Red Rebel
17th May 2009, 20:41
Justice for the Move 9!
Since August 8, 1978, members of the MOVE Organization have been sitting in jail for a crime it was physically impossible for them to commit. After a brutal police raid on MOVE headquarters and a lengthy trail saturated with corruption, nine MOVE members were convicted of murdering one police officer who was killed with one bullet. MOVE is starting now, as of 1978, that the MOVE 9 are INNOCENT, but were nonetheless arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced 30 to 100 years each for a crime that government and police officers know that MOVE didn’t commit. The fact that MOVE people are still in prison today is a travesty of justice that testifies to this system’s intention to neutralize MOVE for nothing more than exposing the poison, disease, and oppression that this culture and the institutions that uphold it, continue to inflict on all life.
Brief History of MOVE
MOVE ‘s work is revolution. JOHN AFRICA’s revolution. A revolution to stop man’s system from imposing on life, to stop industry from poisoning the air, water, and soil and to put an end to enslavement to ALL life. People animals, ANY form of life. –MOVE
MOVE is a revolutionary organization which formed in the early 1970s to confront oppression on all levels and work towards animal liberation, environmental and social justice… the struggle to free all life from the imposition of this system. Naturally locked hair, communal living, a principled unity and commitment to this way of life often characterized MOVE people. MOVE members follow the example of a wise, perceptive black man name JOHN AFRICA. He taught that we need to destroy the illusion that humans are masters of the living world and to start living in harmony with, rather than above, natural law, as equal members of the community of life. Among their early activities, MOVE demonstrated against zoos, pet stores, and police brutality. MVOE confronted industrial polluters, mediated between gangs, fed poor children natural food, and generally helped uplift the community. But this holistic, consistent, and revolutionary example set by JOHN AFRICA and MOVE became a threat to those who profit from the subjugation of life. Throughout the 70s this conflict continued to escalate with Philadelphia police regularly beating and arresting MOVE members. Police even resorted to a starvation blockade of MOVE headquarters, beating several women into miscarriages, and on one occasion, stomping a three week-old MOVE child to death. MOVE, refusing to break or compromise MOVE belief in the face of such atrocity, took a militant stance against this abuse, forcing this system to either to the right thing or openly display their intentions of genocide against MOVE.
August 8th, 1978 Police Assault
By August of 1978, the corporate owned media has successfully lied to the public to reduce support for the MOVE while the city manufactured the appearance of a legal basis to arrest them. In the early hours of August 8th, based on illegal eviction orders an unjustified arrest warrants, hundreds of police officers armed for war, surrounded the headquarters of the MOVE Organization. Construction vehicles proceeded to tear down the fence and break out the windows with people still inside. Once police had concluded that all of the people had retreated to the basement for safety, they shot tear gas and thousands of gallons of water from deluge hoses towards the house. Gunshots rang out from a house across the street, and in response police throughout the area fired a barrage of bullets at the MOVE basement, which they knew contained children. MOVE adults found themselves wading in rising water, trying to keep children and animals from drowning, while they knew frenzy of police bullets came in their direction. When the gunfire subsided police officer James Ramp lay dead. As MOVE members, miraculously alive, attempted to surrender, they were beaten and arrested. Delbert Africa emerged from the basement with empty, outstretched arms and was smashed in the face with a police helmet and shotgun butt, dragged by his hair and savagely beat by four police officers. (Despite this event being caught on videotape and shown on television, all the officers involved were acquitted.) And although destroying the evidence of a crime scene, particularly on involving the death of a cop, is illegal, that day police sent in bulldozers. The area was leveled by noon, demolishing the house, the foundations, and the trees in the yard. No efforts were made to preserve the crime scene, inscribe chalk marks, or measure ballistics angles. In other words, all evidence that could have proved MOVE innocent was destroyed.
Q. Described this window that you were telling us about where you believe you saw these [first shots] come from?
A. There is a house at 33rd and Baring St. It is a long house. There is an addition to it in the back with a side door… there is a window above it. It was from that window.
--Richard Maloney’s testimony from the MOVE 9’s trial.
“A preliminary autopsy disclosed that slain officer, James Ramp, died of a bullet penetrating the left side of the base of the neck and traveling downward.” –Chief Inspector Joe Golden
Q. Who shot James Ramp?
A. I haven’t the faintest idea.
-- Trial Judge Edwin Malmed’s answer to a reporter’s question several days after convicting and sentencing the MOVE 9.
Justice Denied
With the house, trees, ect. completely destroyed the stage was set for one of the most extraordinary corrupt trails in recent Philadelphia history. Two people who were in the house with everyone else were not committed MOVE members. One was let go, the other given a light sentence, thus exposing the real intentions of this government towards committed MOVE members.
During the pre-trial hearings, the testimony of Assistant Medical Examiner, Dr. Robert Catherman was filed with discrepancies concerning the location of Ramp’s fatal wound. Also, Detective James O’Hara testified that tests from bullet fragments taken from Ramp’s body had not been completed. Despite all of this, and even with the house gone, Judge Merna Marhsall upheld that the MOVE 9 could be tried from murder based on photographs of MOVE headquarters. Even though there were no photos of police taking any weapons out of the house, no photos showing alleged angles that bullets traveled from MOVE to cops, and no photos or videos of MOVE people pointing or shooting guns from the basement on August 8th, 1978.
During the trial by Judge Edwin Malmed, the police raided another MOVE house, this time in Richmond, VA, where children, whose parents were August 8th defendants, were residing. The MOVE 9 demanded the trail be recessed until they could ascertain the whereabouts and welfare of their children. Malmed refused. Shortly after, due to the objections of concerned parents, he removed the MOVE 9 from the rest of the trial and illegally appointed back attorneys to represent MOVE despite their insistence that no one was to represent them.
The trial continued fro 47 days without the defendants in the courtroom. During this time, medical examiners who conducted the autopsy, Dr. Marvin E. Aronson, testified that the bullet that killed Ramp traveled through his body without deviation up or down. Despite all of this , on May 4th, 1980 Malmed pronounced all MOVE defendants guilty of third degree murder and excessively sentenced them to 30-100 years each. He said that he found MOVE guilty based on video tapes. Tapes that don’t show MOVE doing anything, but clearly show the police trying to kill MOVE, and tapes that all blanked out at the moment that Ramp was shot. Since the trial, all three video tapes were used as the basis of the MOVE 9’s conviction have mysteriously disappeared!
There were 12 people in the basement of MOVE headquarters that day, six feet below street level where James Ramp was located. Yet only the nine committed MOVE members were convicted. It would be physically impossible for any of them, let alone all nine of them to have shot Ramp at the angle reported. Moreover, they were being shot at, holding babies and animals from drowning. There’s no way anybody in that basement could have stood up against this type of water pressure, debris and simultaneously aim and shoot a gun.
The Truth Revealed
Despite the police claims that MOVE fired the first shot that day, thus attempting to justify their crimes against MOVE, many witnesses report the first shots coming from the house across the street from MOVE headquarters at the corner of Barring Street. Several bullet holes were in fact found in that house at 3300 Baring. Shots that were impossible to have come from MOVE. Shots that could only have come from police who were responding to someone shot from inside. In statements never introduced to the trial, even police officers admit to seeing or hearing shots from 3300 Baring. In fact, one man and two women were arrested from that house after the shoot-in of MOVE headquarters. The man, Larry Manning, was identified by Officer Bundy as the same man he saw in the window of 3300 Baring. In addition to everyone inside the MOVE house, the two women from 3300 Baring were hand tested for gunpowder residue. Larry Manning was never tested! Why would a man involved in a shootout in which police officer was killed not be tested to see if he fired a weapon? In addition, there is no recorded of police every recovering the gun used at 3300 Baring. What is being covered up and why?
