[Ppnews] J Patrick O'Connor reviews Mumia's new book

[Political Prisoner News]

<http://www.phillyimc.org/en/speaking-truth-power-review-jailhouse-lawyers-prisoners-defending-prisoners-v-usa>http://www.phillyimc.org/en/speaking-truth-power-review-jailhouse-lawyers-prisoners-defending-prisoners-v-usa


Speaking Truth to Power


by <http://www.crimemagazine.com/poconnor.htm>J. Patrick O'Connor

CrimeMagazine.com, April 5, 2009

  Mumia Abu-Jamal's 27 years on Death Row for a 
murder he did not commit would have turned almost 
anyone else into an embittered, defeated man. 
Instead, he has remained what he always was, "the 
voice of the voiceless," as he demonstrates yet 
again in his most recent book, 
<http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100448090>Jailhouse 
Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A. (City Lights Books, 2009.)

Through hundreds of essays, radio commentaries 
and now six well-written, meticulously researched 
books, he has defied the walls that encase him to 
speak out against oppression. His voice his heard 
weekly throughout the United States on Pacifica 
Radio and his writings are read and admired 
throughout much of the world. From the bowels of 
Death Row, where 3,600 others languish in the 
United States, Abu-Jamal presses on for justice, 
day after day, year after year.

Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners 
v. the U.S.A. opens a tightly shut door into the 
operations of the U.S. penal system by 
chronicling the exploits of dozens of jailhouse 
lawyers – both men and women – who have fought 
the injustices the courts and the prisons have 
dealt them and their fellow prisoners. Their 
accomplishments, against all odds, have been 
incredible. Their story is a story never before told.

For the vast majority of the 2.3 million 
prisoners in the United States and for Abu-Jamal 
himself, the overriding, inescapable reality 
about the U.S. justice system is that the law is only what a judge says it is.

As Abu-Jamal has found out through his long and 
tortuous appeal process, "What published opinions 
claim, in all their legal niceties, matters 
little." Although he does not reference his own 
case in this or any other book he has written, 
valid constitutional legal claims that have won 
others new trials have done nothing for him. It 
did not matter to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, 
a federal district court, or a U.S. court of 
appeals that the prosecutor at his 1982 violated 
his constitutional right to a fair trial by using 
peremptory challenges to purge 10 otherwise 
qualified blacks from sitting on his jury. It 
didn't matter even though the U.S. Supreme Court 
ruled in Batson in 1986 that racial 
discrimination in jury selection was grounds for 
a new trial. (Abu-Jamal currently has a request 
for a Writ of Certiorari before the U.S. Supreme 
Court on his Batson claim, a request that marks 
his final legal recourse. If Cert is denied, he 
will remain in prison for life barring clemency 
by a future governor of Pennsylvania.)

Abu-Jamal himself is a jailhouse lawyer, who 
wryly notes that it is "the bane" of the vast 
majority of jailhouse lawyers "to be able to help 
everybody but themselves." He references a 
Pennsylvania case where he and another jailhouse 
lawyer won a new trial for an inmate sentenced to 
death. Given this new chance, the inmate copped a 
plea and had his sentence reduced to life, a 
reduction that got him off Death Row into the general prison population.

Becoming a jailhouse lawyer has long been met 
with retaliation by prison guards and prison 
administrators. Even to this day, jailhouse 
lawyers are the most discriminated against and 
punished by prison authorities. Abu-Jamal cites a 
1991 nationwide study led by scholar Mark S. Hamm 
entitled "The Myth of Humane Imprisonment" that 
"found that no segment of the modern prison 
population – not blacks nor gays nor AIDS 
patients nor gang members – outweighed jailhouse 
lawyers when it came to prisoners who were 
targeted by the prison administration for punishment."

The report noted that guards and administrators 
"had a standard practice of singling out 
jailhouse lawyers for discipline and retaliation 
for challenging the status quo." Abu-Jamal finds 
it telling "that those who, for the most part, 
are most apt to use pen and paper – rather than, 
say, a 'lock in a sock' – to address and resolve 
grievances, are the most targeted of all prison 
populations." To this day, in every "hole" in 
every prison, Abu-Jamal writes, "you will find 
some jailhouse lawyers who are there on 
pretextual – and frequently false – disciplinary 
reports," even though since 1969 the U.S. Supreme 
Court ruled it was unconstitutional to discipline 
prisoners for representing themselves or other prisoners.

In that case, Johnson v. Avery, the high court 
rejected Tennessee's punishment against an inmate 
for assisting a fellow prisoner with his legal work.

No nation in the world incarcerates as many of 
its citizens as does the United States. Right now 
one in every 99 people in the country is behind 
bars. More staggering is that one in every nine 
black men between the ages of 20 and 34 is in 
prison. Because blacks are so overrepresented in 
U.S. prisons, Abu-Jamal sees the prison system as 
nothing more than a modern day extension of the 
Slave Codes that prevailed before the Civil War 
and the Black Codes that took their place in the 
South right after it. For the newly emancipated 
blacks living below the Mason-Dixon Line, the 
Black Codes criminalized various behaviors for 
which only blacks could be "duly convicted." 
Black Codes made crimes of vagrancy, breach of 
job contracts, absence from work, the possession 
of firearms, and insulting gestures or acts.

