Mumia Abu-Jamal, Now in His 40th Year as an Incarcerated Prisoner, Has
Covid-19
https://socialistaction.org/2021/03/22/mumia-abu-jamal-now-in-his-40th-year-as-an-incarcerated-prisoner-has-covid-19/
March 22, 2021
By Dave Lindorff
Internationally known US political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal has reported
to friends and family on the outside that he has contracted Covid-19 in
the Pennsylvania prison where he is incarcerated, and says he is having
difficulty breathing. His life is in immediate danger and he is in
urgent need of hospital care.
This latest outrage was sadly predictable. Prisons across the US have
for years been allowing serious illness to serve as a form of “silent
execution” of prisoners, many of them certainly innocent of the crimes
they were convicted of. Many prisoners in the system, guilty or not,
are serving unfairly punitive terms that keep them confined into an old
age meaning they are particularly vulnerable to potentially fatal
illnesses, whether that is flu, cancer, hepatitis, pneumonia or now
Covid-19.
Noted journalist and political activist Abu-Jamal, now 66 years old and
entering his 40th year in prison, is serving a sentence of life in
prison without possibility of parole following his 1982 conviction of
murder of a white police officer.
As I have written in my book on his case, Killing Time, his conviction
followed a trial that featured coached and lying prosecution witnesses
(including police officers), prosecutorial misconduct, withheld
exculpatory evidence, racial bias in jury selection and a racist
pro-prosecution judge overheard saying at the start of the trial that he
would “help fry the nigger.” His appeal process was just as badly
corrupted. Significantly, it was fatally tainted by the refusal of a
former Philadelphia DA, Ron Castille, who during his tenure oversaw the
legal effort to defeat Mumia’s appeals, to recuse himself later when, as
a state supreme court justice he ruled on those same appeals he had
overseen.
The entire legal process in Abu-Jamal’s case has been a grotesque
atrocity and an epic scandal.
Already suffering from cirrhosis of the liver because, like virtually
all prisoners in American jails, Mumia was, until a federal court
ordered it, denied timely access to medication known to be 95% effective
in treating the Hepatitis C virus endemic in US prisons. This was done
by prison officials who were well aware that the disease, if left
untreated, usually leads predictably to cirrhosis, then to liver cancer
and eventually to death. In Mumia’s case, legal challenges by state
attorneys for the prison system intentionally delayed that court order
until he his disease had already advanced to cirrhosis of his liver.
Now Mumia has predictably caught Covid-19. I say predictably again
because US prisons, overcrowded and impossible to maintain safe
separation in, are known to be breeding grounds for epidemic disease,
and yet have not been declared priority locations for early access to
the vaccines that protect against the spread of this deadly virus that
has already killed half a million Americans.
This denial of vaccination to a captive population of 2.3 million people
is nothing short of a crime against humanity. It is a crime made all the
more outrageous because, thanks to the excessive sentences so common in
this vindictive, racist, classist and deliberately cruel society, many
US prison inmates are old. The Bureau of Prisons reports that 20% of its
prisoners, for example, are over 50. State prisons may be even worse,
with many of them routinely sentencing felons to as much as 40 years,
or, in case of rapes and murders, life without parole. Compare that to
most civilized nations which limit sentences to 10-12 years even for the
most serious of crimes.
Given the current pandemic medical crisis facing the US and the world,
the US and all 50 states should immediately order the release of all
older prisoners over the age of 50 unless a solid case can be made in
individual instances that some older prisoner poses a grave risk of
committing a violent act if released.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is not such a prisoner, having been a non-violent model
prisoner for his entire 39 years of incarceration.
Free Mumia and all older inmates in Pennsylvania’s prisons immediately!
Dave Lindorff is author of “Killing Time: An Investigation into the
Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal” (Common Courage Press, 2003)
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--
Charles Bukowski “For those who believe in God, most of the big
questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the
God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to
new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a
command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the
teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here
to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds
and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.” ―
Charles Bukowski