Mumia’s Life Is On the Line

[fredbergen]

[FONT="Century Gothic"]November 2009[/FONT]

[FONT="Century Gothic"]Appeals to Obama’s Top Cop Eric Holder Spread Deadly Illusions[/FONT]

[FONT="Century Gothic"]Mumia’s Life Is On the Line:
Mobilize Labor/Black Power to Free Him Now![/FONT]


[FONT="Arial"]Internationalist Group at Harlem rally for Mumia Abu-Jamal, 8 May 2009. (Internationalist photo)[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]The threat to Mumia Abu-Jamal’s life is increasingly ominous. The former Black Panther Party spokesman, author and world-renowned radio journalist has been held on Pennsylvania’s death row since 1982 for a crime he did not commit. After federal district court judge William Yohn in 2001 set aside the death sentence pending a new sentencing hearing, many felt the danger of Mumia’s execution was past. Not so. In a November 11 legal update, his lead attorney, Robert Bryan, wrote: “There is an escalated effort by the authorities to see him die at the hands of the executioner. This is the most dangerous time for Mumia since his 1981 arrest.” While the U.S. Supreme Court has turned down Jamal’s two appeals, it has yet to decide whether to hear the prosecution’s appeal seeking to overturn Judge Yohn’s order. If it were to rule in favor of the prosecution, this would open the way for Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell to issue a third warrant of execution, which he has vowed to do. Even if the high court lets the decision of the Third Circuit Court stand, a new sentencing hearing could not rule on Mumia’s innocence but only decide between the death penalty or life imprisonment without parole.[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]Contrary to the misplaced expectations of many, the Obama administration is not about to save Mumia. It is up to us to mobilize in action the wide support internationally among workers, blacks, intellectuals, defenders of democratic rights and opponents of the racist death penalty to prevent them from silencing the “voice of the voiceless.”[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]Mumia was a marked man in the eyes of the ruling class long before 9 December 1981, when he was shot in the chest and savagely beaten by Philadelphia police. He was a thorn in the side of local rulers who run the city with massive police power. Republican mayor (and former police chief) Frank Rizzo warned Mumia in 1978 that “you’re going to have to be held responsible and accountable” for his reporting of cop assaults on the predominantly black MOVE organization. Charged with killing police officer Daniel Faulker, Jamal was railroaded in a frame-up trial and sentenced to die the following year. (Democrat Rendell was at the time the district attorney who oversaw Mumia’s prosecution.) He has been in isolation on death row ever since, while the cops, the media and the government howl for his blood. But Mumia is innocent. The ballistics, forensics and photographic evidence all contradict the prosecution’s claims. Another man confessed to the killing and explained the circumstances, while multiple eyewitnesses saw the killer flee the scene on foot as Mumia sat on the curb, bleeding nearly to death from a police bullet to his lung. Mumia’s “crime” is that he survived.[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]Around the world, hundreds of thousands have marched for this courageous champion of oppressed. Trade unions representing millions of members have rallied to the defense of Mumia. His dispatches from prison (“Live from Death Row”) are broadcast and reprinted internationally. He has been made an honorary citizen of Paris. But in the U.S., Jamal has been the object of a bipartisan ruling-class assault. When a suburb of Paris named a street after him, Congress passed a resolution by 368 to 31 condemning this and declaring Mumia a murderer. Many left groups have been calling for a new trial, as if the racist U.S. judicial system would allow Jamal to demonstrate his innocence. With that avenue closed off, they are currently petitioning Barack Obama’s attorney General, Eric Holder, to order a civil rights investigation of Mumia’s case. Yet Obama supports the death penalty, specifically in the case of “cop killers,” as Mumia has been labeled. Now right-wingers are revving up a propaganda barrage with the launching of a sinister pseudo-documentary film, Barrel of a Gun, to retail the web of lies that has been spun to justify the legal lynching.[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal has come to symbolize the racist death penalty in the United States, a heritage of slavery that is ever present. The Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, of which the IG is the U.S. section, have fought for working-class mobilization, including strike action, to free Mumia. Our comrades of the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil, on 23 April 1999 sparked a first-ever work stoppage for Mumia’s freedom, a statewide action by the teachers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (They did so again on 7 May 2008.) The next day ILWU dock workers union in the U.S. shut down every port on the West Coast declaring, “An injury to one is an injury to all, Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!” Other unions including Postal Workers, Farm Workers, SEIU, as well as Seattle, San Francisco and other local labor councils are on record in defense of Mumia. It is urgent to expand this support into powerful labor/black action, appealing to the integrated union movement to join with the black, Latino and immigrant poor to demand that he be liberated. Citywide conferences, marches and job actions to save Mumia and demand his freedom are needed, now![/FONT]

