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The following article appeared on Abu-Jamal-News.com.
On
Tuesday, Feb. 19, in a ruling unrelated to the pending U.S. Third
Circuit Court decision, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected
death-row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal's appeal of a 2005 ruling by
Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Pamela Dembe, which denied
Abu-Jamal's Post Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) petition, on grounds that
it was not "timely." This recent PCRA petition was based on
affidavits by two witnesses that did not testify at the original 1982
trial: Yvette Williams and Kenneth Pate.
Yvette
Williams states that key prosecution witness Cynthia White told her
that she had been coerced by police into giving false testimony against
Abu-Jamal. Defense witnesses Veronica Jones and Pamela Jenkins have
given similar accounts of Cynthia White's coerced testimony against
Abu-Jamal.
As
Amnesty International has documented, White's alleged eye-witness
account was altered, as each subsequent account given to police further
served to support the prosecution scenario used to convict Abu-Jamal.
Kenneth
Pate says that prosecution witness Priscilla Durham confided to him
that she had also lied in court when she stated that she heard
Abu-Jamal confess at the hospital. Even before Pate's affidavit,
Durham's account was very suspicious.
The
alleged "hospital confession," where Abu-Jamal reportedly
declared, "I shot the motherf***er and I hope the motherf***er
dies," was first officially reported to police over two months
later, by hospital guards Priscilla Durham and James LeGrand (Feb. 9, 1982),
P.O. Gary Wakshul (Feb. 11), P.O. Gary Bell (Feb. 25), and P.O. Thomas
M. Bray (March 1). Only two of
these five witnesses were called by the DA: Gary Bell (Faulkner's
partner and "best friend") and Priscilla Durham.
At
trial, Gary Bell testified that the two-month lapse resulted from his
being so upset over the death of Faulkner. Priscilla Durham testified,
and added for the first time, that she had reported the confession to
her supervisor the next day. Neither her supervisor nor the alleged
handwritten statement were presented in court.
The
DA sent an officer to the hospital, returning with a suspicious typed
version. Sabo accepted the paper (not signed) despite both Durham's
disavowal, and the defense's protest that authorship and authenticity were
unproven.
Immediately
following Tuesday's news, I asked several people to respond to the
court's decision: Pam Africa, Robert R. Bryan, Dave Lindorff, Michael
Schiffmann, and Linn Washington Jr.:
PAM AFRICA:
— Coordinator of The International Concerned Family and Friends
of Mumia Abu-Jamal
I
am not shocked by this decision. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has
never ruled fairly in Mumia's case, especially with former Philadelphia
DA Ron Castille's participation.
This
should wake people up to see the injustice in Mumia's case. Why can the
media report so quickly on this decision, but not report on the newly
discovered crime scene photos? These photos are serious evidence, but
the media has ignored them. The media and courts are complicit in the
railroading of Mumia.
I
urge readers to please help fight the media bias by going to
Abu-Jamal-News.com to see the new photo evidence, downloading the
information, and spreading the word, at this urgent time in Mumia's
case.
ROBERT R. BRYAN:
— Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal
Mumia
and I had a long conference this afternoon, shortly after the
Pennsylvania Supreme Court made its ruling. We were not surprised since
that court has a history of not addressing the racism and fraud that has
dominated the prosecution since its inception over a quarter of a
century ago.
By
dismissing the appeal on procedural grounds, the court avoided dealing
with the compelling facts establishing that the prosecution of my
client was based upon lies, half truths, and bigotry. It is sad that
the state court used possible mistakes of the previous lawyers in the
case as an excuse to dodge the truth.
This
state ruling has no bearing on the proceedings pending in the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. If the federal decision is
favorable, then the Pennsylvania Supreme Court judgment will be moot. Otherwise, I plan to seek relief in
the U.S. Supreme Court. I will not rest until Mumia is free.
