Judge Dembe Denies Mumia's Post-Sentence Motion
NO LIFE SENTENCE!! FREE MUMIA NOW!!
Judge Pamela Dembe, President of the
Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, affirmed her secret sentencing of Mumia
Abu-Jamal to life imprisonment and dismissed Mumia's post-sentence motion on
October 1 according to the court docket records. Dembe's order followed the
DA's motion to dismiss, which outrageously asserted that a life sentence was
"the precise relief" Mumia sought overt the past thirty years!
The DA's motion centered on a false
rendition of the prosecution's "evidence" against Mumia--it went way
beyond the even the perjured and coerced testimony that was presented at the
trial. Needless to say, it ignored the federal court rulings that Mumia was
unconstitutionally and illegally sentenced to death.
It was Judge Dembe who deemed it
irrelevant that Judge Albert Sabo, the trial judge and PCRA judge from
1995-1998, admitted his bias and racism with his declaration, overheard by a
court stenographer, "Yes, I'm going to help them fry the n-----." It
was Sabo's instruction to the jury that the courts found to be illegal. Dembe
in 2001 refused to hold an evidentiary hearing on Sabo's bias as well as new
evidence of Mumia's innocence, including the confession of Arnold Beverly, who
swore he was the man who killed police officer Daniel Faulkner.
On August 13, 2012, Judge Dembe imposed a life sentence
without parole on Mumia, without even notifying him. This was in flagrant
violation of constitutional and PA statutory law, intended to foreclose Mumia's
right to challenge his sentence to "slow death row," life sentence
without parole. Had Mumia known of the impending sentencing, he would have
argued for immediate release from prison pursuant to a motion for
extraordinary relief based on thirty years of solitary confinement on death
row pursuant on an illegal sentence. The decade he spent in solitary
confinement while the DA tried to get the death sentence reinstated by the
Federal Court of Appeals and U.S. Supreme Court was retaliation against Mumia
for not being silenced.
Mumia's post-sentence motion challenged
Judge Dembe's secret proceeding. It also was a constitutional challenge to life
imprisonment without parole as a violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition
against cruel and unusual punishment, the Pennsylvania Constitution's
prohibition against cruel punishments, evolving standards of decency and
international law. It further challenged solitary confinement and the fact that
death row prisoners are illegally kept in solitary.
Mumia's
challenge to a life-imprisonment sentence unified the fight of all
those men and women who are fighting state torture, the death sentence,
the "slow death row" of life imprisonment and the debilitating and
degrading conditions of incarceration. Having been defeated
and denied a "legal lynching," the state wants Mumia to rot away in
prison. Our fight continues to be freedom for Mumia, as part of the
fight for
liberation of all mankind.
Sept. 14th Statement on Solitary
[Speech writ. 9/5/12] © ’12 Mumia Abu-Jamal
Brothers and Sisters! Mis Hermanos y Hermanas! Comrades!
Thank you all for coming together here.
[Speech writ. 9/5/12] © ’12 Mumia Abu-Jamal
Brothers and Sisters! Mis Hermanos y Hermanas! Comrades!
Thank you all for coming together here.
You may think that you know something about solitary, but you don’t.
You may have a loved one in prison who has experienced it, and told you
about it.
But still I say, you don’t know it.
You know the word; but between word and the reality, a world exists.
You don’t know that world.
But the closest we may come is to say it must be like life on another planet. One where the air is different; where the water is different, where wildlife and flora and fauna mean different things.
For, as you know the word torture, you don’t know how it feels.
For solitary is torture.
State torture.
Official torture. Government sanctioned torture.
Some may call that hyperbole, or exaggeration.
But I’ve lived in solitary longer than many – most, perhaps –Americans have been alive.
I’ve seen men driven mad as a hatter by soul crushing loneliness. Who have sliced their arms until they looked like railroad tracks. Or burned themselves alive.
This isn’t something I’ve read about in psychology books, or newspaper reports.
I’ve seen it with these eyes with which I write these words. I’ve smelled the blood. I’ve smelled the nauseating stench of the smoke.
Why? Because human beings are social creatures; and solitary confinement kills that which is human within us.
Why did these men do these things (to themselves)?
We can’t really know, but if I could guess I’d say they simply wanted to feel. To feel something. To feel as if they were alive.
I’ve seen men beaten while handcuffed; shocked with Tasers and electrified shields; and gassed with pepper spray – really a form of liquid cayenne pepper, which inflames the eyes, nasal passages and mouth.