[FONT="Century Gothic"]No Justice in the Capitalist Courts: Mobilize Workers Power![/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]The tight-knit ruling class in Philadelphia is dead-set on the drive to execute Mumia. Every candidate for Philadelphia district attorney in the recent elections swore that he would continue to seek the death penalty. From Mumia’s trial judge, Albert Sabo, a lifetime member of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) who said within earshot of a court stenographer that he was going to help the prosecution “fry that n----r,” on up to the Supreme Court, the courts have done such blatant injustice to his appeals that Mumia’s defenders have nicknamed this defiance of logic and legal precedent “the Mumia exception.” But this is not an exception, it is the rule: there is no justice for the oppressed in the capitalist courts! And that is doubly and triply true for a black man and fighter for justice targeted by the police, whose racist crimes he has widely publicized.[/FONT]

[FONT="Arial"]Internationalist photo[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]At the national level, Democrats and Republicans alike are fiercely loyal to their cops. They will not go against the will of the FOP on such a high-profile case. The multiracial working class, whose cause Mumia has so movingly championed, is his natural ally and has the power to free him and bring down the whole racist injustice system, death penalty and all. Yet standing in the way of the all-out struggle that it will take to stop the execution is the loyalty of many of Mumia’s defenders to the racist capitalist state. His former attorneys Leonard Weinglass and Dan Williams refused to present the testimony of Arnold Beverly, the man who shot police officer Faulkner, arguing that it was not “believable” that the police and prosecution would knowingly frame an innocent man – their client! Why not? The cops do it all the time, they even have a name for it: testilying. Solicitous of approval from liberals and bourgeois politicians who believe that Mumia is guilty, various reformist groups preferred to call for a “new trial” in the capitalist courts, rather than simply demand that an innocent man be freed.[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]This was highlighted when Mumia’s lawyers argued an appeal before the U.S. Third Circuit court in May 2007, detailing how police suborned perjured testimony and how blacks were systematically excluded from Jamal’s jury. Prosecutors peremptorily challenged 11 of 15 potential black jurors and only 4 of 28 whites, in a city with over 40 percent black population. A district attorney’s training video later surfaced instructing Philadelphia prosecutors on how and why to knock blacks off juries. The evidence of racist discrimination in jury selection was so overwhelming that liberals and reformists thought that Mumia’s “day in court” had arrived. Jeff Mackler, leader of the San Francisco-based Mobilization to Free Mumia, wrote that “what appeared to be unfolding” in the Philadelphia courtroom was that “the systematic race and class bias” of the U.S. criminal “justice” system was being “set aside” and that “Mumia Abu-Jamal, could win a new trial and freedom” ( “New Trial and Freedom for Mumia?” Socialist Action, June 2007).[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]However, on 27 March 2008, a three-judge panel of the circuit court turned down Mumia’s appeal and called for a new sentencing hearing with only two possible outcomes: death or life in prison without parole. Still, Mackler’s faith in bourgeois justice was not shaken. He told National Public Radio on 1 April 2008: “We’re confident that the decision of Judge Ambro, who was the minority out of the three... will be upheld.” Yet four months later the full circuit court confirmed the March ruling. Commenting later on the appeal to the Supreme Court by Mumia’s lawyers, Mackler wrote: “If the Court denies the petition, Mumia’s legal options are finished” (Socialist Action, August 2008). And now that the Supreme Court has in fact refused to hear Mumia’s appeal, Mackler grasps at straws, praising the “important campaign” for a civil rights investigation by the Justice Department, and opining that Pennsylvania officials might “let the 180-day clock run out” on a new sentencing hearing, leaving Mumia with life without parole (Socialist Action, November 2009). Beyond “second guessing the courts,” in which he has repeatedly been wrong, he makes only the vaguest reference to “the struggles of the masses.”[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]The string of legal reverses for Mumia continues. On 6 October 2008 the Supreme Court rejected the appeal for a new trial on the basis of affidavits proving that the prosecution and police suborned perjury and intimidated witnesses in Mumia’s 1982 trial. Mumia’s lawyers also filed an appeal of the Third Circuit’s July 2008 decision, asking for a new sentencing phase of the trial because of the exclusion of blacks from the jury. On April 6, the Supreme Court refused to hear that appeal as well, despite all the evidence that prosecutors had violated the standards laid out in the landmark 1986 case of Batson v. Kentucky, where the court ruled that systematic exclusion of blacks from juries is grounds for overturning guilty verdicts. The Court’s delay on the prosecution appeal is likely because it intends to rule first on another case, Smith v. Spisak, of a neo-Nazi from Ohio who ranted to the jury against blacks and Jews and confessed to three hate crime murders. This is bourgeois “justice” in racist America: if the death sentence for the neo-Nazi murderer is reinstated despite misleading jury instructions, then this precedent will be almost certainly used against Mumia, an innocent black man and an opponent of racism.[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]To be clear: we support Mumia’s lawyers using every legal avenue open to them. But for his supporters to raise the political call for a “new trial” is an expression of confidence in the capitalist courts that can only disorient protests. The battle for Mumia’s freedom depends on bringing to bear a power greater than racist bourgeois “justice”: the power of the working class.[/FONT]

