Mumia fights for a new trial

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O n Mumia Abu-Jamal’s birthday, April 24, about 125 demonstrators mobilized outside Philadelphia’s Court of Common Pleas in solidarity with Mumia’s effort to re­ verse his 1982 frame-up murder conviction and win a new trial that could lead to his freedom.

Mumia Abu-Jamal has been imprisoned for 36 years, and was on death row for 30 of those years. His fight for a new trial and freedom has been supported by organizations ranging from Amnesty International and the NAACP to the European Parliament and scores of national and local trade unions and city governments in the U.S. and abroad.

Represented by Judy Ritter, Mumia’s Philadelphia-based attorney, and Christina Swarms, of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, Mumia petitioned the court for a new Post Conviction Relief Act hearing based on last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of Williams v. Pennsylvania.

The Williams decision reversed a death-penalty convic­ tion on the grounds that “it is a violation of the due process right to an impartial tribunal free of judicial bias if a judge participating in a criminal appeal had a significant personal involvement as a prosecutor in a critical decision in a de­ fendant’s case.” In Mumia’s case, Philadelphia’s Senior As­ sistant District Attorney, Ronald Castille, served as a pros­ ecutor in Mumia’s 1982 trial. Castille, who in the name of the state of Pennsylvania authorized a racist video instruct­ ... Climate march (continued from page 1: “Which way for the climate movement?”)

and we will not stop fighting. With 100 and 500-year storms now coming every year, we are fighting for our lives.”

Scorn for Trump and his policies favoring Big Oil was likewise widespread in the Science Marches, which brought out tens of thousands on the previous week­ end, Earth Day.

The Washington march on April 29 was sponsored by the People’s Climate Mobilization, a coalition that had the active support of over 900 environmental, labor, and social justice organizations. The PCM was founded three years earlier around the giant Septem­ ber 2014 Climate March in New York City.

A lingering criticism of the 2014 action was that, de­ spite its massive size, it yielded relatively few organiz­ ing projects in its wake. In contrast, the PCM is now trying to carry the momentum forward, and particu­ lar attention has been given in PCM literature to the situation of front-line, indigenous, and working-class communities in the climate fight.

“Today’s actions are not for one day or one week or one year,” PCM national coordinator Paul Gestos states. “We are a movement that is getting stronger everyday for our families, our communities and our planet. To change everything, we need everyone.”

But in order to achieve real “change,” our goals and strategy need to be hammered out and made pre­ cise. Unfortunately, the movement to combat climate change has lagged in promoting a broad and demo­ cratic discussion, while key figures in the current leadership have allowed themselves to be lured into supporting proposals that fall short of the major tasks ahead.

Just days before the April 29 climate mobilization, Democratic Party Senators Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merk­ ley, and Cory Booker announced that they were spon­ soring a new bill that, among other provisions, would mandate a U.S. transition to 100 percent renewable energy no later than 2050. The bill, dubbed the “100 10 SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 2017 ing state prosecutors how to exclude Blacks from juries, later refused to recuse (remove) himself from adjudication of Mumia’s Pennsylvania Supreme Court appeals between 1995 and 2008, when he was a member of that court.

Ritter and Swarms, according to virtually all Mumia sup­ porters present in the courtroom, presented a clear case for the applicability of Williams to Mumia’s conviction and de­ manded the reversal of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s findings and a new trial.

Philadelphia Deputy District Attorney Ronald Eisenberg, who had unsuccessfully argued the Williams case before the U.S. Supreme Court, represented the DA’s office at the April 24 hearing. His central argument to reject Mumia’s new PCRA petition was that, although Castille had offi­ cially signed off on all of the state’s briefs in Mumia’s case, there was no evidence of his direct involvement. Mumia’s team refuted this specious argument and requested full dis­ covery of Castille’s papers to prove otherwise. Eisenberg also argued that the 2016 Williams case was not retroac­ tive—that is, it did apply to Mumia’s prior conviction.

Presiding Judge Leon W. Tucker made no rulings on any of the above contested issues but indicated that he would render a decision soon. Indeed, he did so just a few days later—and in a dramatic fashion that represented a first and major legal victory for Mumia in his renewed fight for freedom. Tucker ordered the Philadelphia District At­ torney’s office to turn over to Mumia’s attorneys within 30 days all records and memos regarding Castille’s involve­ by ’50 Act,” was immediately embraced by several environmental leaders. Jason Kowalski of 350.org cheered it on as the “North Star” of the climate move­ ment. Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, touted the bill in an April 19 Nation article as being able to bring about “an end to fossil-fuel infrastructure.”

McKibben claimed correctly that the U.S. needs to undertake a “World War II-scale mobilization for clean energy,” but he was far off the mark in imply­ ing that passage of the Senate bill would launch an effort at anywhere near that level. During the war, the government essentially took control of the entire economy. The total output of U.S. manufactured goods increased 300 percent from 1940 to 1944, mainly due to government orders and investment.

In 1945, the U.S. devoted over 41 percent of the economy to war spending, whereas the SandersMerkley bill would allocate less than 1 percent of the $18.5 trillion U.S. economy to protecting the climate.

