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manage to shoot Faulkner, who was presumably bent over Cook in order to handcuff him, in the back without hitting Cook or the shot leaving traces on Cook's VW.
At the Abu-Jamal trial, all this had changed, but not too much. Scanlan now placed the same scene, not in front of the VW, but in front of Faulkner's police car: closer to where White claimed things had happened, but in the recounting of events still squarely at odds with White's.
But in his chat with his long-time ally to get Abu-Jamal executed, Michael Smerconish, close to three decades later Joseph McGill doesn't really care. He just ignores Scanlan, and settles for the equally absurd version of Cynthia White that places events, not in the street, but on the sidewalk.
Among many others, this is a part of the events the prosecution has never given a plausible account for. Only two prosecution witnesses ever claimed to have seen how Faulkner was shot in the back by Abu-Jamal, Cynthia White and Michael Mark Scanlan. Even if in his account for the Smerconish show, McGill opted for the White account, the contradictions between her account and Scanlan's remain irreconcilable, and what is more, given the ballistic facts at the scene her own account cannot possibly be true, even disregarding many glaring contradictions in her own statements made from December 9, 1981, to Abu-Jamal's 1982 trial which can't be analyzed here.
McGill's Tale III: How Faulkner Got Killed
But then comes the crunch, McGill describing to Smerconish in an all-excited tone how Faulkner was allegedly killed. This passage starts like this: Faulkner
"fell to the ground. He was on his back. And then what Jamal does ["] at that point, Jamal just stands over him, like you see in the television. He puts his two hands together, as in so many of these TV shows, and he points down, and fires, remember, he had five bullets in there ["], and he just kept firing."
This is simply untrue. As McGill hast to know perfectly well, none of the three prosecution witnesses who claimed to have seen the deadly shots at Faulkner -- Cynthia White, Robert Chobert, and Michael Scanlan -- described the shooter as firing with both hands. After he had White graphically demonstrate in court how Abu-Jamal allegedly shot Faulkner, McGill himself summarized her performance like this: "Indicating for the record this time using her right arm she was pointing and going up and down with her right arm three times towards the floor."
On the prodding by McGill, prosecution witness Robert Chobert made the very same demonstration in front of the trial court.
Why, then, does McGill resort to this barefaced lie? Of course simply to even better achieve the whole purpose of this interview, namely, to present Abu-Jamal as a cold-blooded, deliberate executioner who leaves nothing to coincidence when it comes to killing a cop.
Even more importantly, having set the scene in this way, McGill continues:
"At that point, Jamal just stands over him, just like you see in the television, he put his two hands together, as in so many of these TV shows, and he points down, and fires. Remember he had five bullets in there ["], and he just kept firing. One of those bullets hit Danny Faulkner between the eyes. And the other one went through part of the clothing, and the other was remiss."
He describes Faulkner as having fallen down and lost his gun, now allegedly lying prone on the sidewalk, "literally immobile and unable to do anything." Then "this coward steps over him, and with his high velocity bullets kills him and continues to fire until he has no more shots."
This is a point McGill repeats on and on in many of his public performances, namely, Abu-Jamal firing three to four shots at the prone and defenseless officer at point blank range.
This is the central and most appalling lie the prosecution started out with right away and has clung too rigidly over the years.
Miraculously, at no point in their investigations, either the police or the prosecution made any attempt to explain what had happened to the two to three bullets Abu-Jamal had allegedly fired at the prone Faulkner but that had missed him.