[FONT="Century Gothic"]Illusions in the Democrats are Deadly[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]What’s striking in the face of the unrelenting blows Mumia has taken from the courts is the absence of mass mobilizations recently by his supporters. It’s not hard to figure out why: it’s the same reason that there have been no major antiwar demonstrations for the last two years, even though the war in Iraq and Afghanistan rages on and is increasingly unpopular. The reformist left joined the liberals in placing their hopes in the Democratic Party and Barack Obama. As a result, they now appeal to Attorney General Eric Holder to save Mumia. It doesn’t phase them that they are beseeching the boss of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the same FBI that had Mumia under surveillance since he was 15 years old and whose longtime chief J. Edgar Hoover declared in 1968: “The Negro youth and moderate[s] must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries.” This was no idle threat: at least 38 Black Panthers were murdered by Hoover’s agents. The FBI rode with the KKK as they gunned down civil rights workers in Mississippi. And now they are supposed to “investigate” violations of Mumia’s civil rights? Think again.[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]Numerous public figures and even some capitalist politicians in the U.S. and around the world have signed their names to petitions calling to free Mumia. We welcome their support for an innocent class war prisoner like Mumia. But it is quite a different matter for campaigners for Mumia to tell people to look to and place their hopes in the capitalist rulers. Yet this is the standard policy of the groups like the Workers World Party and the International Action Center it leads, which are the loudest pushers of the civil rights petition to Holder. Workers World (20 November 2008) declared triumphantly: “The election victory of Barack Obama will go down in history as a triumphant step forward in the struggle against racism and national oppression in the U.S.” History hasn’t exactly turned out that way, as any Marxist could have foretold. The Internationalist (March-April 2009) headlined: “Obama Presidency: U.S. Imperialism Tries a Makeover,” and “What ‘Post-Racial’ America: Barack Obama vs. Black Liberation.” We warned: “Those who looked to the election of a black president to save Mumia could be cruelly awakened from their illusions.”[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]More than a sign of desperation by legalistic liberals and wretched reformists once their hopes in a “new trial” were dashed, this appeal is also a product of misplaced “hope” in the new commander in chief of U.S. imperialism. Although the election of a black president in this deeply racist country represented a significant social shift, his administration and party are pillars of American capitalism, where 40 percent of death row inmates are black and one in nine young black men is in prison. At the NAACP convention in New York last August, where Eric Holder spoke, supporters of the IAC/WWP, the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition held a banner saying: “Obama & Holder/We Need You Now!/Free Mumia.” “We need” these Democrats?! The Amsterdam News (16 July) reported that “hope is based on the premise that having a Black attorney general, a Black president” would mean “Abu-Jamal’s chances for a new trial ought to be better.”[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]But the premise is wrong. The Democratic Party of Obama also includes the black former mayor of Philadelphia, Wilson Goode, whose police firebombed the house of the MOVE organization on 13 May 1985, killing eleven black men, women and children and destroying over 60 homes in the Osage Avenue neighborhood in the ensuing blaze. The persecution of Mumia Abu-Jamal is due to the class interests of the bourgeoisie, including its few black members. “Black faces in high places does not freedom make,” as Mumia wrote in August of last year, analyzing what an Obama victory would mean. He added, “Indeed, in times of Black uprising and mass discontent, Black mayors seem the perfect instrument of repression, for they dispel charges of racism.” And as long ago as 2004, Obama has said that killing a police officer (which Mumia was falsely found guilty of) should be “death penalty eligible.”[/FONT]

