Justice Is Just an Emotional Feeling: Judge Sabo's 1995-97 Kangaroo Court

One of the three defense points the 3rd Court of Appeals rejected in its March 27, 2008 decision not to grant Abu-Jamal a new trial or at least new hearings in any form was the claim that the behavior of the original trial judge Albert Sabo during the 1995, 1996, and 1997 post-conviction hearings was so unfair and unconstitutional as to warrant relief.

In its decision, the court gave this point short shrift and referred to one of its earlier decisions where it says it held that federal “habeas proceedings are not the appropriate forum … to pursue claims of error at the PCRA proceeding.” Given the date of that decision (Lambert v. Blackwell), October 12, 2004, it is curious why the court certified Abu-Jamal’s PCRA claim in the first place, a certification that took place only on December 6, 2005.

But maybe that is just another one of the irregularities in court behavior which seem to almost inevitably crop up whenever it comes to Mumia Abu-Jamal. On a more substantive level, the courts recent decision practically says that however biased, immoral and outrageous a judge’s behavior may be during PCRA proceedings, it will no longer be subject to federal review.

This in alone is reason enough to strongly protest the recent court decision, since as we will see in a moment, Albert F. Sabo posture and deeds during Abu-Jamal’s 1995-97 hearings fit all the adjectives just mentioned, and more. The following article is an abbreviated, stripped-down to bullet points form of a much longer, amply footnoted article on the same topic which will be published on www.abu-jamal-news.com towards the end of April 2008.

Unfortunately, there is no time or space here to go into the horrendous – or “disturbing” – as the Philadelphia Inquirer politely called it in 1995 – performance of Judge Sabo at Abu-Ja­mal’s original 1982 murder trial.

Since this behavior, which reached from stripping Abu-Jamal of his right to self-represen­tation, the seating of manifestly biased jurors, the undue haste with which he conducted the trial, the blocking of areas of evidence and examination vital to the defense to the toleration of unconstitutional remarks by the prosecutor and much, much more, has been amply documented elsewhere, I will constrain myself to one single point concerning the original trial.

On March 18, 1982, Abu-Jamal’s then lawyer Anthony Jackson made a motion to the pre-trial judge, Judge Ribner, to have questionnaires sent out to prospective jurors in the case to enable the defense to see to it that the jury finally empanelled would be impartial and fair. This was to supply the defense beforehand with more information about the jurors, and one of the reasons why Jackson said that information was needed was the systematic exclusion of black jurors by Philadelphia prosecutors by means of peremptory strikes.

Ribner, himself a harsh jurist who presided over 9 death sentences, transferred the decision to the trial judge, Albert Sabo, who dealt with the question on June 4 at one of the suppression hearings (during the brief period when Abu-Jamal was allowed to represent himself), of course found the concerns of the defense unfounded and a questionnaire for prospective jurors unnecessary, referring even to alleged Pennsylvania court procedure that disallowed it.

Here, a defense attempt to get information about the jurors in the pool out of which the eventual jurors would be selected, including information about race, was blocked by Judge Sabo even before the jury selection itself, even though a questionnaire, which the defense offered to pay for out of its own all but empty pockets, would likely have saved a lot of time in jury selection – and having a speedy trial was one of Judge Sabo’s purported main concerns.

This is the natural point to hop on to some important points about Sabo’s posture during Mumia Abu-Jamal’s 1995-97 post-conviction hearings, where the need for speedy proceedings was time and again an argument Sabo used to try to throw the defense in disarray, a practice by the presiding judge that ran like a thread through the nine weeks of the hearings:

· After the Governor of Pennsylvania, later Homeland Security Czar Thomas Ridge, had preempted the defense’s filing of its PCRA petition by signing an execution order against Abu-Jamal for August 17 on June 1, 1995, Judge Sabo, in a rare display of judicial sadism, refused to stay the execution until August 7, when the proceedings were already well under way. That meant that the prisoner moved into the so-called “phase 2,” which in turn meant that Abu-Jamal was stripped of almost all personal belongings, placed under permanent 24 hour supervision, and stripped of the right to use the prison legal library resources at a time when he needed them most.

· Judge Sabo used Abu-Jamal’s execution date repeatedly as an excuse to quash subpoenas of important witnesses, to deny supplemental petitions, to interrupt defense attorneys’ arguments, and even to fine and in one case throw them in jail. When he finally granted a stay of the execution ten days before the set date, he gleefully told the defendant and his understandably jubilant supporters: “Calm down, don’t be too happy because that’s only for this one.”

· In a stunning display of bias, Judge Sabo himself disrupted what is called “courtroom decorum” by allowing off-duty police officers to carry their guns with them into the courtroom. After repeated representations by the defense concerning this, at the hearing on July 31, 1995 he said: “They are in here for my protection. […] Any police officer that is in here is authorized to carry a gun, as far as I am concerned, 24 hours a day.” When defense attorney Wolkenstein protested “An off-duty police officer, in our opinion, should be treated the same as any other citizen who comes into this Courtroom,” he responded: “No, no, it’s all together different. […] I will make the decision who can carry a gun in this Courtroom and who can’t.”

· When on August 2, 1995 the defense tried to subpoena clerks from the Administrative Office of the Pennsylvania Courts as well as the Jury Commissioner of the County of Philadelphia as part of their PCRA petition argument that jury pools were not drawn “from a fair cross section of the community,” Sabo silenced attorney Wolkenstein and had her locked up in a jail cell instead. All subpoenas were quashed, leading attorney Jonathan Piper to state during the defense’s closing argument on September 11, 1995: “We have been precluded from presenting any evidence with respect to the racially-biased manner in which jury pools were selected in Philadelphia in 1982.” This is particularly stupefying since

· Twelve and a half years later, the 3rd Circuit Court of appeals (1) denies Abu-Jamal relief on the question of racism in jury selection because of an alleged lack of defense data on the racial composition of the jury pool, the very question Wolkenstein tried to address when Sabo locked her up, and (2) declares that whatever Judge Sabo did during the PCRA hearings can no longer be part of any federal review, including his move to block the defense from getting hold of the data that the court now demands.

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