Who is Mumia Abu-Jamal and why should he be free?

Mumia Abu-Jamal was a radio journalist in Philadelphia, known as "the voice of the voiceless" during the years of Mayor Frank Rizzo. He was the recipient of a Major Armstrong Award for radio journalism, and was named one of Philadelphia’s "people to watch" in 1981 by Philadelphia magazine. He was president of the Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia, and he had no prior criminal record.

In December of 1981, Mumia was shot by a Philadelphia cop and almost died when he intervened in a street incident where his own brother was being beaten by that same cop. The police officer was also shot and killed, and witnesses saw other men run from the scene. Yet when police arrived, they beat the wounded Mumia before taking him to the hospital, and he was immediately charged with murder.

Mumia’s brother and another key eyewitness were later harassed by police and driven out of town. Other witnesses changed their stories to implicate Mumia and were rewarded. The dead officer was holding the driver’s license application of a third man. But it was Mumia that the police wanted.

Mumia had been a member of the Black Panther Party, and later a supporter of the MOVE organization. He was a leading critic of police violence against the minority communities of Philadelphia, practices that led to an unprecedented suit filed by the United States Department of Justice seeking to end the notorious brutality of the Philadelphia police. The FBI and Philadelphia police amassed hundreds of pages of surveillance files on Mumia, beginning when he was just 15 years old, for his outspoken opposition to racism and police brutality.

When People began to question the charging of Mumia, the police put forward the absurd story—two months after the incident— that Mumia had "confessed" in the hospital emergency room, and they had simply forgotten to mention it at the time or write it in their reports. The written reports and the emergency room doctor say this never happened.

Mumia was then barred from most of his own trial for protesting an unprepared court-appointed attorney who was later disbarred. Eleven peremptory challenges were used to knock almost all Blacks off the jury. Vital evidence was withheld from the defense, and part of the fatal bullet has "disappeared" from the police files.

The political motivation of the prosecution was made clear when the prosecutor argued for the death penalty by reading revolutionary quotations from a published interview with Mumia from ten years earlier.

In recent hearing for a new trial, a witness used against Mumia in his first trial came forward to say that she lied under police coercion. In retaliation, she was arrested in the courtroom as she stepped off the witness stand on an old warrant from another state.

Now the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled unanimously against every issue raised in Mumia’s appeal against a new and fair trial. This takes place in the wake of massive police scandals in Philadelphia, where dozens of people have now been released from jail because they were originally convicted on the basis of phony evidence fabricated by the police.

For the last 17 years Mumia has been locked alone in a cell 23 hours a day, denied contact visits with his family. His confidential legal mail has been opened and reproduced by prison authorities. He was put into punitive detention for writing his book Live From Death Row, which is in its sixth printing by Addison-Wesley. Recently the U.S. 3^rd Circuit Court of Appeals found this punishment to be unconstitutional and that prison officials had yielded to pressure from the Fraternal Order of Police. However, journalists are still prohibited from filming or recording interviews with him As Jamal has put it, "They don’t just want my death, they want my silence."