[FONT="Century Gothic"]The Obama Administration and Mumia[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]Significantly, the first black president was endorsed by Michael Smerconish, a reactionary Philadelphia radio commentator who is the most prominent spokesperson for the anti-Mumia lynch mob (he co-authored a book, Murdered by Mumia, with the widow of police officer Faulkner). This right-wing Republican who brags about his close ties to George Bush has made a concerted effort to line up Obama for the execution of Mumia, including in direct conversations. Late in the campaign last year, Smerconish asked the Democratic candidate where he stood on the Mumia case. Obama replied that he wasn’t familiar with the details of the case, but added: “So let me just lay out a very clear principle: In my mind, if somebody killed a police officer, they deserve the death penalty or life in prison” (Philadelphia Daily News, 20 August).[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]When the Fraternal Order of Police interviewed Barack Obama and John McCain, two of its questions were about Mumia Abu-Jamal and Daniel Faulkner. The FOP wanted to be sure that the two senators would have voted for the House resolution it sponsored in 2006 retailing the prosecution slanders of Mumia and condemning the French city of St. Denis for naming a street after him. Obama reassured the cops: “I deplore acts to harm or kill our nation’s police officers, and oppose efforts to glorify those who commit such acts.” While the FOP endorsed the Republican McCain for president, it lobbied for Eric Holder’s confirmation as Attorney General. Holder shortly thereafter addressed the FOP’s May 15 “National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service,” where he issued a chilling warning to “all those out there who would do harm to police officers”: “We are coming to get you. You will be arrested, you will be prosecuted, and you will be sentenced to the full extent of the law.” While liberals and reformist appeal to capitalist politicians like Obama and Holder, one has to ask, why would the makers of these bloodthirsty proclamations lift a finger to assure a “fair trial” for a man the police swear is a “cop killer”?[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]Throughout his campaign, Obama reassured the bourgeoisie that he would not do anything to oppose racism. Then in July, when a Cambridge cop arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the foremost black intellectuals in the nation, for “disorderly conduct” at the door of his own home, Obama at first said the police had “acted stupidly.” He was clearly trying to avoid calling the arrest “racist,” which it clearly was. But in the face of a firestorm in the conservative and liberal media over this mild rebuke, Obama quickly backtracked. More recently there was the case of White House staffer Van Jones, a black former leftist. For months, rightist bigots led by moronic Fox News commentator Glenn Beck had frothed at the mouth over Obama’s “green jobs” advisor Jones. The administration ignored their racist rants, until on Thursday, September 3 it was reported that Jones had once supported Mumia. By Saturday, Jones had “resigned.” Since then, the right-wing media frenzy against the “communist cop killer” Mumia has continued (see Linn Washington, “Fox Finds a New Black Boogeyman,” CounterPunch, 9 November).[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]As for Eric Holder, he didn’t get to be the bourgeoisie’s top law enforcement officer without a solid résumé. Before becoming the Attorney General, Holder was a leading corporate attorney with the firm of Covington and Burling, where he defended Chiquita Brands International against charges of funding the right-wing mercenary army that massacres union members, peasants and indigenous leaders in Colombia. In 2008, Holder filed a “friend of the court” brief to the Supreme Court supporting Washington, D.C.’s ban on handguns. Washington is the home of a majority black population that the ruling class would keep absolutely disenfranchised and powerless and which, like everyone else, has every right to hold arms. “Weapons possession,” incidentally, was one of the pretexts for the 1985 Philly police firebombing bombing of MOVE. Today, Obama’s Attorney General defends warrantless wiretapping – arbitrary spying on telephone calls without even the fig-leaf of judicial permission – and has called on a federal judge in San Francisco to dismiss a lawsuit against the policy because even hearing the case in court would be “jeopardizing ongoing intelligence activities.”[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]In order to court bourgeois liberals, judges and lawyers who are concerned more with bolstering the pretense of justice in U.S. courts than with Mumia’s actual innocence, Jamal’s “socialist” defenders first prioritized the call for a “new trial.” Now the petition to Holder for a civil rights investigation “cordially” does not say that Mumia is innocent, does not call for him to be freed, does not call for a new trial, does not even demand that the state not kill him! This can only demoralize and disorient those who would fight to save Mumia.[/FONT]

[FONT="Century Gothic"]Don’t Bow to Capitalist Class “Justice”[/FONT]

