Execution Case Dropped Against Abu-Jamal
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Published: December 7, 2011
Prosecutors in Philadelphia announced Wednesday that they had halted the state’s effort to execute Mumia Abu-Jamal, the death row inmate convicted of killing a police officer 30 years ago, whose subsequent legal case based on claims of innocence has received international attention.
Chris Gardner/Associated Press
Mumia Abu-Jamal, above, after a 1995 hearing in Philadelphia. In his long time on death row, he survived at least two execution dates.
Timeline: Mumia Abu-Jamal
Unlike most other death-row inmates, Mumia Abu-Jamal has been a vocal spokesman for his own cause. He has attracted supporters around the world, who see him as a symbol of the racial inequities and other injustices of the American death-penalty system.
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Times Topic: Mumia Abu-Jamal
Matt Rourke/Associated Press
Maureen Faulkner, the widow of Officer Daniel Faulkner, called the judges who overturned a death sentence “dishonest cowards.”
Associated Press
Mr. Abu-Jamal was convicted of fatally shooting Officer Daniel Faulkner, pictured, on Dec. 9, 1981.
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“This has been a very, very difficult decision,” Mr. Williams said at a news conference, adding that he believed Mr. Abu-Jamal was guilty of the murder and should be executed. “The sentence was appropriate. That would have been the just sentence for this defendant.”
In April, a federal appeals court ordered a new sentencing hearing for Mr. Abu-Jamal because jurors had received potentially misleading instructions during his 1982 trial. In October, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Mr. Williams said Wednesday that the appeals court ruling — and others that have spared Mr. Abu-Jamal’s life over the years — had led him to drop his pursuit of the death penalty, in part because witnesses are no longer available. He said he made the decision after discussing it with Maureen Faulkner, the widow of Daniel Faulkner, the slain police officer.
During his long stay on death row, Mr. Abu-Jamal, 57, a former Black Panther and radio reporter, became a vocal and — to some — convincing advocate of his own “Free Mumia” movement. That cause became particularly prominent around college campuses, where students collected donations for his legal defense fund and sold buttons and posters carrying images of his pensive face and long dreadlocks beneath that slogan. The Beastie Boys and Rage Against the Machine performed at a benefit concert on his behalf in 1999, and a suburb of Paris named a street after him in 2006.
The case has been played out repeatedly in court and the news media, and found a place in popular culture that has extended into the Internet age on blogs and Facebook pages. The trial was said to be either a miscarriage of justice based on racism, or a cut-and-dried murder of a law enforcement officer in which the issue of race prevented justice from being carried out. Mr. Abu-Jamal survived at least two execution dates — in August 1995 and December 1999.
On Wednesday, Ms. Faulkner, who appeared at the news conference with Mr. Williams and other city officials, said she had agreed to give up her advocacy for Mr. Abu-Jamal’s execution because the case had dragged on for too long.
At times, she employed stinging language to express her vexation at Mr. Abu-Jamal’s ability to avoid execution, calling the judges who overturned Mr. Abu-Jamal’s death sentence “dishonest cowards.”
“Rest assured I will now fight with every ounce of energy I have to see that Mumia Abu-Jamal receives absolutely no special treatment when he is removed from death row,” she said. “I will not stand by and see him coddled as he had been in the past. And I am heartened by the thought that he will finally be taken from the protected cloister he has been living in all these years and begin living among his own kind — the thugs and common criminals that infest our prisons.”
But Christina Swarns, director of the criminal justice practice at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which is representing Mr. Abu-Jamal, said that she was “delighted” by the decision — and that the Free Mumia movement had some influence.
“We’re at a time in this country when support of the death penalty is at an all-time low, and that reflects some of the concerns expressed by Mumia’s supporters in terms of the fairness of the process,” she said.
Mr. Abu-Jamal, who is black, was convicted of fatally shooting Officer Faulkner, who was white, on Dec. 9, 1981, after the officer pulled over Mr. Abu-Jamal’s brother for driving the wrong way on a one-way street. A jury found that Mr. Abu-Jamal had shot Officer Faulkner in the back and then, as the officer lay bleeding, shot him four more times. Mr. Abu-Jamal had been shot in the chest by the officer.
Mr. Abu-Jamal has said that he was at the scene but that someone else — whom he has not identified — was the killer.
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