But hey, courts’ scrupulously adhering to legal standards except in the case of Abu-Jamal is the ‘standard’ in the Abu-Jamal case. And, perhaps a further wrinkle here, the murder victims of this gang were not whites like the policeman in the Abu-Jamal case
Abu-Jamal’s attorney, Robert R. Bryan, commenting on the Third Circuit’s rejection said it’s “naïve not to realize that this case continues to reek of politics and injustice.”
Now before contending that combining Mendte and Mumia is mixing apples-&-oranges, consider some double standards of justice issues.
Consider the fact that federal prosecutors in Philadelphia quickly indicted a young man earlier this year weeks after Philadelphia police badly beat this man in an unprovoked attacked. The police who brutalized this young man claimed he had a gun – a charge he and eyewitnesses deny. The feds indicted this young man as a convicted felon illegally possessing a gun using the specious hook of this young man’s year-old conviction for a minor gun related incident that netted him a probationary term...a term he was serving successfully.
The prison time faced by Larry Mendte – who is expected to plead guilty – is far less that the mandatory five-year sentences federal courts routinely uphold for non-violent/first-time offenders convicted of simply smoking crack cocaine. Mendte faces only six months in prison for cracking into Alycia Lane’s email – not once but more than 500 times…and perhaps more but the feds could not reliably document those additional invasions.
Note that standard practice leans towards Mendte never seeing a prison cell for his [alleged] offense...but if Mendte was Mookie from down-the-way, well…
Linn Washington Jr. is a Yale Law Journalism Fellowship graduate who is a columnist for The Philadelphia Tribune newspaper.
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