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"This Is No Victory"--Analysis of Third Circuit Court decision re. Mumia Abu-Jamal

By Linn Washington, Jr.  Posted by Hans Bennett (about the submitter)       (Page 4 of 10 pages) Become a premium member to see this article and all articles as one long page.   1 comment

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The trial judge granted the prosecutor’s request to remove Abu-Jamal from selecting his own jury, a decision without merit that unfairly benefited the prosecutor and stripped Abu-Jamal of his right to represent himself. Plus, this action aggravated tensions between Abu-Jamal and his attorney.

Further, the panel’s majority faulted an Abu-Jamal lawyer for not properly raising the jury selection racism issue during Abu-Jamal’s first appeal in the late 1989s to the Pa Supreme Court without acknowledging a major error committed by the lawyer who filed that appeal.

That attorney prepared that appeal without ever reviewing the trial transcript.

There is no way that attorney could have prepared a legally valid appeal without knowing what specifically had happened at trial. (That appeal attorney was also suffering from what proved to be a fatal brain tumor, a medical condition that impaired that attorney’s cognitive abilities.)

In creating this new standard, the panel’s majority makes it harder to prove Batson violations. Plus, this standard changes that court’s precedent on procedures needed to raise Batson claims.

The judge who dissented from his two colleagues faulted them for creating this new standard, a standard not ordered by the US Supreme Court.

“This case’s newly created contemporaneous objection rule…goes against the grain of our prior actions, as our Court has addressed Batson challenges on the merits without requiring that an objection be made during jury selection in order to preserve” future appellate review, the dissenter said.

This judge, speaking specifically to changing precedent, said since Third Circuit precedent did “…not have a federal contemporaneous objection rule…I see no reason why we should not afford Abu-Jamal the courtesy of our precedents.”

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Hans Bennett is a multi-media journalist mostly focusing on the movement to free Mumia Abu-Jamal and all political prisoners. An archive of his work is available at insubordination.blogspot.com and he is also co-founder of "Journalists for Mumia," (more...)
 
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