I suppose that I should consider the positives in this story. I should see the
glass as half full, rather than as half empty. But what this case reminds me,
is that prosecutors almost invariably align themselves with the police. Krasner
was supposed to be a wonderful, left wing person, whose election was a strike
for the forces of fairness and truth. And what did he do? Immediately, he acted
to prevent Munia's appeal. And now that he's changed that, he's still ensured
that only a tiny number of cases will be affected. We have a New York City
mayor whose son is bi-racial, who, when first elected, publicly explained the
danger that the police pose to all black youths. The NYPD punished him for that
politically and as a result, he has withdrawn to a rather reactionary public
view regarding how the police interact with the public.
It's no wonder that the Democratic Party easily accepted and promoted the FBI's
assertion that Russian trolls promoted Black Lives Matter content on Facebook
and that such content was put there by a foreign country to promote discord in
the US. That "discord in the US", according to the national security
establishment, couldn't possibly originate from structural racism so the
Russians must have injected it.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Sunday, April 21, 2019 9:31 AM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Mumia Abu-Jamal victory: Philadelphia DA withdraws
his appeal
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
Related posts
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Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! All out Feb. 26 and March 27!
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“ What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
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― Christopher Hitchens,