Mumia’s trial, before the notorious hanging judge Albert Sabo, was an unusual travesty even by the usual standards of the class-based and racist U.S. The basic facts on his frameup and conviction in the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia policeman could be found only in the publications of the radical left and the newsletters of those groups which, to their immense credit, have worked tirelessly on the case-notably the Committee to Save Mumia Abu-Jamal, Partisan Defense Committee and Equal Justice USA, and of course Mumia’s own family.Īt this point the main facts have become better known, at least to readers of the broad liberal-left as well as the African-American press, and most of our readers will have some familiarity with them: that Abu-Jamal as a teenager had been active in the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panthers and targeted for surveillance by the police and FBI that he was an award-winning Black journalist who lost a job because of his sympathetic coverage of the MOVE organization that he was moonlighting as a cab driver when, on Decemhe saw police beating a man on the street and recognized the victim as his brother that when he intervened a fight ensued, in which Mumia himself was shot and severely beaten by police while police officer Daniel Faulkner was fatally shot-apparently, according to some witnesses who never testified at trial, by a man in a crowd who ran from the scene. coverage, the very existence of Mumia Abu-Jamal was virtually buried by the mass media-just as Mumia himself has been virtually entombed on Death Row since 1982.

Until recently in this year of super-saturation O.J.

Such a stay, of course, should have been automatic-but in fact it was a tremendous victory won by immense international pressure and outrage over the case. Ten days prior to his scheduled dath by lethal injection, Mumia received a stay pending exhaustion of all his appeals. At the beginning of June, governor Thomas Ridge signed the death warrant for this African-American journalist and revolutionary activist, setting the date of execution for August 17. THE LIFE OF Mumia Abu-Jamal hung in the balance as this issue of Against the Current is in preparation (mid-July 1995).

Save Mumia Abu-Jamal | Solidarity Save Mumia Abu-Jamal - The Editors

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