Judge Yohn felt compelled to cite another novel interpretation of “the law,” the present doctrine that “innocence is no defense.” Authored by the U.S. Supreme Court in the infamous Herrera case, this holds that innocence is trumped by timeliness. If evidence of innocence is submitted beyond a statutory deadline, it is irrelevant. The legal process must embody “finality,” says the “law of the land” today, even if the result is the execution of an innocent man.
Today, the truth of what happened in the fateful early morning hours of Dec. 9, 1981, has been obliterated from the record by a system that has reduced Mumia’s chances of freedom to the interpretations of a handful of “constitutional issues” by three supposedly unbiased jurists, while the vast reserve of evidence proving Mumia’s absolute innocence had been long ago been barred from consideration.
The political stakes involved in Mumia’s case are recognized by all. The federal level of the U.S. state itself believed that it was necessary to inform the Third Circuit where it stood when the House of Representatives in the last session of the Republican Congress passed a lying resolution condemning Mumia as a cop killer and warning the French city of St. Denis that its naming of a street after Mumia was unacceptable to the U.S.
This is but one indication that “the law’s” interpretation extends far beyond the judiciary. All but 31 House members approved this resolution that pitifully stated that Mumia had exhausted all his appeals at a time when his most important appeal was pending before one of the nation’s highest courts. So much for the objectivity, not to mention the factual accuracy, of the legislative branch, the same branch of government that voted to hasten the execution of the 3350 people (mainly Blacks and other oppressed minorities) who inhabit the death-row sections of the profit-oriented prison industrial complex.
What Really Happened on the Morning of Dec. 9, 1981?
The truth of that day has been largely obliterated by countless police and prosecution manipulations and falsifications designed to buttress a scenario that cannot stand up to the massive accumulations of facts that were known at the time and subsequently unearthed. The facts are simple enough. In this writer’s view, a police officer, shortly before 4:00 am, in a red-light district of Philadelphia, stopped a banged-up blue Volkswagen bug with a dangling license plate and demanded that the driver, Mumia’s brother Billy Cook, get out of the car, which he did.
Officer Faulkner, who had put in a call for police back-up, also ended up with a driver’s license application in his clothes that belonged to Arnold Howard, who had given it to Kenneth Freeman, Cook’s street-stall business partner and a passenger in the VW bug. The license was almost immediately found by the police in Faulkner’s clothing, but only reported to the defense some 13 years later.
An argument ensued and Faulkner bludgeoned Cook with his 17-inch flashlight. Mumia, parked in his taxicab a distance away, observed the beating. He headed toward the scene and was shot by Faulkner. Freeman then alighted from the VW and shot Faulkner.
Six witnesses say the shooter, Freeman, fled the scene, with several describing his clothing, hair, and physical characteristics, all vastly different from Mumia’s. Mumia, near dead, lay a few feet away from Faulkner. All the evidence accumulated since that time proves these assertions and disproves the prosecutions fabricated scenario (see freemumia.org).
The 31 photographs of the crime scene taken minutes after the shootings by photojournalist Pedro Polakoff put the lie to the testimony of police “eyewitness” Robert Chobert, who claimed that he viewed the murder from his taxicab that was parked immediately behind Faulkner’s police car. There was no such taxicab there.
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