[Ppnews] Mumia Abu-Jamal faces new execution threat - SF Event Nov 8

[Political Prisoner News]

Mumia Abu-Jamal faces new execution threat -- SF Event Nov. 8

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/11/05/18627908.php

by Jeff Mackler
Thursday Nov 5th, 2009 12:03 PM
Pennsylvania prosecutors, twice rejected in their efforts to impose 
the death penalty on Mumia (in 2001 and 2008), may have found new 
support in the U.S. Supreme Court.

SF EVENT FOR MUMIA, KEVIN COOPER, AND TROY DAVIS -- Sunday, NOVEMBER 
8TH AT 2PM: Centro Del Pueblo, 474 Valencia Street (between 15th and 
16th Streets) San Francisco (read more at bottom of article)

After almost 28 years on Pennsylvania's death row and innumerable 
battles in the U.S. criminal injustice system, innocent political 
prisoner, journalist and world renowned "Voice of the Voiceless" 
Mumia Abu-Jamal lost his final appeal on April 6, 2009. Ignoring it's 
own precedents and those of the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals 
below it, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to affirm what had been the 
"law of the land" for decades, that the systematic and racist 
exclusion of Blacks from juries voids all guilty verdicts and 
mandates a new trial.

In Mumia's 1982 trial presided over by the notorious "hanging judge" 
Albert Sabo, the prosecutor Joseph McGill used 10 or perhaps 11 of 
his 15 peremptory strikes against Black jurors. But as with virtually 
all court decisions over the past decades in Mumia's case, the "Mumia 
Exception," the contorted interpretation of the "law" to reach a 
predetermined result, was once again applied, with the high court 
refusing to review the twisted logic of its subordinate bodies 
thereby allowing Mumia's frame-up murder conviction to stand.

But what has caught the attention of both legal observers and human 
rights activists even more is the fact that the same court, while 
refusing to hear Mumia's appeal, chose to delay a ruling on a cross 
appeal filed by the State of Pennsylvania that seeks Mumia's 
execution. Pennsylvania prosecutors, twice rejected in their efforts 
to impose the death penalty on Mumia (in 2001 and 2008), may have 
found new support in the U.S. Supreme Court.

It appears that the court's delay in ruling on the validity of 
Mumia's original execution sentence was due to its decision to grant 
oral arguments in the Ohio case of Smith v. Spisak, a case that might 
re-write or reinterpret the nation's laws to make it easier to obtain 
jury verdicts calling for execution. The Court heard Ohio 
prosecutor's arguments for Spisak's execution on October 13, 2009. A 
ruling is expected in the year ahead.

Frank Spisak, a neo-Nazis who wore a Hitler mustache to his trial, 
denounced Jews, and Blacks and confessed in court to three hate crime 
murders in Ohio, saw his jury-imposed death sentence reversed in the 
federal courts when his attorney's successfully invoked a 1988 
Supreme Court decision in the famous Mills v. Maryland case. Mills 
requires that in order to find mitigating circumstances sufficient to 
impose a sentence of life imprisonment without parole, as opposed to 
the death penalty, the jury's majority decision (as opposed to 
unanimous decision) on each mitigating circumstance is sufficient. In 
both Spisak and Mumia's case the presiding trial court judge violated 
Mills and in essence instructed the juries that unanimity, not a 
majority vote on each mitigating circumstance was required. In both 
cases the prosecution's appeal was rejected and Mills was upheld, 
thus staying the imposed death sentences and ordering a new trial or 
sentencing hearing with the proper jury instructions. In both cases 
the prosecution, seeking to avoid a new trial in any form, appealed 
to the U.S. Supreme Court demanding execution.

An April 7, 2009 article in the Legal Intelligencer, the oldest law 
journal in the country, had this to say about the Supreme Court's 
decision to delay a ruling on Pennsylvania's request to re-impose the 
death penalty on Mumia.

"In both cases, [Spisak and Abu-Jamal] the federal courts' decisions 
to overturn the death sentences hinged on Mills v. Maryland -- a 1988 
U.S. Supreme Court decision that governs how juries should deliberate 
during the penalty phase of a capital trial.

"The Mills ruling struck down a Maryland statute that said juries in 
capital cases must be unanimous on any aggravating or mitigating 
factor. [Emphasis added].

"The justices declared that unanimity was properly required for any 
aggravating factor, but that mitigating factors -- those that weigh 
against imposing a death sentence -- must be handled more liberally, 
with each juror free to find on his or her own."

