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 is Innocent! Stop the Frame Up! Free Mumia!--
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition, NYC
www.FreeMumia.com,
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