As America embarks on its second century of mass incarceration, breaking every repressive record ever made, it’s also breaking every record in regards to solitary confinement: locking up, isolating and torturing more and more people, for more and more years.
As I’ve noted elsewhere (in my Live from Death Row (1995), for example) In 1890 the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case re Medley, held that solitary confinement for a man on Colorado’s death row was unconstitutional. In a sense, over a century later, the law has lurched backwards!
Today, such an idea would be laughable, if not unthinkable.
According to some estimates, there are over 100,000 people in solitary across the country (I happen to believe this is a conservative estimate). But no matter the number, the reality is stark: under international law – solitary confinement is torture.
Period.
And if it happens to one man, one woman -one child - it is torture nonetheless, and a crime under international law -or, put another way, the law of nations.
That’s because such a policy has one primary purpose; to destroy human beings, by destroying their minds.
Is it cruel and unusual, and thus violative of the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? Apparently this was so in the 1890’s, but not so in the present, probably because of who was in prison then – and who are now.
It may surprise you to know that at the end of the nineteenth century, Blacks were a distinct minority of American prisoners, and while numbers certainly swelled post-slavery (to build the prison-contract-labor industryreally slavery by another name), the biggest bounce in Black imprisonment came in the aftermath of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements, when Black people, en masse, opposed the system of white supremacy, police brutality and racist juries.
And then – The Empire strikes back!
Indeed, never in the history of the modern world have we seen such a vast machinery of repression, and the U.S. is the world’s undisputed leader in imprisonment of its citizens.
Neither China, Russia nor any other nation comes close.
As scholar/law professor Michelle Alexander had aptly described it, the U.S. has reconstituted the ‘New Jim Crow’.
And as prison populations explode, the law becomes increasingly more supportive of this repression, and less tolerant of the notion of equal rights, or even equal access to courts.
These factors have continued to be problems irrespective of whether under Republican or Democratic administrations.
For, repression is apparently bipartisan.
But all is not gloom and doom.
People have the power to transform their grim realities.
All they have to do is fight for it.
Organize.
When people get together – and fight together – they create change.
They make change.
If you want to shut down solitary confinement, you can do it.
You’ve got to organize – and fight for it.
If you find the prison industrial complex intolerable, then organize – and fight it.
This is not Pollyannaish, or pie in the sky.
This is as gritty and as down to earth as spinach.
It’s as real a dirt. As real as steel. As real as blood. As real as life.
Whenever any social advance has happened it’s because people fought for it. Often, against their own governments, for governments ever embrace the status quo.
During the U.S. Civil War, one of Lincoln’s severest critics was Frederick Douglass, the fiery Black ex-slave and abolitionist.
When Lincoln died a few years later, Douglass would both mourn his passing and laud his accomplishments.
It was Douglass who said: “Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has, and never will.”
That lesson of our Ancestor is still true.
We must demand what we want – and fight for it!
Period.
If we want the closing of solitary confinement, we can make it happen.
If we want people like Delbert Africa, Mike Africa, Russell ‘Maroon’ Shoatz, Janet Africa, Phil Africa, Janine Africa, Chuck Africa, Leonard Peltier, Jalil Muntaqim, Ed Africa, or [Dr.] Mutulu Shakur freed, we can make it happen.
Really. Truly. But we gotta fight for it.
Movements make change.
So let us build such a Movement, that it shakes the earth!
Don’t rely on voting, for politics is but the cruel art of betrayal.
Rely on working together and fighting for change.
For “Power concedes nothing without demand!”
Build the Movement!
Let us go forth and make the change we want, for we are the hope of more people than we know and People make change!
Ona Move! Long Live John Africa!
“Power Concedes Nothing Without Demand!”
Down With Solitary!
Shut Attica Down!
Down with the Prison Industrial Complex!
But still I say, you don’t know it.
You know the word; but between word and the reality, a world exists.
You don’t know that world.
But the closest we may come is to say it must be like life on another planet. One where the air is different; where the water is different, where wildlife and flora and fauna mean different things.
For, as you know the word torture, you don’t know how it feels.
For solitary is torture.
State torture.
Official torture. Government sanctioned torture.
Some may call that hyperbole, or exaggeration.
But I’ve lived in solitary longer than many – most, perhaps –Americans have been alive.
I’ve seen men driven mad as a hatter by soul crushing loneliness. Who have sliced their arms until they looked like railroad tracks. Or burned themselves alive.
This isn’t something I’ve read about in psychology books, or newspaper reports.
