World-renowned revolutionary journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted and sent to death row in the killing of a police officer in Philadelphia, has now gone through 27 years of fruitless appeal proceedings. Despite mounting and irrefutable evidence of Jamal’s innocence, all of these hearings have upheld his conviction in a 1982 trial, which was rightly called “a monumental miscarriage of justice from beginning to end,” by crime reporter J Patrick O’Connor.

Then, last April, the US Supreme Court finished off this cowardly charade by denying Jamal a final hearing, without so much as a word of explanation. In making this flat-out rejection of Mumia’s appeal, the Supreme Court--like the Federal Third Circuit Court a year earlier--had to knowingly violate its own well-established precedent in Batson v Kentucky--the 1986 ruling which said that purging a jury on the basis of race was unconstitutional. A violation required a new trial, even retroactively. In Mumia’s case, the prosecutor used at least ten out of 15 peremptory challenges to exclude qualified blacks for reasons that were not applied to prospective white jurors. Only one such exclusion is required to trigger a conviction reversal under Batson!

“The law is what the judge says it is”

Called the “Mumia Exception,” by O’Connor, whose book, The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal, is perhaps the best yet written on the case, decisions such as these demonstrate a systematic bias inherent in the courts and political system: those considered a threat to the system will be persecuted in total disregard of the law. As Mumia himself puts it in his brilliant new book, Jailhouse Lawyers, “The law is what the judge says it is.”

Racism in jury selection was only one outrage in Jamal’s trial. The judge, Albert Sabo, a former cop himself and a known “prosecutor in robes,” expelled Jamal from most of his own trial, prevented evidence that would show Mumia’s innocence from being admitted, and systematically denied defense motions. None of this behavior was “legal,” nor was it an accident: Sabo was out to get Mumia. He made this clear when he was overheard to say privately, in court during a break, “yeah, and I’m gonna help ‘em fry the n----r.”

Mumia Abu-Jamal Is Innocent!

Jamal’s innocence was clear from the beginning, or should have been. Several witnesses said they saw one or two other men flee the scene right after the shooting. Businessman William Singletary, who witnessed the entire incident close up, told police that the passenger in the car which had been stopped by the slain officer was the real shooter. Jamal, he said, arrived on the scene unarmed, and only after the shooting!

Jamal had been driving a cab and was in the neighborhood when he heard gun shots, and saw his brother, Billy Cook, in his rear-view mirror. Cook was staggering, having been been beaten by a cop. Running to the scene, Jamal was shot and almost killed by a cop, either by the mortally-wounded officer (Daniel Faulkner), or by a cop arriving on the scene. Meanwhile, police arriving on the scene, instead of collecting actual evidence, immediately began to frame the wounded Jamal for the murder of the officer. They knew who they had, because Mumia was a former Black Panther, a journalist who had exposed earlier police crimes on local radio; and he had been targeted by the Justice Department’s counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO).