Free mumia - on d-row & 100% innocent.

[pastradamus]

V intresting check it out & post your view's.

www.freemumia.org/intro.hotmail

[sabre]

Its a damn shame that the police are getting away with this

by the way the link to the intro doesnt work

(Edited by sabre at 6:11 pm on Feb. 3, 2002)

[CommieBastard]

i thought he wasnt on death row anymore?

[bleed3r]

this site (http://www.mumia.org/freedom.now/) has some more current info. mumia's death row sentence was appealed i believe, and is currently in a sort of "limbo" per say... he was denied right to a new trial.
if any of you aren't familiar with mumia's journalism i highly encourage you read one of his books or listen to some of his spoken word. he's an amazing writer.
writing aside, mumia's case is just a constant reminder of america's dysfunctional legal system.

[Pillar of Maturity]

I thought he's getting a new sentencing hearing, though.

[bleed3r]

me too. =/

[JiMMYBoyLe]

mumia should be free the charges that were brought up against him were false and the cops should not get away with this

[nkarne69]

I'm curious as to what everyone knows about Mumia. I've looked into both sides and despite my usual distrust of this government I think he killed a cop. Now I don't like my government but I do believe in some degree of civil order, murderers need to go to jail. I am in total opposition to the death penalty so I agree Mumia shouldn't be executed, however I think he's guilty and no matter how much I agree with his politics this doesn't change my opinion that he should be in jail.
But hey I could be wrong, so convince me that he's innocent, tell me why you all think he's innocent.

[ArgueEverything]

Quote: from nkarne69 on 5:55 am on Feb. 5, 2002
I'm curious as to what everyone knows about Mumia. I've looked into both sides and despite my usual distrust of this government I think he killed a cop. Now I don't like my government but I do believe in some degree of civil order, murderers need to go to jail. I am in total opposition to the death penalty so I agree Mumia shouldn't be executed, however I think he's guilty and no matter how much I agree with his politics this doesn't change my opinion that he should be in jail.
But hey I could be wrong, so convince me that he's innocent, tell me why you all think he's innocent.

im no expert on this, but i believe a mafia hitman as admitted guilt for the crime mumia was charged with - but the court refuses to hear his testimony.

[bleed3r]

im going to transcribe a spoken word speech for you, hope it changes something. here goes...

This is only supposed to happen in the movies. Henry Fonda in "The Wrong Man". Harrison Ford in "The Fugitive". North By Northwest. Thin Blue Line. An innocent person, when they least expect it, falls into an unbelievable chain of events, and finds themselves accused of a crime they could not possibly have committed. Every step in the justice system goes wrong. All seems hopeless as the camera rolls closer and closer to the death chamber, until finally, until the very last minute, the authorities are proven wrong, and the accused is set free to live happily ever after as the credits roll. After all, this is America, where these kind of nightmares do not happen. Because our justice system is "fair". Our justice system "works".

Now imagine -- You are a respected, award winning, and courageous journalist who's news reports are soemtimes critical of a notoriously violent and corrupt police department. Suddenly the nightmare happens to you. Shot through the liver at the scene of a crime. Instead of helping you, the cops beat you as you lie on the sidewalk, and allegedly beat you again inside the hospital. Not in Haiti. Not in China. But in the United States Of America. When you wake up from surgery, the nightmare is still there. You are the one accused of what the corporate media tells us is "the ultimate unforgiveable sin". -- Killing a police officer. You have no criminal record. Ballistics tests don't add up. There is plenty of evidence that you DID not, and COULD not commit this crime, but the nightmare just gets worse. Evidence that could clear you, "DISAPPEARS". Witnesses, "DISAPPEAR". A jude who has sentenced more than twice as many people to death than anyone else in the United States, DENIES you a competent lawyer, AND denies you the right to defend yourself. Appeals are denied by the very judges who ruled the opposite way in almost identical cases. Not in Mexico, not in Nigeria, but in the United States of America. And unlike the movies, this time a headline hungry governer salivates like a giggling crocodile, eager to put a black man to death with the stoke of a pen to enhance his political carreer.

Why is our government so hellbent on killing Mumia Abu-Jamal? Why are they so afraid of him? Of his voice? Of his way with words? To the point where even a poem about him and the frightening government lawlessness in his case is BANNED from national public radio? Is it what he says about our country, and ourselves? In words so powerful and eloquent that our children may one day study his now-banned radio commentaries in school, the way some now study the last words of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, before he and Nicola Sacco were executed by the U.S. government in 1927 for a crime they did not commit? The real crime being, they were anarchists. They were labor union activists. And if that's not enough... They were emmigrants.

What have we become? What are we letting ourselves become? This isn't the movies, this is what America HAS become. A 1995 FBI investigation leads to six Philidalphea police officers pleasing guilty to assault, framing defendants, stealing money, lying to obtain search warrants, and more, resulting in more than a hundred criminal convictions being overturned, yet still no new trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal. And what of all the other wrongfully convicted human beings WITHOUT Mumia's gifts for communication? Who are caged like animals in our mushrooming prison industrial complex system? Waiting to be killed by our government to satisfy Generation X, acute, America's sick thirst for human sacrifice and modern slavery. When Nigerian environmental and native rights activist Ken Saro Wiwa, was hanged on Trumped up murder charges, the Nigerian government and Shell Oil were condemned all over the world as outlaws. Now we are the outlaws of the world in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

And as more and more wealth gets sucked upward by people who don't need it, and mass rage toward Corporate America swells closer and closer to the boiling point, the official response is to keep the lid clamped on tighter, and tighter, and tighter, through more and more police state actions, just like the ones we fought in World War II to eliminate from the face of the earth. If this is allowed to keep going, what has happened to Mumia Abu-Jamal could happen to other innocent people. Like three guys in West Memphis, Arkansas who were convicted of the brutal murders of three small children. One is on death row, the other two got life, the evidence used to convict them was "They wore black clothing and listened to heavy metal." Free the West Memphis Three. If allowed to go far enough, this could happen to anyone. It could happen to me. It could happen to you.

-- Jello Biafra on Mumia Abu-Jamal

[bleed3r]

and ArgueEverything is correct, Arnold Beverly admitted to committing the crime Mumia was accused for, but judge Yohn denied his voice.

http://www.freemumia.com/
this site has something about it on the front page right now, but i'll paste it here just in case it's updated between now and when you get a chance to look at it.

Professional hitman, Arnold Beverly, has confessed to the cop killing that Mumia Abu-Jamal is on death row for. However, Federal Court Judge Yohn has shut Arnold Beverly out of Federal Court and refused to allow him to testify before the court and be cross-examined on his testimony. Also, Pennsylvania State Court Judge Dembe has ruled against allowing Arnold Beverly to testify. State prosecutors argued that whether Mumia is innocent or not does not matter, that timely filing of legal documents is key. They argued, and Judge Dembe agreed, that because the confession of Arnold Beverly was filed more than 60 days after Mumia heard of it, that Mumia cannot use this confession in court! In other words, that the timely filing of confessions and evidence is more important than the actual confession or evidence. We say innocence or guilt is primary! If there is no time limits on murder, there is no time limits on the confession of a murder. We can't allow the murder of an innocent man based on legalisms, racism and politics.
Judge Dembe made a similar ruling in the case of another man, Otis Peterkin. Mr. Peterkin had also missed very short filing deadlines. Recently the Federal District Court overturned Judge Dembe's decision saying she could not ignore serious prosecutorial conduct and important evidence of innocence because of missed filing deadlines. In other words, that innocence or guilt is more important than time limits. Read Mumia's new appeal to Judge Dembe.

[DaNatural]

someone asked to be convinced of mumia's innocence. Ok lets start with the trial and i will be able to show how this system has purposely tried to get this man in prison for a long time. First off the police tried on two seperate occasions to charge him for murder, thankfully he was not even in the country when it happened and his working records show that. The judge in his case was a former member of the police fraternal order so its clear whos side he was on. Secondly he was unable to defend himself and was appointed an incompetent public attorney. This attorney since then has signed an affadavit stating that he was incompetent to serve as a proper lawyer and thus demanding that their should be a new trial. Futhermore one of the reasons the judge said mumia couldnt defend himself was because the judge deemed that his dreadlocks intimated the jurors. in many of the hearings mumia was not allowed in the court room. To add more weight to this trial, the dead officers wife was on the news one night and said that while her husbands bloody shirt was being shown mumia apparently was smiling at her. This is a ridiculous claim and the court records show that during the period when the bloody shirt was shown mumia was not even in the damn court room. After his first trial which was a disgrace all of his appeals had been rejected and he was able trhought petitioning to hold off his injection.
Back to the scene of the crime Mumia was also shot and the bullets in the body did not match the bullets in mumia's gun and three seperate witnesses said they saw a third man fleeing the scene. It appeared to be a case in which they finally had him , he was close enough to the scene and they finally got him. Remember mumia was part of MOVE which had several altercations with the police and were extremely hated by the police force. I believe the man is innocent and should be freed but like many other revolutionaries he had been wrongfully accused. It's no different from former black panthers Geronimo Pratt and Mutulu Shakur, with pratt he wasnt even in the country and they charge him with rape and murder i beleive and as for shakur, there were no witnesses, no fingerprints, bullets nothing! and yet they found him guilty. Its ridiculous Fight The Power Muthafuckas

[MJM]

Article from Workers world.

Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Feb. 7, 2002
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------

MUMIA: SYMBOL OF STRUGGLE AGAINST GLOBAL REPRESSION

By Monica Moorehead

The case of revolutionary African American journalist Mumia
Abu-Jamal has evolved into a powerful symbol of the struggle
against the racist use of the death penalty in the U.S.

Tens of thousands of activists here and around the world
have for years proclaimed that Abu-Jamal is innocent and his
conviction was a political frame-up. Now an authority on
criminology has written on the significance of Abu-Jamal's
case and the movement to free him.

In an op-ed piece in the Jan. 21 Newsday--a daily newspaper
read by millions of workers in the New York region--Paul
Leighton, assistant professor of criminology at Eastern
Michigan University, writes that "Abu-Jamal's case embodies
all that's wrong with the death penalty for both sides of
the issue. Supporters see Abu-Jamal as wrongly convicted, an
all too frequent occurrence fueling support for a moratorium
on executions endorsed by Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day
O'Connor. Abu-Jamal's supporters see the black activist (who
has no previous arrests for violence) as a symbol of racial
oppression, an articulate defendant personifying the
statistics that blacks make up 11 percent of the population,
46 percent of prisoners and 54 percent on death row."

Leighton co-authored the book "Class, Race, Gender and
Crime: Social Realities of Justice in America."

In his Newsday piece, "Death Penalty Flunks Fairness Test,"
Leighton raises the recent ruling of Federal District Court
Judge William Yohn, who was assigned to Abu-Jamal's first
round of federal appeals. This past December, Yohn threw out
Abu-Jamal's original 1982 death sentence. His decision was
based mainly on just one of the 29 constitutional rights
violations charged in a brief submitted to Yohn's court more
than two years ago.

However, Yohn did not overturn Abu-Jamal's conviction.

Yohn cites "inadequate" instructions by hanging judge Albert
Sabo to the jury in the sentencing phase after the first-
degree murder conviction. Yohn did not find that Black
people had been illegally eliminated from the jury panel
during the original trial, but did allow Abu-Jamal's
attorneys to file an appeal for additional hearings on this
question.

Leighton's op-ed says, "Abu-Jamal's death sentence becomes
life imprisonment without parole unless the district
attorney starts another sentencing hearing within 180 days
of the Dec. 18 decision in this case--a difficult task after
20 years."

Unfortunately, Leighton did not raise the question of Abu-
Jamal's innocence. The courts have so far refused to hear
the 1999 videotaped confession by Arnold Beverly, a self-
proclaimed hit man for the mob, who says that he killed
Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner on Dec. 9, 1981.

Philadelphia courts have refused to hear other eyewitnesses
who now say their original testimony against Abu-Jamal was
false, made under police pressure.

At least 99 people on death row have been released since
1976 on the basis of suppressed evidence that proved their
innocence. Most of these wrongly convicted were released
without having to go through a new trial.

Leighton presents statistics to prove that the U.S. criminal
justice system is riddled from top to bottom with bias
against people of color. The U.S. has more people on death
row than any other industrialized country--an estimated
3,600.

NOT A VICTIM BUT A REVOLUTIONARY

Why is the state hell-bent on legally lynching Mumia Abu-
Jamal?

Even before his imprisonment, Abu-Jamal was an award-winning
journalist who wrote groundbreaking articles on police
brutality. When he joined the Black Panthers as a teenager,
it made him a wanted man in the eyes of the Fraternal Order
of Police and the FBI.

He continues to write from his tiny maximum-security cell on
the struggles here and abroad, while simultaneously mapping
out a legal strategy for his state and federal appeals. His
columns--thought provoking, inspirational and highly
political--expose the contradictions endemic to the
capitalist system. Many of his columns are moving solidarity
statements with working and oppressed peoples waging heroic
campaigns against imperialist and neocolonial domination--
from Palestine to Vieques to the young anti-globalization
forces.

The most progressive and revolutionary currents see the
connection between Abu-Jamal and the struggle against
corporate exploitation. Racist and political repression by
the courts, police, military and the prisons is meant to
terrorize those who have the most to gain from overturning
this economic system of making profits at the expense of
human needs.

This is a reality that Leighton does not understand. He says
the death penalty "has to be imposed fairly and consistently
or not at all."

Abu-Jamal is a class-conscious revolutionary who has allowed
the movement for social change and justice to hoist his case
high to help expose and resist the rotten worldwide system
of capitalism. His words and deeds have propelled millions
into activism.

The challenge for the worldwide movement for social justice
is to effectively engage the masses to embrace all of the
issues that embody the struggle to free Mumia Abu-Jamal.
This includes demanding the abolition of the death penalty
as well as police brutality, like that threatened by New
York City police against protesters at the billionaire
gathering of the World Economic Forum.

[Monica Moorehead is a national coordinator of the Millions
for Mumia project of the International Action Center.]
- END -