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And with good reason: The trouble with McGill's oft-pronounced version of the killing and the testimony of the three prosecution witnesses upon which it is based is that all the eight known photographs of the area around the spot where Officer Faulkner's head finally came to be located do not show the slightest trace of any of these bullets. Such traces, however, would inevitably be visible and impossible to overlook.
This would even be more true had someone shot several .38 caliber bullets with a weight of more than 140 grain (the weight of the incomplete bullet found in Faulkner's brain) into a concrete sidewalk with a velocity of 900 feet/s (allegedly the data for Abu-Jamal's Charter Arms 1382 revolver), +P ammunition propelling the bullets to greater speed and impact (which the prosecution claimed Abu-Jamal had used) and at point blank range.
The interesting thing in the McGill/Smerconish interview is that McGill even has the audacity to mention the bullet that -- and this is one of the few things about which there is no doubt in this case -- entered the right upper shoulder part of Faulkner's police jacket from the front and exited it at the back without even touching the officer's body, and which according to his scenario should have hit the sidewalk immediately afterwards.
Assuming from the picture on the previous page (and the one to the left) as well as from the descriptions of the position of Faulkner's body by police who found him on the scene, that the pool of blood within the oval encirclement on the first picture marks the position of Faulkner's head (and the arrow the general position of Faulkner's body), for this bullet we even know exactly where to look for it, but there is absolutely nothing on any of the photographs.
Even if one moves the assumed position of Faulkner's head to a point further towards the curb from where the blood from his head might have streamed both towards the building and the curb, the picture doesn't change: There is no bullet, or bullet fragment, or gunshot trace, in a spot where at least one of these three should be easily detectable. Note that this is also true for the metal grid next to the blood stain: for the shooter to get the bullet that went though Faulkner's jacket's garment through the open spots offered by the grid without visibly damaging the metal would already be miraculous in this single case, and certainly even more so if one adds two more shots that by accident also ended up in the grid area rather than elsewhere.
According to common sense, it is impossible for a seasoned prosecutor such as Joseph McGill (who rightfully boasts of his experience in murder trials even before the 1982 Abu-Jamal trial) not to have been, and still be, painfully aware of this glaring inconsistency. The ballistic facts on (in this case literally) the ground simply do not bear out, but rather, squarely contradict what the prosecution had its so-called eyewitnesses testify in court.
For almost three decades now, Joe McGill's response to this has always been to simply increase the volume of his loudspeaker about a crazed Abu-Jamal firing away like mad at the prone officer as he lay defenselessly on the ground, in the hope that the noise created thereby will drown out the two very simple questions any decent defense lawyer would have asked from the start if only Abu-Jamal had had one in 1982:
Where are the missing bullets, bullet pieces, or bullet traces in the sidewalk?
How is it that the prosecution can't account for shooting traces that would have had to be there had there three core witnesses told the truth?
That this very simple and very obvious question is not hotly debated -- or for that matter, even asked -- in the U.S. media in general and the dominant media in Philadelphia in particular is only testimony to the fact that their self-perception as being critical, cantankerous, and a pain in the ass for the forces of the status quo is quite out of place in more than one place.
McGill's Tale IV: A Conspiracy to Kill an Unsuspecting Cop
Prodded by the right-wing talk show host, death penalty advocate and long-term champion of Abu-Jamal's execution Smerconish, McGill finally also explicitly brings in something that apparently had been lingering in the background of the thinking of the "Fry Mumia" crowd up to that time for quite a while: namely, that the killing of Officer Faulkner was the result of a deliberate plan on the part of the long-time and fanatic cop hater Abu-Jamal and his brother Billy Cook. The story line is supplied once again by the interviewer, Michael Smerconish, himself, who can barely contain his greed to push his partner into a maximally sensationalist direction:
"Joe, you earlier made reference to the fact that that Abu-Jamal was, I think you used the word "coincidentally," at this intersection ["] when Danny Faulkner pulled over his brother. Have you, you must have given consideration to the possibility that the whole thing was perhaps a set-up to execute a cop, a set-up perhaps to execute Danny Faulkner in particular!"
And McGill takes the bait more than willingly. After rather lamely explaining why he decided not to bring Abu-Jamal's brother Billy Cook into this, and then raving against Abu-Jamal's allegedly "terrible" radical leanings, he continues in a very upset mood matching that of his host: "NOW, it was awfully coincidental, that his brother is stopped going the wrong way on 13th Street, I mean, how dumb is that, in an area where there are cops, but all of a sudden he does! He goes down
13th Street, the wrong way, south, and he is stopped by a police officer!"And he continues: "All of a sudden, William Cook is STOPPED. And then he stops and he's getting out. And again, Mr. Jamal, the coward he was, would wait until his back was to him, and then he ran across, and it almost happened simultaneously, and it just seemed to me, although I couldn't prove it, that it was AWFULLY coincidental." Then, given Abu-Jamal's alleged past proven hatred of law and order and of the police, he claims he still has to ask himself: "Yet -- Was it coincidental or not? Michael, I still wonder." (italics mine, capitals reflecting McGill's emphases)
