The DA and Sabo's efforts to silence Jones continued through to the PCRA hearings.
Unable to locate her earlier, the Defense found Jones in 1996, and (over the DA's protests) obtained permission from the State Supreme Court to extend the PCRA hearings for Jones' testimony. Sabo vehemently resisted—arguing that there was not sufficient proof of her unavailability in 1995. However, in 1995 Sabo had refused to order disclosure of Jones' home address to the defense team.
Over Sabo’s objections, the defense returned to the State Supreme Court—which then ordered Sabo to conduct a full evidentiary hearing. Sabo's attempts to silence Jones continued as she took the stand. He immediately threatened her with 5-10 years imprisonment if she testified to having perjured herself in 1982. In defiance, Jones testified to perjury in 1982 when she recanted seeing two men “run away” and “leave the scene.”
She testified to changing her version of events after being visited by two detectives in prison, where she was being held on charges of robbery and assault. Urging her to finger Mumia, the detectives stressed that she faced up to 10 years in prison and the loss of her children if convicted. Afraid of losing her children, Jones testified to having met the police halfway: she didn't actually finger Mumia, but she did lie about not seeing two men running from the scene. Accordingly, Jones only received probation and was never imprisoned for these 1982 charges.
During cross-examination, the DA announced that there was an outstanding arrest warrant for Jones on charges of writing a bad check, and that she would be arrested after concluding her testimony. With tears pouring down her face, Jones declared: “This is not going to change my testimony!”
Despite objections from the defense, Sabo allowed New Jersey police to handcuff and arrest Jones.
While the DA attempted to use this arrest to discredit Jones, her determination in the face of intimidation only made her more credible. Outraged by Jones' treatment, even the mainstream Philadelphia Daily News reported: “Such heavy-handed tactics can only confirm suspicions that the court is incapable of giving Abu-Jamal a fair hearing. Sabo has long since abandoned any pretense of fairness.”
The same coercion of witnesses by police, DA, and judge exposed by Jones' story was rampant in Mumia's case. Documented by Amnesty International, witnesses Cynthia White (a prostitute facing multiple charges) and Robert Chobert (an arsonist on probation, driving his cab without a license, which he had lost twice due to DWI) also “altered their descriptions of what they saw, in ways that supported the prosecution's version of events.”
While the defense did attempt to challenge these discrepancies, Sabo blocked efforts to inform the 1982 jury fully about the vulnerability of these witnesses to police pressure.
Speaking about White, both Veronica Jones (in 1996) and another ex-prostitute, Pamela Jenkins (in 1997) testified that she was blackmailed into her testimony by the police, who had the power to pursue or drop prostitution charges against her, and in January 2002, yet another witness, Yvette Williams, testified that White’s trial testimony against Mumia was the result of her fearing for her life because of threats by the police.
As for the second most important prosecution witness, cab driver Robert Chobert, he was not only vulnerable because he had been driving without a license, but also because he was on probation because he had firebombed a school, and with his probation revoked for illegally driving a cab, he faced a potentially very long time in jail. And yet his probation was never revoked while he continued to illegally drive his cab at least until the 1995 PCRA hearing, with an occasional fine being his heaviest punishment.
Sabo, of course, never found any trouble with any of this, neither in the original 1982 trial nor during the PCRA hearings – a stance that is probably best explained by his general stance with regard to Mumia right from the start, which is encapsulated in the statement of a new witness who came forward years after the trial.
“I'm Going To Help Them Fry The Nigger”
In 2001 another witness—Terri Mauer-Carter—challenged Sabo's integrity, but the State Supreme Court ruled against the defense's right to have her affidavit considered. Mauer-Carter was working as a stenographer in the Philadelphia Court system on the eve of Mumia's 1982 trial. She states that she overheard judge Sabo say in reference to Mumia's case that he was going to help the prosecution “fry the nigger.”
In 2002, Journalist Dave Lindorff interviewed Mauer-Carter's former boss, Richard Klein, who was with Mauer-Carter when she states she overheard Sabo. A Philadelphia Common Pleas Court judge at the time who now sits on PA's Superior Court, Klein told Lindorff: "I won't say it did happen, and I won't say it didn't. That was a long time ago." Lindorff considers Klein's refusal to firmly reject Mauer-Carter's claim to be an affirmation of her statement.
The 2003 State Supreme Court ruling was an affirmation of lower-level Judge Patricia Dembe's argument that even if Maurer-Carter is correct about Sabo's stated intent to use his position as Judge to throw the trial and help the prosecution "fry the nigger," it doesn't matter. According to Dembe, since it "was a jury trial, as long as the presiding Judge's rulings were legally correct, claims as to what might have motivated or animated those rulings are not relevant."