LINN WASHINGTON JR.:
— Philadelphia Tribune columnist, Temple University Professor of
Journalism
This
ruling is sad but not surprising. It continues the infamous
Pennsylvania Supreme Court tradition in the Abu-Jamal case of abusing
law to block justice. Until
this Court grants a new trial to Abu-Jamal where both sides can fairly
present evidence, any ruling it issues is legally corrupt.
DAVE LINDORFF:
— Author of "Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death
Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal” (Common Courage Press, 2003)
It
comes as no surprise to hear that the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court
has rejected yet another appeal by Mumia Abu-Jamal, the state's
longest-surviving death row prisoner. The court, which is led by former
Philadelphia DA Ron Castille (who helped fight Abu-Jamal's appeals in
his role as DA and has yet to recuse himself from decisions involving this
case), has never issued a ruling favorable to Abu-Jamal.
That
said, it is clear that the prosecution's case was rampant with examples
of suborned perjury, from the belated and choreographed lies by police
about having heard a shouted out confession in the hospital—an event no
nurse or attending physician heard, and which police at the time
curiously failed to note in their reports on the evening's events—to "eyewitness"
testimony from a taxi driver whose taxi nobody remembers seeing where
he said it was—parked directly behind Officer Daniel Faulkner's car.
And
of course, more recently we have the newly discovered news photos
showing police tampering with the evidence at the very scene of the
crime. In a fair world, this case
would have been tossed out long ago, but as the Pa. Supreme Court has demonstrated
yet again, we do not live in a fair world.
DR. MICHAEL SCHIFFMANN:
— German linguist at the University of Heidelberg, co-founder of
Journalists for Mumia, and the author of "Race Against Death;
Mumia Abu-Jamal: a Black Revolutionary in White America"
The
original decision in May/June 2005 by Court of Common Pleas Judge
Pamela Dembe to dismiss Mumia Abu-Jamal's 3rd PCRA petition was already
a travesty of justice. Everything
in that decision was tailored to deny Abu-Jamal relief. After sitting
on the case for almost four years, the judge deciding it evidently didn't
have a clue about the most elementary facts. That was not necessary, though; all that was needed was to
twist the law in such a way that Abu-Jamal would never have a chance,
regardless of what he presented.
Abu-Jamal's
3rd PCRA petition presented testimony by two witnesses that attacked
the arguably two single-most important prosecution witnesses at the June/July
1982 Abu Jamal trial, prostitute Cynthia White and hospital security
guard Priscilla Durham. As discussed extensively in work on our
website, Abu-Jamal-News-com, and elsewhere, not least in many, many
defense briefs, these witnesses were highly incredible even without
that new testimony.
All
the same, it was crucially important: New witness Yvette Williams
testified that Cynthia White had been blackmailed into fingering
Abu-Jamal as the murderer by death threats on the part of the police,
and new witness Kenneth Pate testified that Durham had been peer-pressured
by the police into falsely accusing Abu-Jamal of having boasted about
having "shot the motherfucker" Daniel Faulkner and hoping he
would die. If proven in court,
these two new claims in themselves would be enough to prove that the
case against Abu-Jamal was hopelessly contaminated right from the start
and to explode it once and for all.
By
bending even the reactionary new Clinton-era laws to expedite the
application of the death penalty out of shape, Judge Dembe at the time
concluded that the new evidence was not presented in a
"timely" fashion. The
Pennsylvania Supreme Court now does the same, inventing yet other and
different reasons why the evidence is "untimely."
It's
not worth going again into the "legal" forks and angles of
that new decision. It's a repeat performance of the 2005 Dembe
decision, which I analyzed at the time and which got a worthy response
by the defense, as we now see without avail. What simmers through in every
line of those decisions is that one thing always left unsaid: "We
are afraid of the facts."
But
those facts won't go away, if we fight to disseminate them, to get them
out into the public sphere, and to have them finally heard on court.
That is the most urgent task in the weeks and months to come.
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