THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 13, 1995 TAG: 9508130128
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: Medium: 96 lines
CONVICTED cop-killer and former radio reporter Mumia Abu-Jamal, scheduled to die by lethal injection Aug. 17, received a reprieve last week. Thanks to intellectual hypocrisy, a Pennsylvania court ordered a rarely granted indefinite stay of his execution.
Regardless of one's views on capital punishment, every thinking person who has followed Abu-Jamal's case - which came to a boil with the May publication of his memoir, ``Live From Death Row'' - should be asking: Why him? Who is Mumia Abu-Jamal to garner such favored treatment?
A former Black Panther who became a MOVE sympathizer while covering that radical group in 1978 for a Philadelphia radio station, Abu-Jamal was convicted of the Dec. 9, 1981, murder of policeman Daniel Faulkner. While on death row, Abu-Jamal has exploited forums unavailable to most inmates: the Yale Law Journal in 1991; National Public Radio, which did a flip-flop on airing his paid commentaries in 1994; and this year, the local bookstore.
Worldwide, writers, such as Ayatollah-condemned author Salman Rushdie, politicians and movie celebrities (Ed Asner, Whoopi Goldberg) rallied to portray Abu-Jamal as a racial scapegoat and political prisoner and to denounce his execution as evil and racist. Their protest succeeded: The inmate's next round of post-conviction challenges could take years.
But in singling out one black man on America's death row from among so many invisible others and in indiscriminately embracing the defense's version of the crime and trial, such ``intellectual'' protesters make a further mockery of a criminal justice system already deeply entrenched in bias, inconsistency, delay and waste.
According to Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Styron (``Sophie's Choice''), a longtime death-penalty opponent, Abu-Jamal's 1982 murder trial was ``so deficient in standards of judicial proceedings, so rife with errors'' that a valid guilty verdict could not be reached. How does Styron know this? He told a reporter that he read materials from the international writers group PEN (whose main sources are Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch) and from Rushdie, detailing abuses, and a New York Times op-ed defense plea by novelist E.L. Doctorow.
Would that such intellectual heavyweights, joined by others in Europe, China and South Africa, would apply their energy and outrage to all 3,000 U.S. death-row cases. They would find rampant irregularities and miscarriages of justice: trials and sentences determined by bias of race, class, sex, even victim status; the poor treated far worse than the monied. (Have they never heard of O.J. Simpson, an alleged double-murderer not being tried under penalty of death?)
Instead, they indulge in both indefensible selectivity and naivete. PEN actually ``calls for the commutation of any (death) penalty against any writer.'' The message to death-row inmates: Start writing. Use the media to further your cause.
Many would argue that the ``cause'' of Abu-Jamal, 41, reaches beyond his writing to his race and radical politics. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson seemingly would have little interest in just any black man who killed a white police officer 14 years ago. But without his media contacts and self-promotion, Abu-Jamal would never have been heard; and this is wrong.
Abu-Jamal argues he was brutalized by the police, denied effective counsel by both a biased ``hanging'' judge (Court of Common Pleas Judge Albert Sabo, who, ironically, granted the stay) and an over-zealous prosecutor, and condemned by a racially imbalanced and prejudiced jury.
His lawyers further claim that a Pittsburgh-area inmate witnessed the shooting of Faulkner and can clear Abu-Jamal. Still other witnesses reportedly saw ``another man'' flee from the scene.
Arguments such as these, regardless of their basis in fact, are standard fare and routinely dismissed by courts in review of death-penalty cases. How hard is it to find a ``witness'' who will testify that a shadowy figure was seen lurking nearby? Perhaps Abu-Jamal was railroaded - certainly defendants are railroaded. But only special treatment earned him yet another chance - after 13 years.
The incontrovertible facts, unembellished by advocacy, beg a closer look:
While moonlighting as a cab driver at 4 a.m. on Dec. 9, 1981, Abu-Jamal came upon his brother being arrested by Faulkner for driving the wrong way down a one-way street. Abu-Jamal pulled out his gun and went to the aid of his brother: Faulkner was shot dead, Abu-Jamal suffered a serious chest wound. The gun, its five spent shell casings consistent with bullet fragments in Faulkner, was found near Abu-Jamal.
Three witnesses testified that Abu-Jamal got out of his car and shot Faulkner, who returned fire. Where are these witnesses now? Where, for that matter, is Abu-Jamal's brother? Regardless of what happened at trial, or even at the scene when white policemen arrived to find a fallen comrade and a black man bleeding, this is a ``smoking-gun'' case, not a case of an innocent caught in the cross-fire.
The only innocents here are those intellectuals who would place a higher value on the life of one black man, over another, simply because he writes. Thinking people should advocate the abolition or uniform enforcement of capital punishment. In making self-serving exceptions, they do nothing but further injustice.
MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma is a lawyer and book editor for The Virginian-Pilot and
The Ledger-Star. by CNB