[FONT="Arial"]"Freedom for Mumia – Down with the Racist Death Penalty!" Banner of the SEPE teachers union in Rio de Janeiro, April 2008. (Photo: Vanguarda Operária)[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]The frame-up of Mumia and the fight to free him go to the heart of the nature of black oppression in capitalist America. The racist death penalty goes right back to the system of slave labor on which the American bourgeois republic was founded. It continues today because black oppression can’t be overcome by passing a few civil rights laws, which are now being cruelly reversed, or by electing a black millionaire president (Obama’s 2007 income: $4.2 million). Over the past century, the Democratic party of Eric Holder and Barack Obama has been the preferred war party for U.S. imperialism, just as it is the capitalists’ party of choice for maintaining their racist rule during times of economic crisis, precisely because of the illusions that blacks and workers have that this is “their” party. Who, after all, would want to “sacrifice” for George W. Bush? Black oppression is inseparable from the class question in this country, where the capitalist order rests on the forcible containment of the mass of the black population at the most exploited and impoverished layer of the working class, subject to pervasive discrimination and victimized by a sadistic regime of police brutality and mass imprisonment.[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]Petitioning the U.S.’ top prosecutor to defend the civil rights of Mumia Abu-Jamal shows that his liberal and reformist supporters who previously put their faith in a “new trial” truly believe that Mumia’s “options are finished” and are just going through the motions. But the millions who suffer pervasive racist humiliation at the hands of the police, who know by their own experience that the prosecutors and the cops have nothing to do with “justice” or “civil rights” are also those with the power to shut down Philadelphia, New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago and every major city in the United States. One group, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee associated with it have called to free Mumia and have done valuable work on his behalf, including unearthing the Beverly testimony that proves his innocence. In the past, the SL/PDC called to mobilize the power of labor and blacks to free Mumia. But when ILWU dock workers did so, they sneeringly dismissed it, while remaining silent about the work stoppages for Mumia in Brazil. Today they talk in the abstract of a fight for his freedom “based on a class-struggle opposition to the capitalist rulers.” But a real effort to build a workers party to lead socialist revolution, in the U.S. and internationally, means fighting to mobilize workers action to save Mumia. Otherwise it is empty talk.[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]Like James P. Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, we place no faith in capitalist “justice,” and all faith in the power of the working masses. Brazilian teachers and West Coast dock workers in the U.S. have shown that working-class action to free Mumia Abu-Jamal is possible. This past July, the ILWU once again called for freedom for Jamal, along with Troy Davis and Kevin Cooper – two other innocent black men on death row – as well as for native American activist Leonard Peltier and the San Francisco 8, former Black Panthers, all of them framed by the government. If in New York City alone the unions that are on record in defense of Mumia were to spark mass labor-black action, it would send shock waves around the country and the world.[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]The policy of moderation and respectability has led to dwindling numbers at protests to support Mumia at the very hour when militant protest led by the working class is most necessary. What is needed is a loud, clear and urgent call to for the workers to use their power to defend Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is on death row because he forcefully spoke out for working-class and oppressed people, and who has continued to be a powerful voice against capitalist injustice even from his prison cell. The multi-racial working class that makes everything in capitalist society move can and must make the racist judges bow to its power.[/FONT]

[FONT="Times New Roman"]For 27 years, Mumia Abu-Jamal has been on death row for being a professed black revolutionary whose courageous indictments of racist American capitalism have earned him the hatred of the ruling class. All defenders of democratic rights, all opponents of racism, all partisans of the working class and the oppressed must now move heaven and earth to free Mumia and abolish the racist death penalty! ■[/FONT]

[fredbergen]

[FONT="Century Gothic"]May 2008[/FONT]

[FONT="Century Gothic"]Brazilian Teachers Strike Again for Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal[/FONT]

The following article is adapted from Vanguarda Operária No. 10, May-June 2008, published by our comrades of the Brazilian section of the League for the Fourth International.

For a second time, the teachers union of the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro, SEPE-RJ, set an important example in calling a strike this past May 7 in defense of public education and demanding “freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal.” Known as “the voice of the voiceless,” the former Black Panther and world-renowned journalist has been imprisoned on Pennsylvania’s death row for the last 26 years, more than a quarter century, for a crime of which he is entirely innocent.

The SEPE has fought for Mumia’s freedom since 1999, when at the initiative of the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil (LQB) and its affiliated Class Struggle Committee (CLC) the teachers union called the first-ever labor action for Mumia. During a two-hour work stoppage, events were held at schools around the state to publicize Mumia’s case and denounce the racist death penalty. The next day, dock workers in the United States shut down all West Coast ports for ten hours demanding freedom for Jamal.

This time not a single voice among Rio teachers objected when spokesmen for the CLC raised the proposal to include the demand for freedom for Mumia in the May 7 strike. In the face of the worsening legal situation for Jamal, whose appeal for a new trial was recently rejected by the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals, the SEPE voted to again stop work, calling on other unions to join it in demanding freedom for Jamal. A notice placed on the union’s web site stated:

“The latest of these judicial farces, like those that preceded it, shows that the exploited and oppressed can have no confidence in the racist injustice system. We call on the movement to include in its struggles, strikes and marches and various forms of mobilization the demand for the immediate freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal!”

The same appeal was included in motions passed by the Intersindical union federation at its meeting on April 12-13, and by the national meeting of women of the Conlutas union federation on April 20-21.

The SEPE faced enormous difficulties in massively mobilizing Rio teachers for the strike, due to successive attacks by the state government of the PMDB (Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement, a bourgeois party) and the PT (Workers Party) and their satellites. Now the SEPE struck a second time on behalf of Mumia, who has said that one of his heroes is Zumbi, the leader of the escaped slaves of Palmares, who was killed fighting the Portuguese colonial army on 20 November 1695. Every year the anniversary of his death is commemorated in Brazil as a day of black awareness.

