https://socialistaction.org/2019/04/20/mumia-abu-jamal-victory-philadelphia-da-withdraws-his-appeal/
Mumia Abu-Jamal victory: Philadelphia DA withdraws his appeal
/ 21 hours ago
May 2019 Mumia 4:18:19 (Sam M.)
Demonstrators take to the street in Philadelphia on April 18 after a
rally and celebration that followed the announcement that the District
Attorney’s office was dropping its appeal of Judge Tucker’s decision.
(Photo: Sal Mastriano / Socialist Action)
By JEFF MACKLER
The sensational news on April 17 that Philadelphia District Attorney
Larry Krasner withdrew his appeal of Superior Court Judge Leon Tucker’s
granting of new appeal rights to Mumia Abu-Jamal represents a major
breakthrough in Mumia’s 37-year freedom struggle. Krasner’s decision
opens the door wide to re-building a broad and decisive movement in the
U.S. and internationally to win a demand that has reverberated across
the world, “Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!”
Krasner’s statement to the media is below. Despite its limitations in
not applying the core decision inherent in Judge Tucker’s ruling to the
myriad of other similarly situated victims of the criminal injustice
system, the simple fact that Mumia’s appeal rights have been reinstated
can only aid the fight for others in the future. Judge Tucker affirmed
and definitively reaffirmed—and Krasner was forced to agree—that
“judicial bias” and an “absence of impartiality” were central to key
decisions that denied Mumia his basic constitutional rights. These are
the precise arguments that our Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal in
Northern California and the broad national movement for Mumia’s freedom
have pressed forward since our formation nearly three decades ago.
Tucker’s sharp rebuttal to Krasner’s original rejection of his ruling, a
rebuttal that he was not legally obligated to undertake, shattered
Krasner’s argument in his original March 26 decision to appeal Tucker’s
ruling. Tucker demonstrated that former Philadelphia District Attorney
Ronald Castille, who subsequently became a Pennsylvania Supreme Court
judge and refused to recuse himself from adjudicating Mumia’s case, gave
the appearance of bias not only because of his prior role as District
Attorney but also because the “appearance of impartiality” must be present.
Castille’s pro-death penalty statements, his ties to the Fraternal Order
of Police (FOP), and his lobbying for speedy death penalties in capital
cases involving the murder of police officers, when Mumia was among his
chief targets, all combined to reveal his bias. Hence, Tucker ruled that
[Mumia’s] “appeal has established by a preponderance of the new evidence
that … there was an unconstitutional potential for bias.” Mumia’s
claims, he ruled, “should be reviewed in the interest of justice.”
Now that Tucker’s decision has been accepted by the DA’s office, Mumia’s
legal team, led by Judith Ritter, will prepare to review and re-open the
previously rejected appeals filed before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court
between 1995 and 2012. Ritter is Professor of Law and Director of the
Criminal Defense Clinic at Delaware Law School, Widener University, in
Wilmington, Del. The appeals are expected to be presented to this court
in a timely manner.
Among the constitutional violations that Ritter and Mumia’s associated
attorneys will likely argue, and Krasner as District Attorney will
oppose, include racial bias in jury to such an extent that it produced
an inherently biased jury and therefore an unfair trial (the Batson
claim); ineffective assistance of counsel; witness intimidation;
falsification of evidence, and exclusion of evidence of innocence.
Additional issues that become part of Mumia’s appeal include a
spuriously alleged Mumia hospital murder confession presented by two
police officers some three months after they allegedly heard it, phony
ballistics evidence, lying and disappeared witnesses, failure to conduct
gun power residue tests, cat-scan tests on the trajectory of the bullets
fired into Mumia’s body that demonstrated police lies on the murder
scene, and a mountain of other material pointing to Mumia’s innocence
that has previously been rejected for appeal consideration.
One startling and significant aspect of Mumia’s appeal will be the
racist bias in the conduct of Judge Albert “the hanging judge” Sabo, who
presided over both the 1982 trial plus the post-conviction review
hearings in 1995-1996. An award-winning court stenographer, Terri Maurer
Carter, testified that she heard Sabo, a member of the Fraternal Order
of Police, say in his court anteroom chambers prior to entering the
court to judge Mumia, “Yeah, and I’m going to help ’em fry the n—-r.”
The Pennsylvania chapter of the American Bar Association once observed,
“No one can get a fair trial in Sabo’s court.”
If Mumia wins just one of his arguments, he will have taken a major
stride toward a new trial wherein he can present the repressed evidence
of his innocence and expose the police and prosecution’s systematic
frame up.
Notwithstanding our utmost optimism for bringing Mumia home, we cannot
refrain from expressing our all abiding concern that the exigencies,
contortions, and inherent class and race bias of capitalism’s legal
system will inevitably be brought to bear. A truly deep and massive
movement in this case remains essential to expose the lie to Mumia’s
conviction and make the political and social price of his continued
frame-up incarceration by the powers that be too high to pay.
Krasner’s decision undoubtedly was influenced by our movement’s
collective actions repudiating his adverse initial ruling, including his
dis-invitation from a speaking engagement at Yale University Law School,
where he hoped to pose as a progressive defender of human rights. No
doubt Krasner has been subjected to immense pressure from the FOP and
other such organizations and political figures that have long sought
Mumia’s execution. His decision has the effect of eliminating years of
legal challenges through the various court bodies just to secure the
right that Judge Tucker initially granted.
Judge Tucker’s decision and Krasner’s appeal withdrawal represent an
historic win for Mumia that will redound across the globe. As always,
any legal victory in the racist criminal justice system is never secure
unless the full weight of a fighting massive, united, and dedicated
social struggle takes the lead in winning new and ever broadening forces.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is an innocent, framed political prisoner, whose freedom
struggle has taught a new generation that the U.S. presides over a
racist, classist mass incarceration, school to prison scenario social
system that imprisons the largest number and percentage of its
population than any other nation on earth. A victory for Mumia—that is,
winning his freedom and bringing him home—will represent a victory for
all humanity.
Statement of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, withdrawing
his appeal in Mumia Abu-Jamal case
PHILADELPHIA (April 17, 2019) — Today the Philadelphia District
Attorney’s Office withdrew its recent appeal of an opinion granting a
re-hearing of some previously decided issues in the case of Mumia
Abu-Jamal. We withdrew the appeal because the opinion we appealed has
been modified consistent with our primary concern — that ruling’s effect
on many other cases.
By way of background, Mumia Abu-Jamal was convicted of the murder of a
young police officer, Daniel Faulkner, that occurred on December 9,
1981. Even after Maureen Faulkner, the wife of the victim, chose not to
continue seeking the death penalty several years ago in hopes of
closure, the case has evoked polarizing rhetoric and continues to assume
a symbolic importance for many that is distinct from the factual and
often technical legal issues involved in the case.
The technical issue at stake here is simply whether or not some decided
issues need to be re-heard by a Pennsylvania appellate court due to one
former judge’s having worn two hats — the hat of an apparently impartial
appellate judge deciding Abu-Jamal’s case after he earlier wore the hat
of a chief prosecutor in the same case. Although the issue is technical,
it is also an important cautionary tale on the systemic problems that
flow from a judge’s failing to recuse where there is an appearance of bias.
Justice Castille did not recuse himself before deciding appeals in the
Abu-Jamal case and several others, including the Williams case. In the
Williams case, the United States Supreme Court decided that Castille
should have recused himself because of the role he took as a chief
prosecutor in Mr. Williams’s matter. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered that
Mr. Williams’s appeal be re-heard by the Pennsylvania appeals judges,
without the taint of Castille’s participation.
A similar question of Castille’s role exists in the Abu-Jamal case. In
order to help resolve it, our Office exhaustively searched hundreds of
file boxes in relation to the Mumia Abu-Jamal matter, including six
previously undisclosed boxes (now turned over to the defense, as
required by law). While we did not find any document establishing the
same level of involvement by Castille in the Abu-Jamal case as in the
Williams case, we did find (and turned over) a June, 1990 letter from
then-District Attorney Castille to then-Governor Robert Casey, urging
that the Governor issue death warrants, especially in cases involving
people who have killed police, in order to “send a clear and dramatic
message to all police killers that the death penalty actually means
something.” Although the letter does not mention Mr. Abu-Jamal or his
case by name, at the time Justice Castille wrote to Governor Casey,
there were only three cases involving people who had been convicted of
killing police that were pending. One was Mr. Abu-Jamal’s.
In the end, the trial-level judge considering this issue wrote an
opinion that agreed with us that these indications of strong feelings on
the part of Justice Castille did not rise to the level of the direct and
active involvement Justice Castille took in the Williams case but went
further, deciding there should be a re-hearing of Abu-Jamal’s decided
issues anyway, based on more general principles of judges needing to
recuse to avoid the appearance of bias.
We appealed, making it extremely clear in our court papers that our
primary concern was with the overly broad language of the opinion and
its potentially devastating effect on hundreds of long settled cases,
decades after their cases were resolved, including its hurtful effect on
victims and survivors. We highlighted our concern with the overly broad
language of that opinion in five specific respects and specifically
noted that we would re-consider appealing if the trial-level court
issued another decision addressing the concerns we raised.
Although the judge was not required to do so, on March 27 he issued
another decision that addressed the concerns we raised. The judge made
clear that his opinion should not be read to mean that several hundreds
of cases were disturbed — -it should be applied only to people convicted
of killing police officers whose cases were in the District Attorney’s
Office while Castille was District Attorney (the category of cases
Castille highlighted in his June 1990 letter to Casey). Given that the
trial-level court has now addressed the concerns that led us to appeal
in the first place, we have withdrawn the appeal.
Our decision to withdraw the appeal does not mean Mr. Abu-Jamal will be
freed or get a new trial. It means that he will have the appeals that
Justice Castille participated in deciding reconsidered by a new group of
appellate court judges, untainted by former Chief Justice Castille
participating in their decision. The trial-level judge has ordered the
Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office and the defense to re-submit the
legal briefs done in the past (which were written under prior
administrations), effectively setting the clock back to where it was in
the past.
The result will be that long-settled convictions in other cases will not
be disturbed and that decisions made by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court
on the legal issues raised decades ago in the Abu-Jamal matter will no
longer be tainted by the appearance of bias.
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April 20, 2019 in Black Liberation, Prisons. Tags: Mumia Abu-Jamal
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