I’ve seen it with these eyes with which I write these words. I’ve smelled the blood. I’ve smelled the nauseating stench of the smoke.
Why? Because human beings are social creatures; and solitary confinement kills that which is human within us.
Why did these men do these things (to themselves)?
We can’t really know, but if I could guess I’d say they simply wanted to feel. To feel something. To feel as if they were alive.
I’ve seen men beaten while handcuffed; shocked with Tasers and electrified shields; and gassed with pepper spray – really a form of liquid cayenne pepper, which inflames the eyes, nasal passages and mouth.
As America embarks on its second century of mass incarceration, breaking every repressive record ever made, it’s also breaking every record in regards to solitary confinement: locking up, isolating and torturing more and more people, for more and more years.
As I’ve noted elsewhere (in my Live from Death Row (1995), for example) In 1890 the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case re Medley, held that solitary confinement for a man on Colorado’s death row was unconstitutional. In a sense, over a century later, the law has lurched backwards!
Today, such an idea would be laughable, if not unthinkable.
According to some estimates, there are over 100,000 people in solitary across the country (I happen to believe this is a conservative estimate). But no matter the number, the reality is stark: under international law – solitary confinement is torture.
Period.
And if it happens to one man, one woman -one child - it is torture nonetheless, and a crime under international law -or, put another way, the law of nations.
That’s because such a policy has one primary purpose; to destroy human beings, by destroying their minds.
Is it cruel and unusual, and thus violative of the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? Apparently this was so in the 1890’s, but not so in the present, probably because of who was in prison then – and who are now.
It may surprise you to know that at the end of the nineteenth century, Blacks were a distinct minority of American prisoners, and while numbers certainly swelled post-slavery (to build the prison-contract-labor industryreally slavery by another name), the biggest bounce in Black imprisonment came in the aftermath of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements, when Black people, en masse, opposed the system of white supremacy, police brutality and racist juries.
And then – The Empire strikes back!
Indeed, never in the history of the modern world have we seen such a vast machinery of repression, and the U.S. is the world’s undisputed leader in imprisonment of its citizens.
Neither China, Russia nor any other nation comes close.
As scholar/law professor Michelle Alexander had aptly described it, the U.S. has reconstituted the ‘New Jim Crow’.
And as prison populations explode, the law becomes increasingly more supportive of this repression, and less tolerant of the notion of equal rights, or even equal access to courts.
These factors have continued to be problems irrespective of whether under Republican or Democratic administrations.
For, repression is apparently bipartisan.
But all is not gloom and doom.
People have the power to transform their grim realities.
All they have to do is fight for it.
Organize.
When people get together – and fight together – they create change.
They make change.
If you want to shut down solitary confinement, you can do it.
You’ve got to organize – and fight for it.
If you find the prison industrial complex intolerable, then organize – and fight it.
This is not Pollyannaish, or pie in the sky.
This is as gritty and as down to earth as spinach.
It’s as real a dirt. As real as steel. As real as blood. As real as life.
Whenever any social advance has happened it’s because people fought for it. Often, against their own governments, for governments ever embrace the status quo.
During the U.S. Civil War, one of Lincoln’s severest critics was Frederick Douglass, the fiery Black ex-slave and abolitionist.
When Lincoln died a few years later, Douglass would both mourn his passing and laud his accomplishments.
It was Douglass who said: “Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has, and never will.”
That lesson of our Ancestor is still true.
We must demand what we want – and fight for it!
Period.
If we want the closing of solitary confinement, we can make it happen.
If we want people like Delbert Africa, Mike Africa, Russell ‘Maroon’ Shoatz, Janet Africa, Phil Africa, Janine Africa, Chuck Africa, Leonard Peltier, Jalil Muntaqim, Ed Africa, or [Dr.] Mutulu Shakur freed, we can make it happen.
Really. Truly. But we gotta fight for it.
Movements make change.
So let us build such a Movement, that it shakes the earth!
Don’t rely on voting, for politics is but the cruel art of betrayal.
Rely on working together and fighting for change.
For “Power concedes nothing without demand!”
Build the Movement!
Let us go forth and make the change we want, for we are the hope of more people than we know and People make change!
Ona Move! Long Live John Africa!
“Power Concedes Nothing Without Demand!”
Down With Solitary!
Shut Attica Down!
Down with the Prison Industrial Complex!
--
SIGN THE JERICHO COINTELPRO PETITION!
Free All Political Prisoners!
www.jerichony.org
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