ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, July 6, 1996 TAG: 9607090010
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LEE WINFREY KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Sunday night at 10, Home Box Office puts its programming muscle behind America's most controversial death-row inmate in a documentary entitled ``Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Case for Reasonable Doubt?''
The case of Abu-Jamal, convicted of murdering a Philadelphia policeman, is a ``Rashomon'' of homicide, in which his defenders and detractors, proponents and opponents look at the same evidence and reach diametrically opposite conclusions.
In ``Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Case for Reasonable Doubt?,'' narrated by Marlene Sanders, there is no new information; nothing substantial that has not previously been printed, heard, or seen; no smoking gun to either convict him or clear him to everyone's satisfaction.
Nor does the show include anything that is glaringly inaccurate. This is, instead, a show tilted Abu-Jamal's way by a selection of scenes designed to draw sympathy to him and make the case against him look weaker than it is by omitting or de-emphasizing key portions of the prosecution's case.
Abu-Jamal - a radio reporter, radical activist, sometime cab driver, and most recently a book author with ``Live From Death Row'' (1995) - has been awaiting execution in Pennsylvania since his homicide conviction in 1982. A gallery of show-business big names, including Ed Asner, Mike Farrell, Danny Glover, Paul Newman and Whoopi Goldberg, believes that he is a political prisoner. In the two highest flights of hyperbole, Jesse Jackson has compared Abu-Jamal to Nelson Mandela, and Cornel West has compared him to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Abu-Jamal was convicted of killing officer Daniel Faulkner, 25, about 4 a.m. on Dec. 9, 1981, by shooting him twice, first in the back and then between the eyes. The slaying scene was one of downtown Philadelphia's tawdriest strips, the red-light district around 13th and Locust streets.
Before he died, Faulkner managed to shoot Abu-Jamal in the chest. Police found the wounded Abu-Jamal sitting four feet from the fallen officer. Nearby with five empty cartridges in it lay Abu-Jamal's gun, a .38-caliber Charter Arms revolver, legally purchased and registered to him. Abu-Jamal did not testify at his trial, so his explanation of these incriminating circumstances is unknown.
The first voice heard on ``Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Case for Reasonable Doubt?'' is his, saying, ``I am a journalist, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and an African American. I live in the fastest-growing public housing tract in America.'' Then the camera pans to a sign outside his residence that says, ``State Correctional Institute, Greene [County], Pa.''
Abu-Jamal's voice is smooth and mellifluous, reflective of his radio experience. This is probably one big reason that he has become the poster child of the anti-death penalty movement, since comparatively few condemned murderers are as well-spoken as he.
His opening appearance is soon followed by news footage of Faulkner's funeral, with his widow, Maureen, sadly watching his flag-draped coffin being carried out of a South Philadelphia church. This is the only time she is seen on the show and, in contrast to Abu-Jamal, who speaks at length, she is never heard. That wouldn't fit in with this show's slant, since she believes that Abu-Jamal killed her husband and should be executed for it.
This show is strongest in defense of Abu-Jamal in its attacks on the two most questionable aspects of the prosecution's case:
The confession. Both Faulkner and Abu-Jamal were taken for treatment to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, where both Faulkner's partner, Gary Bell, and Jefferson security guard Priscilla Durham said they heard Abu-Jamal, using an obscenity, blurt out that he shot Faulkner ``and I hope he dies!''
But another officer who accompanied Abu-Jamal to the hospital, Gary Wakshul, filed a report that night that said, ``The Negro male made no statements.'' And the physician who treated both Faulkner and Abu-Jamal, Dr. Anthony Coletta, says on this show that he never heard Abu-Jamal utter anything like a confession.
The bullet. Medical examiner Marvin E. Aronson wrote in his initial report that a bullet removed from Faulkner was a .44-caliber. Abu-Jamal's adversaries dismiss this as only an error in a preliminary report, but novelist E.L. Doctorow subsequently laid heavy stress on it in a pro-Abu-Jamal article published by the New York Times.
But this show undermines itself by its selective use of the extensive raw material available. For example, it attacks the credibility of one of the two witnesses who testified they saw Abu-Jamal shoot Faulkner, a prostitute named Cynthia White, implying that her 38 arrests and three open cases made her vulnerable to police coercion.
But it does not even mention Abu-Jamal's other accuser, cabdriver Robert Chobert, or another cabdriver, Edward Scanlan, who said he saw a dreadlocked man shoot the officer, a description that fits the hirsute Abu-Jamal. White, Chobert and Scanlan did not know one another, so it's hard to see how they could all wind up saying essentially the same thing unless it was true.
It is impossible to say exactly who is responsible for this show's pro-Abu-Jamal bent, since the HBO news releases on it list no scriptwriter, a rarity in the television business. The show was produced for HBO by a British company, Otmoor Productions. Queried by telephone, an HBO spokesman said the original script was written by producer/director John Edginton, with additions, deletions, and changes along the way by numerous other people whose names he said he did not know.
LENGTH: Medium: 97 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ``Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Case for Reasonable Doubt?,'' airsby CNBSunday night at 10 on HBO.