That warrant arose from lawyers in Ridge's office participating in unlawfully intercepting correspondence between Abu-Jamal and his lawyers discovering the date for the filing of Abu-Jamal's appeal.
That Ridge issued death warrant severely disrupted Abu-Jamal's appeal proceeding forcing Abu-Jamal's defense team to fight the warrant while preparing for the hearing and enabling the appeal hearing judge to unduly speed the hearing that further constrained defense efforts.
Additionally issuance of that death warrant was improper because Abu-Jamal had a constitutional right to that 1995 appeal seeking to eliminate his death sentence.
Federal and state courts persistently ignored that glaringly improper intervention by Ridge that robbed Abu-Jamal's appeal rights.
Interestingly, Judge Dembe is the same jurist that rejected compelling evidence that the judge in Abu-Jamal's 1982 trial made a racist, prosecution-favoring admission on the eve of the proceeding.
A court stenographer had announced that she overheard that trial judge, the infamous Albert Sabo, declare he was going to help prosecutors "fry the n-word" referencing Abu-Jamal.
Racist and/or pro-prosecution bias by a judge is forbidden by court rulings and Pa's Code of Judicial Conduct.
Yet, Dembe refused to take testimony from the stenographer to determine the veracity of allegations from that woman who came from a family of police officers.
Dembe, in a ruling exhibiting ridiculous reasoning, claimed Sabo's racist, pro-prosecution rant was immaterial to Abu-Jamal's conviction because a jury not Sabo convicted Abu-Jamal.
Dembe's fundamentally flawed assertion pretended that Sabo did not influence the trial in a series of sabotaging actions like stripping Abu-Jamal of his right to represent himself at trial just days before testimony began (sending his defense into a tail-spin), keeping favorable Abu-Jamal evidence from jurors and even selecting a juror for duty who admitted being solidly biased against Abu-Jamal.
The injustice in Abu-Jamal's long-running case has elicited condemnation from numerous entities as diverse as Amnesty International, the NAACP and the City Council of Munich, Germany.
The injustice evident in Abu-Jamal's case is consistent with the injustice exhibited daily by some Philadelphia police, prosecutors and judges.
The same day Abu-Jamal filed his resentence challenging motion a Philadelphia judge convicted Philadelphia broadcaster Jeff Hart of disorderly conduct for a minor incident arising from Hart observing police brutality during the arrest of a suspect near Hart's house.
Hart said the false disorderly conduct charge followed his asking a Philadelphia policeman to not use repeated profanity when ordering Hart from the arrest scene.
Abu-Jamal, an award-winning journalist at the time of his 1981 arrest, frequently reported on rampant police abuse in Philadelphia.
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