The effect of Mills was to make it harder for prosecutors to obtain 
death sentences in capital cases. The Intelligencer concludes, "The 
question now before the courts is whether Mills requires that death 
sentences in other states be overturned if the juries in those states 
are misled by faulty instructions or sufficiently vague verdict forms 
to believe that mitigating factors require unanimity." [Emphasis added].

I emphasize the words "other states" because prior to this unexpected 
turn of events the legal community appeared to agree that Mills 
applied to all states. That is, if a jury was orally mis-instructed 
and/or received faulty or unclear verdict forms that implied it 
needed to be unanimous with regard to mitigating circumstances 
sufficient to not impose the death penalty, the death penalty was set 
aside and a new sentencing hearing was ordered.

This is what happened in Mumia's case when Federal District Court 
Judge William H. Yohn in 2001 employed Mills to set aside the jury's 
death penalty decision. Yohn gave the State of Pennsylvania 180 days 
to decide whether or not to retry Mumia at a new sentencing hearing 
where new evidence of innocence can be presented by Mumia, but where 
the jury can only decide between execution and life in prison without 
parole. At this hearing, the jury cannot make a decision regarding 
guilt. Since then, Pennsylvania officials have effectively stayed 
Yohn's order by appealing to the higher federal courts.

In deciding to hear Ohio prosecutors' arguments in the Spisak case 
with regard to Mills the Supreme Court has implied that one of the 
key issues they will consider centers on the interpretation of the 
concept of federalism, that is, that the exercise of power in the 
U.S. is shared in some measure between the federal government and the 
states. The political pendulum has swung back and forth on this 
issue. In past decades, the "states' rights" interpretation was 
employed to justify racist state laws that denied Blacks access to 
public institutions and facilities. With the rise of the Civil Rights 
movement federal power was used to compel the elimination of the same 
racist laws. Justice has been far from blind in racist America. It is 
applied to the advantage of the working class and the oppressed only 
to the extent that the relationship of forces, that is, the struggles 
of the masses, demand it.

Since Mills was decided in the State of Maryland, the would-be Ohio 
and Pennsylvania executioners argue that based on the laws of their 
states, Mills cannot be automatically applied to the situation in 
Ohio where a different set of jury instructions and therefore jury 
deliberations were involved. Indeed, Ohio prosecutors argued before 
the Supreme Court on October 13 that Ohio and Pennsylvania were the 
exception and not the rule and that the norm in other states was to 
essentially reject a strict interpretation of Mills in favor of 
various state guidelines regarding jury instructions.

Should this "states' rights" argument be accepted and Mills be 
effectively constricted, the Supreme Court could then uphold Spisak's 
death sentence and, with a mere citation to Spisak and the new 
interpretation of Mills, uphold the Pennsylvania's appeal seeking 
Mumia's execution.

While most legal observers previously considered a Supreme Court 
Mills re-interpretation a virtual impossibility, the stage has now 
been set for such an outcome. The state's longstanding effort o 
execute Mumia has been given new legal avenues for success with the 
top court's decision to re-consider the Spisak case.

What the Supreme Court will do, however, is far from clear. It will 
also consider Spisak's new attorney's argument that his jury trial 
lawyers were incompetent in essentially arguing during their trial 
summation that Spisak was essentially an extreme and horrific nut 
case who barely understood what he was doing. Should the Supreme 
Court chose to ignore or side-step Pennsylvania's Mills arguments and 
rule only on the issue of ineffective assistance of counsel, the 
chances of Mumia's execution recede considerably. The court could 
also chose to remand the case back to the lower courts to reconsider 
their previous Mills interpretation in light of the Supreme Court's 
possible new instructions on this issue. Second guessing the courts 
in Mumia's 28-year legal sojourn has stumped virtually the entire 
legal community, or at least those who believe that the laws of the 
land should be implemented without prejudice to the individual 
concerned. In virtually every instance, however, this has not been 
the case; an unending series of legal atrocities have been 
perpetrated against Mumia that expose the criminal "justice" system 
for the fraud it is in racist and classist America.

Mumia is far from out of danger, especially when his very life, in 
legal terms, presently hinges on the whims of the Supreme Court, the 
institution that has already denied his request for a hearing before 
them on another issue, the systematic and racist exclusion of Black 
jurors. Such exclusion is explicitly prohibited in the historic 1986 
Supreme Court ruling in the case of Batson v. Kentucky. But the court 
once again ignored its own rulings and even decisions that 
strengthened Batson claims to hasten Mumia's demise. In every sense 
Mumia's life is on the line as never before. Pennsylvania's Governor 
Ed Rendell is pledged to sign what could be the third and final 
warrant for Mumia's execution, a warrant that would likely order that 
his life be taken by lethal injection.