Should climate activists rally around the “100 by ’50 Act?” In a Common Dreams article, Ezra Silk, director of strategy and policy for The Climate Mobilization, gave strong arguments against that course. He be­ lieves that by establishing 2050 as the target year for 100 percent renewable energy, the bill falls far short of what is necessary and thus “fails to meet the chal­ lenge of this historic moment.”

Silk pointed out that even the makers of the bill ad­ mit that it stands little chance of passage in the Sen­ ate, and so, “why not go big [in establishing goals] and try to actually solve the climate crisis?” He stressed that “for humanity to have a good chance of holding warming permanently below 1.5°C (which itself is far too high for safety), there is no carbon budget left to burn. … “That means we need to stop emitting greenhouse [gases] right now. And according to climate scientist Michael Mann, even if we did that, the current carbon dioxide concentrations of approximately ~405 ppm are already high enough to produce a catastrophic 2°C of warming, which would devastate African farmers’ ability to grow food and would cause a large-scale re­ lease of greenhouse gases from thawing permafrost.” ment in Mumia’s case; pre-trial, trial, post-trial and direct appeal proceedings; communications between Castille and his staff; and any public statements Castille made about Mumia’s case during or after his tenure as district attorney of Philadelphia. Mumia was given 15 days to file amend­ ments to his post-conviction petition. The clear implication of Tucker’s granting of discovery is that he is favorably inclined to apply the Williams decision if Castillo’s direct involvement in Mumia’s case can be established.

Activists and legal observers at the April 24 hearing be­ lieved that Tucker appeared sympathetic to key arguments presented by Mumia’s attorneys. But they remain skeptical, if for no other reason than Mumia’s appeals, always in ac­ cord with established court decisions and legislation, have been repeatedly denied—so much so that the term “Mumia exception” has become commonplace with regard to the operations of the U.S. criminal injustice system.

Contrary to the requirements of U.S. “law,” Mumia was convicted by a mainly white jury, from which Blacks had been systematically excluded. He was physically banned from the courtroom during much of his trial. Eyewitnesses to his innocence were intimidated to alter their testimony or otherwise prevented from testifying at his trial, and “evi­ dence” was manufactured by corrupt police, state investiga­ tors, and prosecutors.

In another landmark case, last month Pennsylvania De­ partment of Corrections officials unsuccessfully sought to avoid a court order instructing prison authorities to admin­ ister Mumia’s long-sought anti-viral medication—with a 95 percent cure rate of Hepatitis C. Mumia is now receiving this life-saving medication, but only after a two-year de­ lay, during which time his Hepatitis C disease, contracted through a 1981 blood transfusion after a police officer shot him, had developed into cirrhosis of the liver, the extent of which is still unknown.

Mumia has become a stunning symbol of the brutal rac­ ist and class-biased system of injustice that permeates U.S. society today—a gulag system, in which nearly 7 million human beings are incarcerated or subjected to “criminal” oversight jurisdictions, the largest number and percentage of a population of any country in the world.

Were it not for 36 years of national and international mo­ bilizations to save Mumia from the executioners’ grasp, he would have been “legally” murdered long ago. Indeed, the latter end was sought by prosecutors and the Fraternal Order of Police for three decades, and only ended when a critical court victory ruled that a state prosecutor’s closing remarks at Mumia’s trial were fundamentally flawed.

Given the choice of granting Mumia a new trial, in which evidence of innocence could be presented for the first time—thereby exposing the monstrous police/prosecutor frame-up of Mumia—or agreeing to a new sentence of life imprisonment, Pennsylvania officials opted to forego ef­ forts to kill Mumia, who is now serving a life term at SCI Mahoney in Frackville, Pa. Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! n Ending the climate crisis, Silk wrote, would require at the very least: 1) Building a zero greenhouse gas emissions econo­ my in 10 years or less. 2) Tackling all sources of greenhouse gas emis­ sions—including the food system. 3) Safely removing all the excess carbon from the atmosphere to get back to pre-industrial greenhouse gas concentrations.

Silk expressed a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party, and of Bernie Sanders in particular as a “trust­ ed messenger” of the climate movement. We think his enthusiastic trust in Sanders is misplaced, but we strongly agree with his criticisms of the MerkleySanders-Booker bill.

Giving active support to the bill would drive the climate movement into an unnecessary detour, a di­ version. The snail-paced provisions of the bill, even if they were enacted, would prolong the lives of the automobile and fossil fuel industries at the world’s expense. And more fundamentally, it is unrealistic to expect the U.S. Congress, which is entirely beholden to the corporate and banking interests that profit from fossil fuels, to undertake the systematic planning nec­ essary to combat climate change.

The first task of the U.S. climate movement is to mo­ bilize millions of citizens in mass action to confront the governmental and corporate purveyors of climate change with hard demands of what needs to be done. An essential tool in this process would be democrat­ ic regional conferences, in which the environmental movement can interact with organizations of work­ ers, community groups, and oppressed people to plan our strategy and goals and to build a united coalition of struggle.

It is essential that the trade unions give muscle to this movement, mobilizing their members and the en­ tire working class in the effort. Ultimately, it will be the working class and its allies—those who suffer the most from climate change and environmental deg­ radation—who will take charge of restructuring the economy for human needs instead of profits, and of building a fully democratic and sustainable society. n

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During the three days of the Ontario NDP Convention, April 21-23 at the Met­