A special issue of the union newspaper on Mumia was put out for the strike recounting the facts of his case and the SEPE’s 1999 work stoppage for his freedom (see above). More than 20 chapters of the teachers union took papers to distribute and to inform their ranks of the strike. Particularly active were the locals in the steel city of Volta Redonda (where the LQB/CLC originated); Valencia, which gave full support; and São Gonçalo, a working-class suburb of Rio across the Bay. The issue contained a poem by Marilia Machado, a supporter of the LQB/CLC, titled “Prelude for Jamal” (see below).

In the discussion in the SEPE state assembly on the motion, representatives of the CLC emphasized that the strike by the educational workers of the SEPE/RJ, most of whom are women, was taking place amid generalized unrest. Not only was the union fighting back against attacks on teachers launched by the “militarized popular front” government of Brazilian president Lula (leader of the PT) and state governor Sergio Cabral (of the PMDB), along with their junior partner, the fascistic mayor of the city of Rio de Janeiro, César Maia.

It was also a response to the epidemic of dengue fever which has beset the poor and black population of the city of Rio this summer as never before, claiming children among its victims. This came on top of the massacre of 70 people, mostly young black men, during raids on the favelas (slums) in connection with the Pan-American Games held in the city last year. The CLC denounced that police operation, which served as a training grounds for the paramilitary National Security Force (FSN), which has been practicing in the hills of Rio to invade and kill in Haiti.

The Brazilian military commands the multinational “United Nations” force that is policing the black republic in the Caribbean as mercenaries for U.S. imperialism, which has its hands full in Iraq and Afghanistan. The LQB/CLC has called to mobilize workers action to drive the Brazilian military out of Haiti, and out of the Rio slums.

The CLC has always stressed that the fight to free Jamal cannot be separated from other demands of the working class, and of working women in the educational sector in particular. In their articles, the LQB and CLC point out that the liberation of the black population can only come about through socialist revolution. They emphasize that it is necessary to build a revolutionary workers party as a “tribune of the people,” as Lenin put it, which takes up all the demands of the exploited and oppressed.

The CLC’s call since 1999 to mobilize the working class to free Jamal, which was embraced by the SEPE-RJ, the largest union of working women in the state of Rio de Janeiro, which has twice stopped work on behalf of the imprisoned black leader in the United States, marks an unprecedented and historic step in the workers struggles in Brazil. ■

[FONT="Arial"]Prelude for Jamal
By Marilia Machado


You are the struggle of all of us:
Of those who have gone before
and those yet to come.

The essence of freedom,
reaching for liberation.
You are those who live in Brazil
or in any other nation.
The pain of whoever is a slave
in a world of so many masters,
of the victims of so many horrors
in the countryside, city and slums.
You are one of those who write history
with strength and conviction
A hero without fantasy
who doesn’t serve to alienate,
the voice which refuses to be silent
in the face of so much oppression,
a desire for justice,
a cry from the heart.
You are a scream in the throat
of every black person who cries,
of every human marked
by cruel tortures.
You are peace, and sometimes war.
You are Mumia Abu Jamal.[/FONT]
Marilia Machado has two volumes of published poetry and workers as a teacher in São Gonçalo. In 1997 she was named Muse of Poetry of the city of Rio de Janeiro.

[Communist]

[FONT=Times New Roman]ALERT*ALERT*ALERT*

This week there was a huge development in Mumia's case.

According to a posting yesterday on the US Supreme Court's website, the Court has scheduled a conference for this Friday, January 15, to discuss Mumia's case. Specifically, they are looking at the Philadelphia DA's request to have Mumia executed without a new sentencing hearing.

The Supreme Court has apparently been waiting for the ruling on the Spisak case, which was also released this week. In Spisak, the court ruled to reinstate Spisak's death sentence, but it is still unclear what impact this ruling will have. The common thread between Mumia and Spisak is the "Mills" precedent, and the Court yesterday ruled that Spisak's case did not meet the standards of Mills.

JOIN International Concerned Family & Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal on Monday, Jan. 18th in Philadelphia for petitioning outside a downtown Martin Luther King, Jr. luncheon in Philadelphia. Meet at 17th & Arch Sts. at 11am.

It is very possible that the Supreme Court may rule on this case on Tuesday. This is a critical moment for Mumia.

The petitions we will be circulating all on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama to immediately launch an investigation into the long history of civil rights and Constitutional violations in this case.

For more information call: 215-476-8812


This is the link to the Supreme Court posting:

http://origin.www.supremecourtus.gov/docket/08-652.htm

SOME BACKGROUND:

This past March, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Abu-Jamal’s appeal for a new guilt-phase trial, but the Court has yet to rule on whether to hear the appeal made simultaneously by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, which seeks to execute Abu-Jamal without granting him a new penalty-phase trial.