MOVE didn’t fired any shots, let alone the first shot.
MOVE didn’t kill James Ramp. YET THE MOVE 9 ARE STILL IN PRISON!
On March 13th 1998, Merle Africa, one of the MOVE 9, died under suspicious circumstances. We must ensure not another MOVE person dies in those prisons. DEMAND JUSTICE FOR THE MOVE 9!
After 30 years, Parole
In 2008 all surviving eight MOVE 9 members were denied parole due to blatant racism, hate, and religious persecution. The Inquirer quotes parole board spokesperson Leo Dunn as saying that parole had been denied on the grounds that the three MOVE prisoners had “minimized or denied the ‘nature and circumstances’ of the offense, ‘refused to accept responsibility’ and lacked remorse. He said the fourth reason for the rejection was the ‘negative recommendation by the prosecutor.” The prosecutor is DA Lynn Abraham, the same DA who was involved in signing the 1978 warrants, pressured the parole board to deny the MOVE 9 parole despite each prison recommending parole.
The parole board used several of the stipulations that MOVE spokesperson Ramon Africa had predicted that they would use to deny parole, including that they “refused to accept responsibility” and lacked remorse…. The unfairness and arguable illegality of this is so obvious, because how can you expect someone to “admit guilty” when they’ve always said they are innocent? Where does the remorse come from in someone is actually innocent? The “nature and circumstances” stipulation is a blatant re-sentence, since the serious nature of the charges were considered by the judge at the time when he ruled that MOVE should be eligible for parole after 30 years. How can this fairly be used to deny parole?
The MOVE 9 go before the parole board again in spring of 2009.
See www.onamove.com (http://www.onamove.com/) to TAKE ACTION!
Write/call/fax/email the parole board. Write/call/fax/email the media. Educate your community.
Bring the MOVE 9 HOME!
I copied this info from a flier at a MOVE 9 rally yesterday so no link to article and any spelling errors are of my own.
Since August 8, 1978, members of the MOVE Organization have been sitting in jail for a crime it was physically impossible for them to commit. After a brutal police raid on MOVE headquarters and a lengthy trail saturated with corruption, nine MOVE members were convicted of murdering one police officer who was killed with one bullet. MOVE is starting now, as of 1978, that the MOVE 9 are INNOCENT, but were nonetheless arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced 30 to 100 years each for a crime that government and police officers know that MOVE didn’t commit. The fact that MOVE people are still in prison today is a travesty of justice that testifies to this system’s intention to neutralize MOVE for nothing more than exposing the poison, disease, and oppression that this culture and the institutions that uphold it, continue to inflict on all life.
Brief History of MOVE
MOVE ‘s work is revolution. JOHN AFRICA’s revolution. A revolution to stop man’s system from imposing on life, to stop industry from poisoning the air, water, and soil and to put an end to enslavement to ALL life. People animals, ANY form of life. –MOVE
MOVE is a revolutionary organization which formed in the early 1970s to confront oppression on all levels and work towards animal liberation, environmental and social justice… the struggle to free all life from the imposition of this system. Naturally locked hair, communal living, a principled unity and commitment to this way of life often characterized MOVE people. MOVE members follow the example of a wise, perceptive black man name JOHN AFRICA. He taught that we need to destroy the illusion that humans are masters of the living world and to start living in harmony with, rather than above, natural law, as equal members of the community of life. Among their early activities, MOVE demonstrated against zoos, pet stores, and police brutality. MVOE confronted industrial polluters, mediated between gangs, fed poor children natural food, and generally helped uplift the community. But this holistic, consistent, and revolutionary example set by JOHN AFRICA and MOVE became a threat to those who profit from the subjugation of life. Throughout the 70s this conflict continued to escalate with Philadelphia police regularly beating and arresting MOVE members. Police even resorted to a starvation blockade of MOVE headquarters, beating several women into miscarriages, and on one occasion, stomping a three week-old MOVE child to death. MOVE, refusing to break or compromise MOVE belief in the face of such atrocity, took a militant stance against this abuse, forcing this system to either to the right thing or openly display their intentions of genocide against MOVE.
