US has no standing to slam foreign judicial abuses: Stop the Hypocrisy! Free Mumia, Free Leonard Peltier, Free Assang

By Dave Lindorff

President Joe Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken are worried about Russian Putin critic and presidential aspirant, currently in a Russian prison after conviction on charges of skipping bail and leaving the country and other charges, being abused and at risk of dying in jail.

That threat may or may not be real, but US objections to Russia's treatment of a political rival or dissident, like US objections to China's harsh treatment of democracy advocates and former democratic members of Hong Kong's now crushed and no longer autonomous Legislative Assembly would carry a lot more weight, and be far less laughable around the globe if these two leaders would also be demanding decent treatment and release from prison of political prisoners who have been getting abused, degraded and denied adequate medical treatment at the hand of the US "justice system."

While the list is fairly long, I will highlight three cases here.

The first and most urgent is Mumia Abu-Jamal, ones a leading Black journalist in Philadelphia who was convicted in 1982 of the killing of a white Philadelphia police officer in a trial marked by perjured testimony from clearly coached witnesses claiming to have seen an "execution style" slaying that crime photos and a gun test conducted by myself and fellow journalist Linn Washington, Jr., prove could not have happened as portrayed by the prosecutor, who himself was guilty of misconduct in lying about the availability of a witness to the judge. Abu-Jamal, who is about to turn 67, has served 40 years in prison, more than two decades of that time on death row before his death sentence was ruled unconstitutional and converted to life in prison without parole. During all those death row years he was held in solitary confinement.

He suffers from diabetes and contracted Hepatitis C, which the prison system first failed to diagnose and then refused to treat with proper medication until ordered to do so by a federal court in a case that the state fought tooth and nail, delaying so long that by the time he finally was provided with the medication that is 95% successful at curing the deadly disease, it had already destroyed his liver with cirrhosis. Now he's been diagnosed with Congestive Heart failure and is about to be given open heart bypass-surgery to replace clogged arteries, no doubt due to his imprisonment, inactivity and poor prison diet.

Abu-Jamal is currently appealing his conviction arguing after six boxes of documents pertaining to the prosecution's case including evidence of possible bribery of a witness were discovered in the DA's office, where they had been hidden from Abu-Jamal's attorneys for four decades. The city's supposedly "progressive" DA is fighting that appeal, as is the police officer's widow Maureen Faulkner who receives financial support for her efforts to intervene in the case from Philadelphia's Fraternal Order of Police"

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/stop-the-hypocrisy-america-free-mumia-free-leonard-peltier-free-julian-assange/