In March 2008, the Third Circuit Court affirmed Federal District Court Judge William Yohn’s 2001 decision “overturning” the death sentence. Citing the 1988 Mills v. Maryland precedent, Yohn had ruled that sentencing forms used by jurors and Judge Albert Sabo’s instructions to the jury were potentially confusing, and that therefore jurors could have mistakenly believed that they had to unanimously agree on any mitigating circumstances in order to consider them as weighing against a death sentence.

According to the 2001 ruling, affirmed in 2008, if the DA wants to re-instate the death sentence, the DA must call for a new penalty-phase jury trial. In such a penalty hearing, new evidence of Abu-Jamal’s innocence could be presented, but the jury could only choose between execution and a life sentence without parole.

The DA is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court against this 2008 affirmation of Yohn’s ruling. If the court rules in the DA’s favor, Abu-Jamal can be executed without benefit of a new sentencing hearing. If the U.S. Supreme Court rules against the DA’s appeal, the DA must either accept the life sentence for Abu-Jamal or call for the new sentencing hearing. Meanwhile, Mumia Abu-Jamal has never left his death row cell.




PETITION TO PRESIDENT OBAMA:

Dear All,

please help to spread the petition to President Obama against the death penalty and for Mumia Abu-Jamal:

http://www.petitiononline.com/Mumialaw/petition.html

To: President Barack Obama WE THE UNDERSIGNED petition you to speak out against the death penalty for Mumia Abu-Jamal, and all the men, women and children facing execution around the world. This ultimate form of punishment is unacceptable in a civilized society and undermines human dignity. (U.N. General Assembly, Moratorium on the Use of the Death Penalty, Resolution 62/149, Dec. 18, 2007; reaffirmed, Resolution 63/168, Dec. 18, 2008.)

Mr. Abu-Jamal, a renowned black journalist and author, has been on Pennsylvania’s death row for nearly three decades. Even though you do not have direct control over his fate as a state death-row inmate, we ask that you as a moral leader on the world stage call for a global moratorium on the death penalty in his and all capital cases. Mr. Abu-Jamal has become a global symbol, the “Voice of the Voiceless”, in the struggle against capital punishment and human-rights abuses. There are over 20,000 awaiting execution around the globe, with over 3,000 on death rows in the United States.

The 1982 trial of Mr. Abu-Jamal was tainted by racism, and occurred in Philadelphia which has a history of police corruption and discrimination. Amnesty International, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, “determined that numerous aspects of this case clearly failed to meet international standards safeguarding the fairness of legal proceedings. [T]he interests of justice would best be served by the granting of a new trial to Mumia Abu-Jamal. The trial should fully comply with international standards of justice and should not allow for the reimposition of the death penalty.” (A Life In the Balance - The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, at 34, Amnesty Int’l, 2000; www. Amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/001/2000.)


Note: This petition is approved by Mumia Abu-Jamal and his lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, San Francisco
E-mail: MumiaLegalDefense(AT)gmail.com;

Website: www.MumiaLegalDefense.org
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Berliner Bündnis Freiheit für Mumia Abu-Jamal!

im HdD
Greifswalderstr.4
10405 Berlin

www.mumia-hoerbuch.de
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[FONT=Georgia]free Mumia![/FONT]

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[Communist]

[FONT=Courier New]Reuters[/FONT]


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Supreme Court to rule on famed death penalty case

Jon Hurdle
PHILADELPHIA
Sun Jan 17, 2010 9:09am EST




PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court is expected on Tuesday to issue its latest decision on the fate of Mumia Abu-Jamal, arguably America's most famous death-row inmate, convicted of slaying a Philadelphia policeman, a crime he denies committing.

The court is due to rule on an appeal by the Philadelphia district attorney who is seeking to have Abu-Jamal executed and bring an end to a decades-long legal saga the inmate, a former journalist, wrote about while in prison.

Abu-Jamal, now 55, was convicted in 1982 of killing officer Daniel Faulkner on December 9, 1981. He has become an international cause celebre for the anti-death penalty movement whose supporters argue strenuously he did not receive a fair trial.

His backers say he was framed by police, that prosecution witnesses were coerced into false testimony and that ballistics evidence shows Abu-Jamal did not shoot Faulkner but that the murder was committed by another man who fled the scene.

Supporters also claim that Abu-Jamal, who is black, was the victim of a racist and notoriously pro-prosecution trial judge, the now-deceased Albert Sabo, who was overheard to say, "Yeah, and I'm going to help them fry the nigger," according to an affidavit by a court stenographer.

Faulkner's widow, Maureen, and Philadelphia's Fraternal Order of Police oppose any clemency for Abu-Jamal, arguing his conviction has been upheld repeatedly by numerous courts, including the Supreme Court, over three decades.

They note that bullet fragments taken from Faulkner's body match the ammunition from the gun carried by Abu-Jamal who was earning his living as a taxi driver at the time of the killing.

