Mumia’s life in danger as Court decides Spisak case

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After 28 years on Pennsylvania’s death row and innumerable battles in the U.S. criminal injustice system, Mumia Abu-Jamal—the innocent political prisoner, journalist, and world renowned “Voice of the Voiceless”—lost his final appeal on April 6, 2009. Ignoring its own precedents and those of the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals below it, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to affirm what had been the “law of the land” for decades, that the systematic and racist exclusion of Blacks from juries voids all guilty verdicts and mandates a new trial.

In Mumia’s 1982 trial, presided over by the notorious “hanging judge” Albert Sabo, 11 of 14 Black jurors were so excluded. But as with virtually all court decisions over the past decades in Mumia’s case (the “Mumia exception”), the Supreme Court employed a contorted interpretation of the “law” to reach a predetermined result. The Court refused to review the twisted logic of its subordinate bodies, thereby allowing Mumia’s frame-up murder conviction to stand.

But what has caught the attention of both legal observers and human rights activists even more is the fact that the Court, while refusing to hear Mumia’s appeal, chose to delay a ruling on a cross appeal filed by the state of Pennsylvania that seeks Mumia’s execution. Pennsylvania prosecutors, twice rejected in their efforts to impose the death penalty on Mumia, may have found new support in the U.S. Supreme Court.

It appears that the Supreme Court’s delay in ruling on the validity of Mumia’s original execution sentence was due to its decision to grant a full review in the case of Smith v. Spisak. Frank Spisak, a neo-Nazi who confessed in court to triple hate-crime-type murders in Ohio, had his jury-imposed death sentence reversed in the federal courts when his attorneys successfully invoked a 1988 Supreme Court decision in the famous Mills v. Maryland case. Mills requires that in order to find mitigating circumstances sufficient to impose a sentence of life imprisonment without parole, as opposed to the death penalty, the jury’s majority decision (as opposed to unanimous decision) on each mitigating circumstances is sufficient.

In both Spisak’s and Mumia’s case the presiding trial court judges violated Mills and in essence instructed the juries that unanimity was required. In both cases the prosecution’s appeal was rejected and Mills was upheld, thus voiding the imposed death sentences. In both cases the prosecution appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

An April 7, 2009 article in the Legal Intelligencer, the oldest law journal in the country, had this to say about the Supreme Court’s decision to delay a ruling on Pennsylvania’s request to re-impose the death penalty on Mumia: “In both cases, [Spisak and Abu-Jamal] the federal courts’ decisions to overturn the death sentences hinged on Mills v. Maryland—a 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decision that governs how juries should deliberate during the penalty phase of a capital trial.

“The Mills ruling struck down a Maryland statute that said juries in capital cases must be unanimous on any aggravating or mitigating factor [emphasis added].

“The justices declared that unanimity was properly required for any aggravating factor, but that mitigating factors—those that weigh against imposing a death sentence—must be handled more liberally, with each juror free to find on his or her own.” The effect of Mills was to make it harder for prosecutors to obtain death sentences in capital cases.

The Intelligencer concludes, “The question now before the courts is whether Mills requires that death sentences in other states be overturned if the juries in those states are misled by faulty instructions or verdict forms to believe that mitigating factors require unanimity” [emphasis added].

I emphasize the words “other states” because prior to this unexpected turn of events, Mills was applied to all states. That is, if a jury was mis-instructed and/or received faulty or unclear verdict forms that implied it needed to be unanimous with regard to mitigating circumstances sufficient to not impose the death penalty, the death penalty was set aside and a new sentencing hearing was ordered.

This is what happened in Mumia’s case when Federal District Court Judge William H. Yohn in 2003 emen new legal avenues for success, with the top Court’s decision to re-consider the Spisak case. Mumia’s life is on the line as never before. Pennsylvania’s governor is pledged to sign what could be the third and final warrant for Mumia’s execution, which would order that his life be taken by lethal injection within 90 days.

The battle for Mumia’s execution has not been limited to the courts. Last year’s “Murdered by Mumia” book, co-authored by Maureen Faulkner—the wife of police officer Daniel Faulkner, who Mumia was falsely convicted of murdering—and right-wing talk-radio host Michael Smerconish, presents an outrageous account of Faulkner’s murder. While having little or no basis in the facts of the case, the book has nevertheless been used to advance the Fraternal Order of Police’s longstanding campaign to execute the “cop killer.”

More recently, filmmaker Tigre Hill has produced a work scheduled for Philadelphia and international distribution titled “The Barrel of a Gun,” wherein exBlack Panther Bobby Seal’s rhetoric about “offing the pig,” is coupled with right-winger David Horowitz’s assertions that Mumia was merely carrying out Panther policy. The three-minute preview or trailer to “The Barrel of a Gun” theorizes, without a shred of evidence, that Mumia and his brother Billy Cook literally planned the Faulkner murder, ambush style.

Those unfamiliar with Mumia’s background and the facts of the case could only conclude that Mumia was guilty without question. That Mumia had left the disintegrating Panthers more than a decade before his frame-up trial is not mentioned.

Nor does the film acknowledge that he was an award-winning journalist and president of the Black Journalists Association, a leading reporter/critic of the Philadelphia Police Department, dozens of whose officers were indicted and convicted on Justice Department charges of involvement in drug-running, prostitution, planting and falsification of evidence, and intimidation of witnesses.

Today, having exhausted most all legal remedies, Mumia’s supporters are engaged in an important campaign to demand a Justice Department civil rights investigation into charges presented by his supporters that demonstrate illegal collusion between Pennsylvania prosecutors and the judiciary. A delegation of Mumia’s defenders across the country has planned a Nov. 12 visit to Washington, D.C., where a meeting with Attorney General Eric Holder will be sought for this purpose. Thousands of petitions demanding Mumia’s freedom obtained across the world will also be presented to officials of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Similarly, the Black is Back protest in Washington, D.C., Nov. 7, is demanding Mumia’s freedom in addition to the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the Middle East.

In the S.F. Bay Area, the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal is sponsoring a Nov. 6-8 tour with Amnesty International’s Death Penalty Abolition Campaign leader Laura Moye. Entitled “Innocent but Facing Execution,” the tour will focus on the cases of Mumia, Troy Davis, and Kevin Cooper—three innocent frame-up victims of capitalism’s racist criminal “justice” system.

Troy Davis recently won a decision by the Supreme Court in which he was granted a new hearing in district court. Kevin Cooper is currently appealing his murder conviction before the Supreme Court with the aid of a 101-page dissenting opinion by U.S. appellate judge William Fletcher, stating that “the state of California may be about to execute an innocent man.”

For information, in Philadelphia call (215) 476-8812. In San Francisco, (510) 268-9429. n Socialist Action november 2009 7

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is pledged to sign Mumia’s execution.