that he had asked Jamal's
prosecutor to help get his driver's license back. Years later he
was still driving, unhindered by the police, without a license.
The main witness cited in the ad, Cynthia White, was someone
no other witness even reported seeing at the site. In return for
her testimony that Jamal shot Faulkner, White was allowed to
continue to work the streets as a prostitute for years,
apparently with police protection. In a 1997 hearing, another
former prostitute, Pamela Jenkins, who was a friend of White at
the time, testified that White was acting as a police informant,
a fact not given to the defense, and that she had testified only
after the police had threatened her life.
Other sworn testimony revealed that witness coercion was
routinely practiced by the police as they pursued their
investigation against Jamal. In 1995, eyewitness William
Singletary testified that police repeatedly tore up his initial
statement--that the shooter, not Jamal, ran away from the scene--
until he wrote something acceptable to them. The following year,
another former prostitute, Veronica Jones, courageously came
forward to testify that she had also been coerced into changing
her initial true eyewitness account that two men had fled the
scene of the killing; again, not Jamal. To anyone familiar with
the notorious practices of the Philadelphia Police Department,
this pattern of police misconduct is not unique to Jamal's case.
At the 1982 trial and every subsequent hearing in Jamal's
case information was withheld from the defense by the prosecution
in a court room presided over by Judge Albert Sabo. In an
unrelated proceeding, six former Philadelphia District Attorneys
swore under oath that no accused could receive a fair trial in
Sabo's court. Jamal presented over a score of separate
constitutional violations to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, from
the withholding of evidence to the racial exclusion of jurors.
Eleven qualified African Americans were rejected by the
prosecution, a standard practice as was recently revealed in the
exposure of a "training tape" for excluding blacks from juries
prepared by the Philadelphia District Attorney's office in the
mid-1980s. On this basis alone, Jamal should be given his
freedom.
In a country where the racial bias inherent in the death
penalty was recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987 (even as
it ruled that such bias provided no basis for appeal!)
Philadelphia reigns as the "capital of capital punishment." A
1998 study by the Death Penalty Information Center, titled "The
Death Penalty in Black and White," notes that blacks make up 84
percent of those on death row from Philadelphia and that black
men from that city are almost four times more likely to receive a
death sentence than other defendants.
Since this sinister ad only repeats old, discredited tales
and completely ignores the evidence presented in Jamal's appeals,
one is left to ask, "Why now?" The Pennsylvania State Supreme
Court is about to render a decision on Jamal's appeal of Judge
Sabo's predictable denial of a new trial for Jamal. Pennsylvania
Governor Tom Ridge, who signed Jamal's death warrant in June
1995, has vowed to once again order Jamal's execution should he
lose his appeal. Anticipating the possibility of a repeat of the
massive protests that succeeded in saving Jamal's life in August
1995, the pro-death penalty and law enforcement forces now seem
more determined than ever to defeat and deflect the strength of
that movement.
In a country awash with commodity advertising, the many
thousands of dollars spent in this false and misleading ad will
not subvert or detract from the public outcry in support of
Jamal. The rush to judgment back in 1982, fueled by sensational
media reporting that echoed police demands for the death of Mumia
Abu-Jamal irrespective of the evidence, has produced an historic
injustice which has kept an innocent man in prison most of his
adult life. The effort to now seal his fate through advertising
is equally reprehensible and must be rejected in favor of
immediate freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal.
LEONARD I. WEINGLASS
Attorney for Mumia Abu-Jamal