If the Supreme Court rules in his favor, Abu-Jamal would get a new jury trial on the sentencing, but not his conviction.

But a defeat is likely to send the case back to an appeals court, whose ruling would be based on a new Supreme Court decision on jury instructions in another case, said his attorney, Robert R. Bryan.

Abu-Jamal has been in solitary confinement on death row since the conviction, and has been held since 1995 in a western Pennsylvania prison where he has written books and contributed to international journals and radio shows.

Outside the United States, Abu-Jamal's backers include the human rights group Amnesty International, which in 2000 called for a new trial, arguing his conviction and sentence followed "contradictory and incomplete evidence" in a trial that failed to meet minimum international standards of justice.

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[FONT=Trebuchet MS]SIGN THE PETITION HERE[/FONT]

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[Yazman]

This is disgusting and horrible that this fucking facade has continued for so long. How blind are the masses in the USA that they let this happen?

Free Mumia, goddamnit. Get him free.

[Manifesto]

Read most of this and is there any evidence that proves he did not do it? Other than the obvious racism and lack of a fair trial?

[Q]

Read most of this and is there any evidence that proves he did not do it? Other than the obvious racism and lack of a fair trial?

Your reasoning is fundamentally flawed as we know a little principle of "not guilty until proven otherwise". The burden of proving that Mumia is guilty lies with the state which has so far been totally unable to do exactly that.

Free Mumia!

[bcbm]

Read most of this and is there any evidence that proves he did not do it? Other than the obvious racism and lack of a fair trial?

who cares. free mumia guilty or not

[fredbergen]

Mumia is innocent:

1. Another man, Arnold Beverly, confessed and explained the crime.
   
2. Prosecution witnesses described the killer fleeing the scene on foot wearing a green Army jacket. Mumia sat on the curb with a bullet in his lung. He was wearing a blue and red vest.
   
3. Prosecutors claim that Mumia confessed on his hospital bed. But the notes that the police officer present made at the time say: "The negro male made no comments."
   
4. The medical examiner said that the bullet in police officer Daniel Faulkner was a .40 caliber. Mumia's gun was a .33 caliber.
   
5. Veronica Jones, who initially testified as an eyewitness for the police, took the stand in Mumia's appeal to recant her testimony saying that the police coerced her into lying. The judge had her arrested on the witness stand and removed from the court.

And many more facts, which can be found in the Internationalist Group's collection of articles on Mumia.

What has been posted above by communist_usa, a supporter of the Workers World Party, is unfortunately more of the reformist legalistic strategy that has demobilized struggle for Mumia at this crucial time. Instead of petitions to the country's top prosecutor for an "investigation" and to the commander in chief of imperialism to "speak out," what's needed are urgent calls for mass protests led by the power of organized labor. Around the world, U.S. embassies should be surrounded by urgent protests to save the life of the "voice of the voiceless," Mumia Abu-Jamal.

[bcbm]

mumia's gun was a .38 caliber, which the prosecution's ballistics experts have always agreed was the caliber that killed faulkner...

[pastradamus]

mumia's gun was a .38 caliber, which the prosecution's ballistics experts have always agreed was the caliber that killed faulkner...

Yes, but the ballistics "experts" have always failed to prove that mumia's ballistic prints matched the gun he owned. This case is a joke, there is a huge lack of every form of condeming evidence usually associated with a guilty verdict at a trial. Also that fact that he was accused of killing a policeman plays its part in this political show if you ask me.

[bcbm]

why did his gun have five spent casings in it?

[pastradamus]

why did his gun have five spent casings in it?

Mumia himself cant explain this. The court and jury was never presented with images of ballistic marks. Also the fact the members of the prosecution who gave evidence recanted on this a number of years later makes and issue of this. Seriously the thing reeks of Rubin Carter.

[fredbergen]

why did his gun have five spent casings in it?

What does this prove? Only that the gun was used by someone at some time.

+ YouTube Video

[Manifesto]

Mumia is innocent:

1. Another man, Arnold Beverly, confessed and explained the crime.
2. Prosecution witnesses described the killer fleeing the scene on foot wearing a green Army jacket. Mumia sat on the curb with a bullet in his lung. He was wearing a blue and red vest.
3. Prosecutors claim that Mumia confessed on his hospital bed. But the notes that the police officer present made at the time say: "The negro male made no comments."
4. The medical examiner said that the bullet in police officer Daniel Faulkner was a .40 caliber. Mumia's gun was a .33 caliber.
5. Veronica Jones, who initially testified as an eyewitness for the police, took the stand in Mumia's appeal to recant her testimony saying that the police coerced her into lying. The judge had her arrested on the witness stand and removed from the court.

Thank you, this was exactly what I was asking about. To Q, I was NOT asking if he was innocent or not so it didn't have anything to do with "reasoning".