August 8th, 1978 Police Assault
By August of 1978, the corporate owned media has successfully lied to the public to reduce support for the MOVE while the city manufactured the appearance of a legal basis to arrest them. In the early hours of August 8th, based on illegal eviction orders an unjustified arrest warrants, hundreds of police officers armed for war, surrounded the headquarters of the MOVE Organization. Construction vehicles proceeded to tear down the fence and break out the windows with people still inside. Once police had concluded that all of the people had retreated to the basement for safety, they shot tear gas and thousands of gallons of water from deluge hoses towards the house. Gunshots rang out from a house across the street, and in response police throughout the area fired a barrage of bullets at the MOVE basement, which they knew contained children. MOVE adults found themselves wading in rising water, trying to keep children and animals from drowning, while they knew frenzy of police bullets came in their direction. When the gunfire subsided police officer James Ramp lay dead. As MOVE members, miraculously alive, attempted to surrender, they were beaten and arrested. Delbert Africa emerged from the basement with empty, outstretched arms and was smashed in the face with a police helmet and shotgun butt, dragged by his hair and savagely beat by four police officers. (Despite this event being caught on videotape and shown on television, all the officers involved were acquitted.) And although destroying the evidence of a crime scene, particularly on involving the death of a cop, is illegal, that day police sent in bulldozers. The area was leveled by noon, demolishing the house, the foundations, and the trees in the yard. No efforts were made to preserve the crime scene, inscribe chalk marks, or measure ballistics angles. In other words, all evidence that could have proved MOVE innocent was destroyed.
Q. Described this window that you were telling us about where you believe you saw these [first shots] come from?
A. There is a house at 33rd and Baring St. It is a long house. There is an addition to it in the back with a side door… there is a window above it. It was from that window.
--Richard Maloney’s testimony from the MOVE 9’s trial.
“A preliminary autopsy disclosed that slain officer, James Ramp, died of a bullet penetrating the left side of the base of the neck and traveling downward.” –Chief Inspector Joe Golden
Q. Who shot James Ramp?
A. I haven’t the faintest idea.
-- Trial Judge Edwin Malmed’s answer to a reporter’s question several days after convicting and sentencing the MOVE 9.
Justice Denied
With the house, trees, ect. completely destroyed the stage was set for one of the most extraordinary corrupt trails in recent Philadelphia history. Two people who were in the house with everyone else were not committed MOVE members. One was let go, the other given a light sentence, thus exposing the real intentions of this government towards committed MOVE members.
During the pre-trial hearings, the testimony of Assistant Medical Examiner, Dr. Robert Catherman was filed with discrepancies concerning the location of Ramp’s fatal wound. Also, Detective James O’Hara testified that tests from bullet fragments taken from Ramp’s body had not been completed. Despite all of this, and even with the house gone, Judge Merna Marhsall upheld that the MOVE 9 could be tried from murder based on photographs of MOVE headquarters. Even though there were no photos of police taking any weapons out of the house, no photos showing alleged angles that bullets traveled from MOVE to cops, and no photos or videos of MOVE people pointing or shooting guns from the basement on August 8th, 1978.
During the trial by Judge Edwin Malmed, the police raided another MOVE house, this time in Richmond, VA, where children, whose parents were August 8th defendants, were residing. The MOVE 9 demanded the trail be recessed until they could ascertain the whereabouts and welfare of their children. Malmed refused. Shortly after, due to the objections of concerned parents, he removed the MOVE 9 from the rest of the trial and illegally appointed back attorneys to represent MOVE despite their insistence that no one was to represent them.
