Toomey, for his pathetic performance in the Senate well, has earned the monicker "Senator Pander."
The bottom line, which Senator Pander surely ought to know, is that whether or not Abu-Jamal is guilty, Debo Adegbile did exactly what a lawyer should do. Asked to help right a constitutional wrong, he had the NAACP Legal Defense Fund assist in the appeal of Abu-Jamal's death sentence, which a federal judge had already ruled to be unconstitutional. Adegbile and his legal team did their duty, fighting an appeal by the state to the Third Circuit, which upheld the lower court's ruling, and then on to the Supreme Court, which by refusing to accept the state's appeal, endorsed the Third Circuit, meaning that its decision that Abu-Jamal had been unconstitutionally sentenced to death because of a flawed jury ballot form and confusing instructions from the trial judge was confirmed beyond any dispute.
Senator Pander should know that if the American justice system is to be truly just, it must be just and constitutionally applied to all people -- even those convicted of murder. That's why death sentences have to be voted on by juries following an entirely separate hearing, with a separate presentation of evidence and arguments.
But Senator Pander should also know that this particular trial wasn't just unconstitutional in its sentencing. Far from a "convincing" case, as he claimed, it was an atrocity of justice from the get-go.
Myself, I don't know what happened on the early morning of Dec. 9, 1981. But neither does anyone else, including the FOP and Sen. Toomey. This is because, among other things, the investigation of the case was so poorly done (police didn't even do a wipe test of Abu-Jamal's hands to see if he had recently fired a gun, or if they did, they didn't like the result and pretended not to have done that test -- a basic step in any murder-by-gun case), because there were so many cases of obvious witness tampering and coaching by the prosecution, and of outright lying by witnesses, and because there was such evident bias on the part of the judge, that in the end it is impossible to say Abu-Jamal was a murderer, or even that he was the shooter of Officer Faulkner.
DAVE LINDORFF is author of the critically acclaimed book Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003). He is also a member of ThisCantBeHappening, the four-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper. His work, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, GARY LINDORFF, ALFREDO LOPEZ, LORI SPENCER, LINN WASHINGTON, JR. and CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net
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