EVENTS IN PHILADELPHIA AND NEW YORK LAUNCH
CAMPAIGN TO BRING MUMIA HOME
PHILADELPHIA, December 9, 2013 – On the 32nd year of Mumia
Abu-Jamal’s wrongful incarceration, his supporters will hold a press conference
at noon in front of the District Attorney’s Office at 3 South Penn Square to
outline the case for Abu-Jamal’s innocence, call for his immediate release, and
announce the launch of the Campaign to Bring Mumia Home. At 6PM they will hold
an organizer’s meeting at the Asian Arts Initiative. These activities will
culminate a weekend of events in Philadelphia and New York including forums on
the case and its broader significance led by High School and college activists
on Saturday, December 7: in Philadelphia, Youth on the Move will be held at the
Asian Arts Initiative from 11-2PM; in New York, the We Want Freedom Scholarship
launch will be held at Hostos Community College in the Bronx, Room B-501 from
1-4PM.
“For the last 32 years, the
Philadelphia courts, government officials, and local journalists have succumbed
to the pressures of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) and abandoned the
pursuit of truth in the case of this world-renowned journalist who
was racially profiled and targeted for his political affiliations by a
Philadelphia police department with a long history of brutality and
corruption,“ said Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director of the National Lawyers
Guild.
In 2011, Abu-Jamal’s death sentence was declared
unconstitutional and commuted to life without parole for allegedly murdering
Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981. Despite
clear evidence of police perjury and evidence tampering to obtain a conviction
and in spite of compelling evidence of innocence, for 32
years, Abu Jamal has been denied basic rights.
“The
lengths to which the Philadelphia police department and the prosecutor, Joe
McGill, went to falsify evidence in this case strongly point to Abu-Jamal’s
innocence,” says Dr. Suzanne Ross of New York.
Crime scene ballistics
evidence disproves the theory presented in court by the prosecution. The
implausibility of the prosecution’s theory is corroborated by the first photos
taken of the crime-scene. These photos were taken by Philadelphia freelance
photographer Pedro P. Polakoff and discovered in 2006 by Dr. Michael Schiffman
of Heidelberg University in Germany.
The prosecution’s theory
posits that Abu-Jamal, who came running from a parking lot, shot Officer
Faulkner in the back, that the officer swung around as he was falling and then
managed to shoot Abu-Jamal in the chest. The prosecution further argued that
Abu-Jamal stood over the prone officer and shot several bullets directly into
the ground at Officer Faulkner and that one of those bullets hit and killed the
officer execution style.
However, the sidewalk where
the officer laid dead, pictured in nine of the Polakoff photographs, shows no
bullet marks on the ground – even though according to the testimony of the
three core prosecution witnesses such bullet marks would have had to have been
there. This strongly suggests that these witnesses were coached or coerced.
The prosecution’s theory is also called into question
because police failed to perform routine gun-powder tests on the gun or
Abu-Jamal’s hands that could have proved that he did not shoot a gun that
evening.
Contrary to what the
prosecution argued at trial, crime scene ballistics evidence suggests that
Officer Faulkner was shot from the direction of the passenger’s seat of the
Volkswagen he had stopped, not from the direction of the parking lot from where
Abu-Jamal came running. According to
crime investigations reporter Patrick O’Conner, “One of the most important and
least known facts of this case is the existence of a fourth person at the crime
scene, Kenneth Freeman, the person believed to have been the passenger in the
Volkswagen. Within hours of the shooting, a driver’s license application found
in Officer Faulkner’s shirt pocket led the police to Freeman. Yet Freeman’s
presence at the scene was concealed, first by Inspector Alfonso Giordano and
later, at trial, by Prosecutor Joe McGill.”
The Polakoff photos also
point to the possible presence of a fourth person at the crime scene: Officer
Faulkner’s hat is pictured resting on top of the Volkswagen on the side of the
passenger’s seat, suggesting that he may have had a conversation with the
passenger. However, the dramatic photograph that made it into the newspapers
was one staged by police at the crime scene to elicit an emotional reaction to
the news of a fallen police officer in Philadelphia. In that police photograph,
Officer Faulkner’s hat migrated from the top of the Volkswagen above the
passenger’s seat where it had been on Polakoff’s first photographs to the
sidewalk next to the long trail of Officer Faulkner’s blood.
The Polakoff photographs
also reveal that officer James Forbes, who testified in court that he had
properly handled the guns allegedly retrieved at the crime scene, is holding
the guns with his bare hands, destroying all potentially significant
fingerprints. This kind of evidence tampering was endemic in the police
department. Fully a third of the 35 officers involved in the Abu-Jamal case,
including the top officer at the crime scene, Inspector Alfonzo Giordano, were
later convicted of rank corruption, extortion and tampering with evidence to
obtain convictions in other cases.
The Polakoff photos also
discredit one of the prosecution’s key witnesses, Robert Chobert, who testified
in court that he saw what happened at close range that night because his taxi
was parked immediately behind officer Faulkner’s car. Yet, contrary to his
testimony, on the three Polakoff photos showing the alleged location of the
cab, the space is actually completely empty.
According to Dr. Johanna
Fernandez, Professor of History at Baruch College, “those whose careers would
be destroyed if the truth surfaced in this case argue that the failure of the
appellate process to grant Abu-Jamal relief is proof of his guilt. However, as
was recently demonstrated in the case of Herman Wallace of the Angola 3 case,
the appellate system in the United States very often fails the defendants.” “The
problem with the appellate process,” adds Dr. Mark Taylor, Professor of
Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, “is that following a series of
regressive, states rights laws passed in the 1990s, such as the Anti-Terrorism
and Effective Death Penalty act of 1996, appellate judges are forced to accept
as ‘fact’ tampered evidence collected by the police and established by lower
courts,”
“We
urge people of conscience in Philadelphia to call on the Philadelphia DA and
the Governor of Pennsylvania to release Mumia Abu-Jamal, and bring
Philadelphia’s native son home,” says Dr. Fernandez.
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