LW: The short answer is that I don’t know.
There’s been speculation that the beating was meant to send a message to Wakshul, not to deviate from his testimony that Abu-Jamal actually confessed.
Sabo ruled that there was no such thing as police brutality in Philadelphia, and that in making that claim, Abu-Jamal was making one more absurd claim to deflect his guilt. Here we have a former police officer who testified for the prosecution during the hearing, who was a victim of police brutality within days of the hearing. That just is yet another
example of the manifest unfairness and factual distortion in Sabo’s ruling and his entire presence throughout the case.
HB: Sabo’s fairness in the PCRA hearings is one of the issues being considered on May 17 by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Any thoughts on next week’s oral arguments?
Clearly Mumia deserves a new trial and I think it is bogus for people to argue that he doesn’t deserve a fair trial because he disrupted his original trial. If you look, his disruptions occurred after it was clear that Sabo in collusion with Prosecutor McGill was intent on violating all of his rights, not just the right to self-representation.
They also hamstrung his attorney by not providing adequate resources, and they tried to sabotage his efforts at every turn. That is when Abu-Jamal started “acting out.” Did he take the right tact in doing that? It’s arguable, but the fact is that everyone is entitled to a fair trial.
In 1959, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a ruling in a murder case from Philadelphia where a guy pled guilty to the murder, and the judge and prosecutor tried to cut corners. The court said that even with evidence of guilt piled as high as Mount Everest, everybody is entitled to a fair trial.
Now, with the hearing coming up on May 17, I think it’s interesting to note that there are a couple of items that this court wanted to hear in oral arguments that the federal District Court Judge had not certified for appeal. One of the items is the bias of Sabo in the 1995 hearing.
Here’s something interesting.
Sabo’s bias has always been obvious and objectionable to anyone with their eyes open, but in 1995, Sabo was so bad that both the Daily News and Philadelphia Inquirer harshly criticized his behavior. The New York Times criticized Sabo’s behavior and was joined by other national publications like the Christian Science Monitor and also an article came out in the American Lawyer, where a lawyer/journalist named Stuart Taylor observed the entire proceedings and concluded that Sabo was thoroughly biased and also concluded that he thought Abu-Jamal did it, but did not receive a fair trial.
There is this incredible record of Sabo’s biases, and the importance of the criticism from the Philly media about Sabo’s bias is that normally these people are rabidly anti-Abu-Jamal and they felt that because of Sabo’s continuing presence on this case and his obvious and detestable bias, that it would undermine any credibility of a fair trial. By
undermining that, it would give further credence to criticism that Abu-Jamal did not receive a fair trial.
They were saying, “Take this clown off the case so you don’t give more ammunition to the Mumidiots.” So when it got to the State Supreme Court and when that Court issued their rejection of Abu-Jamal’s appeal in Oct. 1998, there was a paragraph in there talking about Sabo’s bias, and it said the opinions of a handful of journalists “do not convince us” that Sabo was biased. The court said yes, he was intemperate, and made remarks
he shouldn’t have, etc., but the Court declared that Sabo wasn’t biased.”
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