Mumia's supporters around the world and Mumia himself have long known 
that the battle for his life and freedom would be qualitatively more 
advanced by the construction of a powerful mass movement in the 
streets that won the hearts and minds of millions and more than 
reliance on a court system permeated by its very nature with class 
and race bias.

The state power's march for Mumia's execution has not been limited to 
the courts. The 2007 "Murdered by Mumia" book co-authored by Maureen 
Faulkner, the wife of police officer Daniel Faulkner, who Mumia was 
falsely convicted of murdering, and rightwing talk radio host, 
Michael Smerconish, presents an outrageous account of Faulkner's 
murder. While having little or no basis in the facts of the case the 
book has nevertheless been used to advance the Fraternal Order of 
Police's longstanding campaign to execute the "cop killer."

More recently, filmmaker Tigre Hill has produced a work scheduled for 
a debut in Philadelphia in December and later international 
distribution entitled, "The Barrel of a Gun," wherein ex-Black 
Panther leader Bobby Seal's rhetoric about "offing the pig," is 
coupled with rightwinger David Horowitz's assertions that Mumia was 
merely carrying out Panther policy. The three-minute preview or 
trailer to "The Barrel of a Gun" theorizes, without a shred of 
evidence, that Mumia and his brother Billy Cook, literally planned 
the Faulkner murder, ambush style.

Those unfamiliar with Mumia's background and the facts of the case 
could only conclude that Mumia was guilty without question. That 
Mumia had left the disintegrating Panthers more than a decade before 
his frame-up trial, that he was an award-winning journalist and 
president of the Association of Black Journalists, a leading 
reporter/critic of the Philadelphia Police Department, dozens of 
whose officers were indicted and convicted on Justice Department 
charges of involvement in drug-running, prostitution, planting and 
falsification evidence and intimidation of witnesses, was not mentioned.

Today, having exhausted most all legal remedies, Mumia's supporters 
are engaged in an important campaign to demand a Justice Department 
civil rights investigation into charges presented by his supporters 
that demonstrate illegal collusion between Pennsylvania prosecutors 
and the judiciary. A delegation of Mumia's defenders across the 
country has planned a November 12 visit to Washington, D.C. where a 
meeting with Attorney General Eric Holder will be sought for this 
purpose. Thousands of petitions demanding Mumia's freedom obtained 
across the world will also be presented Holder and to officials of 
the U.S. Supreme Court.

Similarly, a mass antiwar protest in Washington, D.C.'s Malcolm X 
Park is set for Saturday, November 7. In addition to the immediate 
withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the Middle East the sponsoring 
Black is Back Coalition is demanding Mumia's freedom.

In the San Francisco Bay Area the Mobilization to Free Mumia 
Abu-Jamal is sponsoring a tour with Amnesty International's Death 
Penalty Abolition Campaign leader Laura Moye. Entitled "Innocent but 
Facing Execution," the tour will focus on the cases of Mumia, Troy 
Davis and Kevin Cooper, three innocent frame-up victims of America's 
racist criminal "justice" system.

For information in Philadelphia call: 215-476-8812. In San Francisco: 
510-268-9429.

BAY AREA EVENTS FOR MUMIA:

Sunday, NOVEMBER 8TH AT 2PM: Centro Del Pueblo, 474 Valencia Street 
(between 15th and 16th Streets) San Francisco

Admission: $5.00 - $20 sliding scale. No one turned away for lack of funds.

Hear:

Laura Moye, Director, Amnesty International's Death Penalty Abolition 
Campaign; actively
working for several years with Troy Davis and his family in Georgia

Hans Bennett, Founder, Journalists for Mumia Abu-Jamal; Editor, Free 
Mumia News; Author,
The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal: Innocent Man on Death Row

Rebecca Doran, leading activist in Kevin Cooper's defense
Sunday, November 8, 2009 2:00 pm

Sponsor: Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, 510-268-9429 
freemumia.org [Note: If you can't attend send your check payable to: 
"Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal," P.O. Box 10328, Oakland, CA 94610.]

[Also in Palo Alto, Fri., Nov. 6, 7:30 pm, Fellowship Hall, First 
Baptist Church, 305 N. California
Ave, 650-326-8837, peaceandjustice.org] labor donated
<http://freemumia.com>http://freemumia.com




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
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