Philadelphia Tribune - December 9, 2024 Abu-Jamal awaits justice – since 1981 By Linn Washington Jr Since Dec. 9, 1981 -- over 8,000 days from today’s date -- prison cells have caged one of America ’s most prolific and internationally respected journalists: Mumia Abu-Jamal. To some, the special hell of death row is appropriate justice for Abu-Jamal, convicted of fatally shooting Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner during the pre-dawn hours on 12/9/81 . To others, the documented misconduct by police, prosecutors, and judges in Abu-Jamal’s case from his curbside arrest through numerous appellate court reviews constitutes injustice in its most gross form. “Everything that is wrong with our legal system and death penalty is evident in this case,” says San Francisco lawyer Robert R. Bryan, the veteran litigator who recently accepted Abu-Jamal as his client. “I’ve never seen a case with so many problems in 30 years of death penalty litigation,” Bryan said during an interview last week. Bryan is finalizing a new round of appeals for Abu-Jamal in Pennsylvania and federal courts. Interestingly, even among many of those convinced of Abu-Jamal’s guilt, there is a strong belief that he did not receive a fair trial in the courtroom proceeding that produced his first-degree murder conviction 21 years ago. This failure to follow centuries-old fundamental law guaranteeing fairness in all trials is a clear contradiction of a ruling that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued on 1/5/59 in a Philadelphia murder case…a ruling issued months before Abu-Jamal’s fourth birthday. That 1959 ruling declared that every defendant is “entitled to all the safeguards of a fair trial as announced in the Constitution and the law of the land…” Procedures ensuring a fair trail must be followed, that 1959 ruling emphasized, even if “evidence piles as high as Mt. Everest…the district attorney conscientiously believes the defendant to be guilty as Cain …[and]…no matter what certainty the Judge views the culpability of the accused…” The rulings in the Abu-Jamal case by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court have perverted previous rulings in murder cases guaranteeing fair trials issued by this court, according to a meticulously researched report issued by the respected Amnesty International in February 2024. The “proceedings used to convict and sentence Mumia Abu-Jamal to death were in violation of minimum international standards that govern fair trial procedures and the use of the death penalty,” stated the AI report that called for granting Abu-Jamal a “new trial” -- a corrective measure thus far rejected by state and federal courts. “The Pennsylvania Supreme Court appears to have ignored its own previous” rulings in denying Abu-Jamal’s appeals, the AI report noted. The refusal of the AI report to recognize Abu-Jamal as a “political prisoner” -- a person imprisoned to quash their political activities -- contradicts conservative claims that it is biased. Abu-Jamal supporters cite his stature as a political prisoner as a key pillar in their protests. In October 2024, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued another ruling, dismissing disturbing evidence of racist bias by the trial judge in Abu-Jamal’s case, Albert Sabo. This ruling brushed aside an affidavit from a white court stenographer who alleged she and her boss -- a Philadelphia judge -- overheard Sabo saying he was going to “help them fry the nigger” shortly before the start of Abu-Jamal’s trial. This recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling stated Sabo’s racist statement amounted to nothing more than another charge of Sabo’s pro-prosecution bias – fair-trial-corrupting antics that the state’s high court has previously rejected. “This ruling is absurd,” said attorney Bryan, who plans to re-appeal the ruling on Sabo’s racism. “Racism is a thread in this case from the point of arrest,” Bryan continued. “It is unique to have an admission of poison oozing out of a judge’s mouth. The rationale used by this court makes no sense.” Many court rulings in Abu-Jamal’s case make little legal sense. When the Pennsylvania Supreme Court first upheld Abu-Jamal’s conviction in 1989, that ruling found no impropriety in the prosecutor using Abu-Jamal’s teenage membership in the Black Panther Party to claim he harbored a desire to kill a cop for over a decade…despite Abu-Jamal having no criminal record. Four months after that 1989 ruling, the justice who wrote the ruling rejecting Abu-Jamal’s appeal harshly criticized his colleagues for allowing a prosecutor to use another murder defendant’s 9-year-old robbery conviction for impeachment purposes. Over a dozen weeks after this justice found no legal improprieties in using Abu-Jamal’s BPP membership for impeachment, he roared that using the robbery conviction was an “inherently prejudicial” error. One of the many ironies in the Abu-Jamal case is that the 1982 jury never considered much of the now-known evidence questioning guilt due to legally questionable actions by police, prosecutors, and Judge Sabo. That 1959 ruling noted that neither a judge nor prosecutors may “restrict the jury’s possible conclusions…” Another irony is that in this case of a journalist, fraught with injustice, little thorough investigative journalism has occurred from the media tasked with being society’s justice-defending ‘watchdog.’ “It’s very clear that Philadelphia ’s [mainstream] media takes the position that Mumia is a cop killer,” says media scholar Dr. Todd Burroughs. Philadelphia media, for example, ignored the Amnesty International report. Burroughs, who is authoring a journalist’s biography of Abu-Jamal, emphasizes that this case is important because America “keeps trying to deal with issues of social justice” without addressing blatant unjust incidents…like the Abu-Jamal case. Linn Washington Jr. is an award-winning writer who teaches journalism at Temple University .