The trial continued fro 47 days without the defendants in the courtroom. During this time, medical examiners who conducted the autopsy, Dr. Marvin E. Aronson, testified that the bullet that killed Ramp traveled through his body without deviation up or down. Despite all of this , on May 4th, 1980 Malmed pronounced all MOVE defendants guilty of third degree murder and excessively sentenced them to 30-100 years each. He said that he found MOVE guilty based on video tapes. Tapes that don’t show MOVE doing anything, but clearly show the police trying to kill MOVE, and tapes that all blanked out at the moment that Ramp was shot. Since the trial, all three video tapes were used as the basis of the MOVE 9’s conviction have mysteriously disappeared!
There were 12 people in the basement of MOVE headquarters that day, six feet below street level where James Ramp was located. Yet only the nine committed MOVE members were convicted. It would be physically impossible for any of them, let alone all nine of them to have shot Ramp at the angle reported. Moreover, they were being shot at, holding babies and animals from drowning. There’s no way anybody in that basement could have stood up against this type of water pressure, debris and simultaneously aim and shoot a gun.
The Truth Revealed
Despite the police claims that MOVE fired the first shot that day, thus attempting to justify their crimes against MOVE, many witnesses report the first shots coming from the house across the street from MOVE headquarters at the corner of Barring Street. Several bullet holes were in fact found in that house at 3300 Baring. Shots that were impossible to have come from MOVE. Shots that could only have come from police who were responding to someone shot from inside. In statements never introduced to the trial, even police officers admit to seeing or hearing shots from 3300 Baring. In fact, one man and two women were arrested from that house after the shoot-in of MOVE headquarters. The man, Larry Manning, was identified by Officer Bundy as the same man he saw in the window of 3300 Baring. In addition to everyone inside the MOVE house, the two women from 3300 Baring were hand tested for gunpowder residue. Larry Manning was never tested! Why would a man involved in a shootout in which police officer was killed not be tested to see if he fired a weapon? In addition, there is no recorded of police every recovering the gun used at 3300 Baring. What is being covered up and why?
MOVE didn’t fired any shots, let alone the first shot.
MOVE didn’t kill James Ramp. YET THE MOVE 9 ARE STILL IN PRISON!
On March 13th 1998, Merle Africa, one of the MOVE 9, died under suspicious circumstances. We must ensure not another MOVE person dies in those prisons. DEMAND JUSTICE FOR THE MOVE 9!
After 30 years, Parole
In 2008 all surviving eight MOVE 9 members were denied parole due to blatant racism, hate, and religious persecution. The Inquirer quotes parole board spokesperson Leo Dunn as saying that parole had been denied on the grounds that the three MOVE prisoners had “minimized or denied the ‘nature and circumstances’ of the offense, ‘refused to accept responsibility’ and lacked remorse. He said the fourth reason for the rejection was the ‘negative recommendation by the prosecutor.” The prosecutor is DA Lynn Abraham, the same DA who was involved in signing the 1978 warrants, pressured the parole board to deny the MOVE 9 parole despite each prison recommending parole.
The parole board used several of the stipulations that MOVE spokesperson Ramon Africa had predicted that they would use to deny parole, including that they “refused to accept responsibility” and lacked remorse…. The unfairness and arguable illegality of this is so obvious, because how can you expect someone to “admit guilty” when they’ve always said they are innocent? Where does the remorse come from in someone is actually innocent? The “nature and circumstances” stipulation is a blatant re-sentence, since the serious nature of the charges were considered by the judge at the time when he ruled that MOVE should be eligible for parole after 30 years. How can this fairly be used to deny parole?
The MOVE 9 go before the parole board again in spring of 2009.
See www.onamove.com (http://www.onamove.com/) to TAKE ACTION!
Write/call/fax/email the parole board. Write/call/fax/email the media. Educate your community.
Bring the MOVE 9 HOME!
I copied this info from a flier at a MOVE 9 rally yesterday so no link to article and any spelling errors are of my own.