Schiffmann told me: “The first key point is that Mumia is no murderer. If he shot at all, he shot to defend his own life, after he intervened at the scene in the first place to protect his brother who had already been beaten bloody.”
“Second, it is very unlikely that Mumia even took his gun out of its holster during that fateful night. What if the destruction of fingerprint evidence on Mumia’s gun (shown in Polakoff’s photos) was not just negligent, but deliberate? It would mean that the police themselves were the ones who drew Mumia’s weapon (which had been empty apart from five spent cartridges to begin with) out of his shoulder holster.”
“And third, in terms of Mumia’s total innocence, I should also add that in 2001, his defense filed two expert affidavits which expressly demanded that the bullet that killed Officer Faulkner be retested by modern methods to determine whether it came from Mumia’s gun: ‘Newer technology may provide evidence as to the class or individual characteristics of the bullet specimen recovered from Officer Faulkner permitting a determination of whether or not it was fired from the recovered Charter Arms revolver,’ just to quote from the autumn 2001 affidavit by medical examiner Robert H. Kirschner. For a defendant who perfectly well knows he did fire the deadly should, that would be pretty irrational.”
The Third Person: Ken Freeman?
Schiffmann cites six witnesses (including several that were intimidated by police) that saw someone run away before police arrived, and then argues that this third person was most likely Billy Cook’s business partner and friend, Kenneth Freeman.
In the 1995 PCRA hearings it was revealed that Faulkner had a license application in his front pocket (concealed from the defense for 13 years) for one Arnold Howard – who testified that he had loaned his temporary (non-photo) license to Kenneth Freeman.
Schiffmann explained to me that “Billy Cook’s attorney Daniel Alva told Dave Lindorff (in his book Killing Time) that Cook had told him within days after the shooting that Freeman had been with him that night. There wasn’t the slightest reason for Alva do have done so if it was not indeed true. Lying to journalists doesn’t belong to the duties of a defense attorney, and the assumption that a well-respected member of the Philadelphia legal community such as Alva would do so for no apparent reason makes little sense to me.”
Returning to his ballistics analysis, Schiffmann argues: “A person coming out of the passenger seat of Billy Cook’s VW would have been ideally placed to fire the shot that hit Faulkner in the back and exited through the region below his throat. Faulkner had on a clip-on police tie that was apparently hit right at that clip (since there was blood and lead on it). The tie was found nowhere near 1234 Locust where it should have been found had Mumia fired that shot in Faulkner’s back. Instead, it was on the Northern side of Locust shortly before the intersection 13th and Locust. And this, in turn, means that the shooter must have been on the sidewalk in front of 1234 Locust – not in the street coming from the parking lot, as Mumia was.”
Further supporting Schiffmann's argument are the mysterious circumstance of Freeman's death. On May 13, 1985 (the same day police firebombed the MOVE organization's headquarters) Freeman was found dead in a parking lot. Likely murdered by police that day, he was found naked, handcuffed and had a drug needle in his arm. Given the impossibility of injecting himself with the needle while handcuffed, the official explanation for the 31year-old’s death (heart attack) seems incredible.
“If Freeman was indeed killed by cops, the killing probably was part of a general vendetta of the Philadelphia cops against their ‘enemies’ and the cops killed him because they knew or suspected he had something to do with the killing of Faulkner,” said Schiffmann. “What I believe happened after the December 9, 1981 shootout is that the cops saw the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Polakoff told me that the cops had proclaimed Mumia guilty even before any real investigation had begun: ‘A fellow cop has been shot, and we have the motherf*cker who did it,’ is what they told him when he arrived at the scene. But after they did investigate, they cannot have overlooked the evidence that pointed to Freeman as the killer. So what they did was first frame Mumia, and kill Freeman later, too.”
The Arnold Beverly Confession
After years of careful analysis, Schiffmann concludes that the scenario presented by career criminal Arnold Beverly in his 2001 affidavit (stating that he killed Faulkner and that Mumia was not involved) is “too contradictory to be tenable.” However, Schiffmann is highly critical of the courts’ flippant rejection of the Beverly affidavit. Considering the seriousness of a death-row homicide case, he argues that they should have at least determined its credibility in a public court hearing
The controversial Beverly scenario is no longer an issue in the courts, and the defense has now officially dropped it. Despite his respect for those who still promote it, Schiffmann argues that this is not the worst thing. “Actually, hearing Beverly in court could very well have ended in a disaster for the defense, in my view. Moreover, the Beverly affidavit has often been a distraction from what should be the really central issues: frame-up, unfair trial, legal innocence, actual innocence. No Arnold Beverly is needed to show that Mumia should be a free man and shouldn’t have spent even one day in jail.”
Freiheit für Mumia Abu-Jamal!
Noam Chomsky argues that “Mumia’s case is symbolic of something much broader... The US prison system is simply class and race war... Mumia and other prisoners are the kind of people that get assassinated by what’s called ‘social cleansing’ in US client states like Colombia.”
Schiffmann also feels that Mumia's case is part of a much larger picture and devotes most of his book to providing a proper historical context. “Determined not to write the typical boring academic tract,” Schiffmann told me: “My book’s not just about Mumia. His case is important because of the larger legal, political, and social issues that his case exposes. I investigate the U.S.’s constitutional tradition, the history of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the horrendous history of city development in the U.S. tragically exemplified in Philadelphia, Mumia’s extraordinary yet typical history of a Black youth alienated by the false promises the U.S. ‘offered’ for him as a young man of the wrong color, and finally the development of the U.S. into a virtual police state for many segments of the population.”
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