Judge Rejects Mumia Petition; Bill Mandel Comments Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit MUMIA: Judge Rejects Petition for New Hearing, Plus Pithy Comments from Bill Mandel AFP via The Times of India - Nov 22, 2001 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=1727460139 US state judge rejects Abu-Jamal's petition WASHINGTON: A Pennsylvania state judge rejected a petition for a new hearing for minority rights activist and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal sentenced to die for 1981 killing a Philadelphia police officer, his support committee said. Judge Pamela Dembe said Wednesday she does not have jurisdiction over Abu-Jamal's case and, therefore, cannot order a new trial in state court. Lawyers representing Abu-Jamal had been asking the judge to consider what they see as exculpatory evidence that could have helped overturn the murder conviction. A man named Arnold Beverly admitted in court papers two years ago that he had been hired by the city mafia to kill officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981 because he was hot on the trail of organized crime figures. Abu-Jamal, a former member of the Black Panthers, the activist group founded in California in 1966, was convicted of shooting Faulkner in cold blood and was given a death sentence. He has always maintained his innocence, and supporters around the world have lobbied for his case to be reconsidered. Abu-Jamal's execution was to have taken place in December of 1999 in Pennsylvania, but a federal court stayed it after lawyers asked the court to consider new evidence that they said may shed new light on the case. His federal appeal is still pending. Supporters of Abu-Jamal plan to hold a demonstration in Philadelphia on December 8 to demand a new trial. ( AFP ) * [The following newsgroup post from Bill Mandel is a succinct summary of the disgraceful injustice of the Mumia Abu-Jamal case in particular, along with germane background on the US injustice system in general from one of the most experienced, courageous and indefatigable progressive activists in the US. His book is an education and provides inspiration and hope, and anyone who hasn't heard his testimony before the UnAmerican Activities goons simply must go to the website to enjoy it -- see the UR below. --NY Transfer] Source - William Mandel November 24, 2001 [In reply to someone who wrote he found "this whole Free Mumia movement an embarrassment of the left." -- Clearly, the embarrassment should be the carping person's and the entire "justice" system's. You are apparently unaware that one of the two men who were hired to and did kill officer Faulkner, of whose death Mumia was convicted, has confessed to the killing and that you can hear and see his confession on a videotape. The other man is long dead, under mysterious circumstances. The confession of Arnold Beverly states that Mumia had nothing whatever to do with the killing, for which Beverly was hired by the Mafia and corrupt police because they feared that Faulkner would blow the whistle on them, and that in fact a number of Philadelphia police officials were subsequently dismissed and convicted on other evidence. You are also unaware that the courts, in which you have faith, have refused to depose this man and thereby make his confession part of the record, which would compel its consideration in legal proceedings. You are unaware that a judge, in justifying this, cited a U.S. Supreme Court finding in another case that innocence is no defense if there have been no procedural violations. It goes without saying that you do not know that the history of the Mumia case is one procedural violation after another, nineteen in all, including barring him from participating in his own defense, which is why he refused to legitimize the proceedings of the court by testifying. There is nothing more convincing than the Beverly videotape and another by a then-prostitute eyewitness, today a single mother of grown daughters in college, who had testified falsely against Mumia under police pressure to do so or be prosecuted on felony charges. You may download exhaustingly detailed defense briefs by requesting them from Howard Keylor He can also tell you how to purchase the videotapes, which are very cheap. I totally support the demand to free Mumia on the above grounds without trial, as occurred here in California with a Black Panther leader who had been imprisoned for over twenty years, also on a murder charge. It is long established that when the powers-that-be believe their credibility and prestige depends upon conviction of innocents, justice goes by the wayside. Before my time there was the Haymarket Case. In my lifetime there was that of Tom Mooney, San Francisco streetcar workers' organizer, whose death sentence was commuted only because the U.S. ambassador in Moscow wired home that such action might help keep Russia, where a tremendous demonstration on Mooney's behalf had just occurred, in World War One. Mooney was freed 22 years later, without further trial, by a Democratic governor of California who had pledged this in his election campaign. In my childhood, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in Massachusetts. In later years there were the Martinsville Seven (all killed: Virginia). The Rosenbergs were executed despite the fact that the prosecutor, Roy Cohn (who "prosecuted" me before Joe McCarthy) and the judge colluded behind the scenes, something making the trial illegal and rendering everything else irrelevant. I have to admit that it is difficult to understand faith in the courts within less than a year since the U.S. Supreme Court violated the Constitutional separation of powers by deciding who should be president of the United States. Bill Mandel My autobiography, SAYING NO TO POWER (Creative Arts, Berkeley, 1999), is designed for the general reader. If you teach in the social sciences, consider it for course use. It was written as a social history of the U.S. for the past three-quarters of a century through the eyes of a participant observer in most progressive social movements (I'm 84), and of the USSR from the standpoint of a Sovietologist (five earlier books) knowing that country longer than any other in the profession. Therefore it is also a history of the Cold War. Positive reviews in The Black Scholar, American Studies in Scandinavia, San Francisco Chronicle, etc. Chapters are up at http://www.billmandel.net where you may also hear/see my defiant testimonies before Sen. Joe McCarthy in 1953 and the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1960. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytrc-11.25.01-06:14:26-3826