President Clinton, a former constitutional law 
professor, signed into law in 1996 two draconian 
measures that undermined what little recourse 
prisoners have to post-conviction justice. One 
was the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death 
Penalty Act that made it far more onerous and 
difficult for prisoners to file wrongful 
convictions claims in Federal Courts; the other 
was the Prison Litigation Reform Act which 
limited the number of suits prisoners could file 
in federal courts and flat out barred suits 
against the state for mental or emotional injury. 
No longer could a prisoner seek redress or 
compensation for psychological damages inflicted 
by sociopathic guards who make sport of demeaning 
prisoners. Ironically, the ringleader of the Abu 
Ghraib guards in Iraq was a former guard at 
SCI-Greene in Pennsylvania where Abu-Jamal is 
incarcerated. "Long before U.S. Army Reserve 
Corporal Charles Graner brought pain, 
humiliation, and torture to Iraqi people detailed 
in Abu-Ghraib outside Bagdad, he was giving the 
blues to prisoners in Pennsylvania, where he was 
known as a brutal, sadistic, racist guard," Abu-Jamal writes.

Under the Prison Litigation Reform Act, the acts 
of mental torture committed at Abu Ghraib, if 
committed in U.S. prisons, would have no standing.

"Is it surprising," Abu-Jamal asks, "that a 
nation that began its existence with Slave Codes, 
then continued for a century with an equally 
repressive set of Black Codes, would institute, 
by hook or crook, Prisoner Codes?"

Despite the Prison Litigation Reform Act, 
Abu-Jamal estimates there are tens of thousands 
jailhouse lawyers practicing pro se for 
themselves and their fellow inmates. They do this 
out of need, particularly when it comes to 
challenging unfair prison conditions, and because 
the great majority of prisoners are not entitled 
to court-appointed counsel post-conviction. In 
the first instance, real lawyers are banned from 
representing inmates in suits against prisons and 
prison authorities in every state but Arizona. In 
the second instance, court-appointed attorneys – 
for a myriad of reason, but mostly relating to 
money – have failed miserably in representing the 
legal and constitutional rights of indigent 
defendants at their original trials.

As Clarence Darrow stated over a hundred years 
ago, "
the courts are not instruments of justice. 
When your case gets into court it will make 
little difference whether you are guilty or 
innocent, but it's better if you have a smart 
lawyer. And you cannot have a smart lawyer unless 
you have money. First and last it's a question of 
money
We have no system for doing justice, not the slightest in the world."

Darrow said that if the courts were organized to 
promote justice "the people would elect somebody 
to defend all these criminals, somebody as smart 
as the prosecutor – and give him as many 
detectives and as many assistants to help, and 
pay as much money to defend you as to prosecute you."

Because the justice system in the United States 
has become so politicized around "law and order" 
and has erected an entire industry to house those 
convicted, the United States – which represents 5 
percent of the world's population – now 
incarcerates 25 percent of the world's prison 
population. That would go a long way in 
explaining why there are tens of thousands of 
jailhouse lawyers working pro se for themselves 
and other inmates and why Abu-Jamal's latest book is such an important one.

--J. Patrick O’Connor is the editor of Crime 
Magazine 
(<http://www.crimemagazine.com/>www.crimemagazine.com) 
and the author of 'The Framing of Mumia 
Abu-Jamal', published by Lawrence Hill Books in 2008.



Solidarity events 
<http://freemumia.com/april242009.html>will be 
held in the US around April 24, to mark Mumia's 
birthday and the release of Jailhouse Lawyers. 
Read more about events in: 
<http://phillyimc.org/en/event-marking-mumia-abu-jamals-new-book-be-held-historic-church-advocate>Philadelphia, 
<http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2009/03/104046.html>NYC, 
<http://abu-jamal-news.com/article?name=jlboak>Oakland, 
<http://boston.indymedia.org/newswire/display/207211/index.php>Boston, 
<http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2009/03/389048.shtml>Portland, 
<http://dc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/145851/index.php>Washington, 
DC, and 
<http://baltimore.indymedia.org/newswire/display/18645/index.php>Baltimore.

**Read reviews by: 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/washington03202009.html>Linn 
Washington, Jr. and <http://www.zmag.org/zbooks/review/135>Kiilu Nyasha

**Read the 
<http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/03/03/18574858.php>foreword 
by former political prisoner Angela Y. Davis and 
an 
<http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/20677>interview 
with Mumia about his new book.** Also read the 
<http://phillyimc.org/en/mumia-abu-jamal-faces-us-supreme-court-supporters-mobilize-globally>previous 
PhillyIMC feature.



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