The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Life in the Balance

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The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Life in the Balance

4.14 of 5 stars 4.14 · rating details · 7 ratings · 2 reviews

Mumia Abu-Jamal has been incarcerated on Pennsylvania's death row for over two decades. His case has generated more controversy and received more attention, both national and international, than that of any other inmate currently under sentence of death in the United States of America.
Mumia Abu Jamal, black, was convicted and sentenced to death in July 1982 for the murder...more

Paperback, 64 pages

Published January 20th 2001 by Seven Stories Press

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Feb 04, 2013 Valerie added it

The .pdf version of this book is not very satisfactory. It's free for downloading, but it doesn't include any pictures or the resource list which is discussed in the text.

I wish I could say I found this surprising, but I can't. This story is drearily familiar. There doesn't seem to have been any real attempt to find out what happened: the nearest guy (who was seriously wounded, and immediately hospitalized) was just glommed on to. There were no ballistics tests, and Mumia was not even given a g...more The .pdf version of this book is not very satisfactory. It's free for downloading, but it doesn't include any pictures or the resource list which is discussed in the text.

I wish I could say I found this surprising, but I can't. This story is drearily familiar. There doesn't seem to have been any real attempt to find out what happened: the nearest guy (who was seriously wounded, and immediately hospitalized) was just glommed on to. There were no ballistics tests, and Mumia was not even given a gunpowder test to see if he'd fired a gun. The whole case depended on eyewitness evidence, which is notoriously unreliable even where there's no evidence (as there is here) of witness tampering. The main witness couldn't possibly have seen anything reliably, because he was looking through the flashing lights of the police car, and saw people only in profile.

Furthermore, there's substantial evidence that Mumia was already under surveillance by COINTELPRO, and that they were looking for something, anything, that could be used against him.

The evidence that the judge in the case was heavily prejudiced against people wearing dreadlocks in general (particularly blacks with dreadlocks), and Mumia in particular, has been supplemented since this came out (it came out in 2000) by evidence that the prosecution was also strongly bigoted. There are also atrocious rulings that indigent defendants can't have their choice of lawyers. The Public Defender is quoted as saying himself that he wasn't adequately trained to defend a capital case, and that he wasn't given time or funds to do an adequate job.

When Mumia petitioned to represent himself, (his first choice having been rejected), he was permitted to question some potential jurors. The report says that Mumia's questions to potential jurors were perfectly routine (for example, that he wanted to eliminate anyone who had heard of the case in news stories, a perfectly routine procedure). It would help if the transcript of the questioning were available in this report. Perhaps these transcripts are available; they may in fact be among the resource list that's not in the downloadable version. But from the parts that are included, they do seem to be completely routine. And anyone who's heard Mumia's voice will know that it's unlikely that potential jurors would have been afraid of him. The argument that they WERE afraid of him was used to force him to stop acting as his own defense counsel, and then the rejected public defender was, despite his own protests that he wasn't competent to defend the case, put back in charge.

Since the publication of this report, Mumia has been 'freed' from Death Row, because the prosecutors' office decided not to retry the case. So Mumia has been moved to general population, to what he himself calls 'slow death row'. He seems to have been terribly shocked the first time he, who had been in what amounted to solitary confinement, saw the prisoners line up for the chow line. There was a separate line for the prisoners in wheelchairs: many of them very old men. There were also terribly many young boys.

What struck me was the fact that the murder Mumia was convicted of happened as late as 1981. I hadn't realized it was that late. Conditions in prisons in the US have gotten much worse since, especially with all the people who have been imprisoned simply because they were accused in drug cases (often of simple possession), and couldn't afford to fight their cases in court. Most have agreed to a plea bargain because they believed they had no choice.

Mumia himself may never be freed: there's realistically no chance of clearing up the story from this distance in time. Only if the person several eyewitnesses described as fleeing the scene (obviously not Mumia, who was so badly injured he couldn't even stand at the time--perhaps his brother, who was present at the time?) would come forward and give exculpatory evidence is there any chance of a new trial. While Mumia himself may have some vague hope of such a resolution, his present concern is for the other prisoners, many of whom don't have the educational and philosophical resources that he himself has. But it's still important to recognize the severe flaws in the US 'justice' system: and to recognize that the most shocking thing about Mumia's case is that it's nothing out of the ordinary, even in 'death penalty' cases. Mumia is just more eloquent, is all.(less)

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