1
1
1
::::::::
Please go HERE for updates throughout the day.
As reported this morning by CNN, Reuters, AP, and others, the US Supreme Court announced today that they have rejected death-row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal's appeal for a new guilt phase trial (in official legal terms, they rejected his petition for a "writ of certiorari"). Abu-Jamal's appeal was based primarily on the US Supreme Court's 1986 "Batson v Kentucky" ruling which stated that a defendant deserves a new trial if it can be shown that the prosecutor used peremptory strikes to remove otherwise qualified jurors simply because of their race. At Abu-Jamal's 1982 trial, prosecutor Joseph McGill used 10 or 11 of his 15 strikes to remove otherwise acceptable black jurors.
The US Supreme Court has not yet decided whether it will further consider the Philadelphia DA's appeal of the 2001/2008 rulings of two lower courts, which ruled that Abu-Jamal deserves a new sentencing hearing if the death penalty is to be re-instated. Therefore, if the US Supreme Court rules in favor of the DA, Abu-Jamal can then be executed WITHOUT a new sentencing hearing!
THIS ARTICLE WILL BE UPDATED THROUGHOUT THE DAY, SO PLEASE CHECK BACK FOR THE LATEST
Dave Lindorff, author of the 2003 book Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal responded this morning to the ruling by telling me (direct quote below):
Once again, a court, in this case the highest court in the land, the US Supreme Court, has created what Philadelphia journalist and legal expert Linn Washington has dubbed "The Mumia Exception"--that is to say a precedent that applies only to one person: Mumia Abu-Jamal. The decision in this case, which involved the high court's refusal to consider and reverse last year's Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruling rejecting Abu-Jamal's claim that his jury was unconstitutionally purged of qualified black jurors by the prosecution's use of peremptory challenges to remove 10 or 11 blacks from the panel, was particularly offensive since it was Justice Samuel Alito, at the time a member of the Third Circuit Court, who wrote an opinion stating that if even one potential juror is removed from a panel for reasons of race or religion, that trial's verdict is fatally flawed and must be overturned. Alito's opinion in that case was soundly reasoned and important, but apparently now, in his exalted position as Supreme Court Justice, Alito thinks the precedent needn't apply to Abu-Jamal.
By simply not hearing Abu-Jamal's case, the Supreme Court, which itself has also already established the precedent that the tainting of a jury by even one racially motivated removal of a juror, has left intact its precedent on this issue, while at the same time leaving Abu-Jamal outside its protection. This is a shameful act of political cowardice on the part of all 9 justices and a betrayal of the fundamental promise of "equal justice under the law."
It is almost a certainty that the Third Circuit will revisit this issue on another death penalty case, and that it will re-affirm the precedent, already in place in the Third Circuit, that any racial motive in purging a juror cannot be tolerated. Then we well be left with the Mumia Exception again, where laws are temporarily suspended to keep this one man on death row, or in jail all his life.
The media reports on the court's latest decision in this case have all gotten it wrong. The court was not ruling that there was "no bias" in his jury, which was composed of two blacks and 10 whites. What the court was refusing to do was hear his appeal of a 2-1 Third Circuit opinion that Abu-Jamal had not objected soon enough or with adequate evidence to what he claimed was a concerted effort by Prosecutor Joseph McGill to remove over 10 qualified potential black jurors from his jury.
In a stinging minority opinion, Appellate Judge Thomas Ambro had criticized his two fellow jurists, asking why, for this one petitioner, they were raising the bar for demonstrating evidence of race-based jury selection, insisting that Abu-Jamal should have protested the removal of black jurors at the time it happened, despite the fact that it was only five years later that such actions were even found to be unconstitutional. He also asked why his two colleagues were ignoring the precedents of both the Supreme Court and the Third Circuit. As Judge Ambro wrote in his dissent: "The Supreme Court has never announced a rule requiring a contemporaneous objection...and I see no reason for us to do so now." He also wrote, "The US Third Circuit Court's own history bears witness against the use of a contemporary objection rule, signalling that our Circuit does not have a federal contemporaneous objection rule---and I see no reason why we should not afford Abu-Jamal the courtesy of our precedents."
Judge Ambro's indictment of his two fellow judges now hangs over the reeking air of the Supreme Court Building in Washington, where placating the politically powerful police union and the right-wing death is seen to be more important than dispensing justice.
The Supreme Court did not rule on the appeal by the Philadelphia District Attorney of a federal district court's overturning of his death penalty. The High Court could still reverse that ruling, which would leave Abu-Jamal facing death with no more avenue of appeal. Alternatively, if the High Court were to leave standing the Third Circuit's unanimous decision supporting the district court's overturning of the death penalty, the DA could ask for a new trial on the penalty alone, in an effort to convince a new jury to reimpose a death sentence.
If the DA were not to seek a new penalty phase trial, Abu Jamal would face life in prison with no possibility of parole, and no more avenue of appeal of his sentence.
Philadelphia District Attorney Lynn Abraham, in a graphic illustration of the ugly politics that surround and continue to pollute this case, immediately grabbed the news of the Supreme Court's decision as an opportunity to trumpet her own bloodthirsty credentials as a government execution-monger. Calling Abu-Jamal "nothing short of an assassin," Abraham once again repeated a fundamental lie of the Abu-Jamal death squad--that he was somehow gunning for Officer Faulkner as a rabid cop-hating Black Power advocate.
In fact, the prosecution never even attempted to make such a case. Even if one were to accept the story line created by Prosecutor Joe McGill for the jury at the trial at face value, with all the tortured and falsified testimony of prosecution witnesses, it was that Abu-Jamal, who happened to be at the scene of an altercation between his brother and Faulkner, came to his brother's aid and ended up shooting Faulkner. There was never any claim of premeditation or planning. which is part of the definition of an "assassination." As always, Abraham and her ilk keep attempting to portray Abu-Jamal not just as a killer of a police officer, but rather as a coldly-calculating political assassin bent on attacking not just Faulkner, but all cops.**(END OF QUOTE)
