With regard to Scanlan and Chobert, there are thus only two possibilities: Either Chobert was indeed, as he claimed, parked behind Officer Faulkner’s police car, and then all accounts by Scanlan about Faulkner’s body jerking and his face being hit by the shot of the killer were sheer fantasy, or Chobert was NOT there even though he was one of two key witnesses against Abu-Jamal, which would be evidence of monumental prosecutorial misconduct since in that case his testimony about how he saw Abu-Jamal fire the deadly shot into Faulkner’s face could only have been the result of massive fakery.
The “Chinese Menu”
This is not the place to go into the many more contradictions in Michael Scanlan’s various accounts between December 9 and the Summer 1982 Abu-Jamal murder trial.68 That his – and White’s, and Chobert’s – description of the shots that killed the officer cannot be true has already been demonstrated elsewhere.69
Both main witnesses at the Cook trial, Cynthia White and Michael Scanlan, went on to play a pivotal role in the trial about the core event of December 9, 1982, the killing of Police Officer Faulkner that lead to the death sentence of Mumia Abu-Jamal for murder in the first degree. But this core event, of course, was not yet what was at issue.
The important point with regard to the killing of Officer Faulkner and the murder charge against Mumia Abu-Jamal is what a close analysis of the March 29, 1982 trial of Billy Cook shows: Adding the accounts of the only two alleged eyewitnesses to both the altercation between Cook and Faulkner and the ensuing killing of the officer, we find that they are
(1) in flat contradiction which each other, and
(2) squarely impossible in themselves.
Point (1) in particular was of course also not lost on Cook’s defense attorney Daniel Alva, who at the end of his cross-examination of Scanlan made a demurrer to the charge of aggravated assault and resisting arrest against his client in which he started to bring out the glaring contradictions between Scanlan’s and White’s account.70 This demurrer was focused on both the question whether Cook could be accused of resisting arrest at all – Alva argued that there was no concrete evidence that his client really was arrested at any time during the events –71 and the question how he could be convicted of assault if the testimony of the witnesses was so contradictory, and with one of the witnesses, Scanlan, not even being able to identify the defendant.72 But Judge Meyer Rose denied the demurrer, and Alva went on to make his final summation:
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