CASE HISTORY

On December 9, 1981 a Philadelphia Police Officer was shot and killed. That officer, twenty five-year-old Daniel Faulkner, was a decorated five-year veteran of the police force. He was recently married, a law student and a U.S. military veteran. He was also a son and a brother.

When police arrived, the shooter was still at the scene. His name was Wesley Cook, AKA Mumia Abu-Jamal. Jamal had grown up in Philadelphia, where he spent his youth as an "apprentice of Revolutionary Journalism". Jamal claims to have been harassed by Philadelphia police at a young age. He joined the Black Panther Party as a teenager and, upon completion of his "training," he eventually rose to the level of Lieutenant Minister of Information for the Panther's Philadelphia chapter. According to Jamal, he used this position to call for a violent race-based revolution. He wrote such things as, "I for one feel like putting down my pen. Let's write epitaphs for pigs" -- "pigs" meaning "police." Referring to alleged police shootings of blacks, Jamal wrote, "the pigs must suffer the same relentless rebuttal from us."

Prior to his murder of Officer Faulkner, Mumia Abu-Jamal had bounced from radio station to radio station as a part-time news reader. He gained a certain amount of notoriety in Philadelphia's inner-city African American community as a result of his perspective on social issues. He often left such radio jobs because of his inability to comply with the program manager's wishes, and for making no attempt at objectivity in his reporting. Jamal eventually found work as a part-time reporter at WUHY-FM, Philadelphia's National Public Radio (NPR) affiliate. In addition to becoming the President of the Black Journalists Association, during the 1970s Jamal also supported a militant urban radical group known as MOVE. He naturally gravitated to MOVE's anti-government, anti-police manifesto. In 1978, three years prior to the Faulkner murder, several members of MOVE murdered another Philadelphia policeman, Officer James Ramp, during a lengthy gun battle with police.

The MOVE members who killed Officer Ramp were tried, convicted and sentenced to long prison terms. Jamal attended the MOVE trial as an allegedly objective WUHY reporter. But according to several sources, as each day's testimony was completed, Jamal would dash outside the courtroom to hand out pro-MOVE propaganda to his colleges from other stations. According to several of Jamal's friends and associates, after the trial, he began to publicly rail against the conviction of the MOVE members and to openly support MOVE and its founder, a man who called himself John Africa. (All MOVE members, it seems, adopt the surname "Africa"). Nearly a year before he murdered Officer Faulkner, Jamal had been fired from his part-time position at WHUY-FM. According to statements made by his manager, Jamal's termination was prompted by his extremist rhetoric, his inability to remain objective, and for several work related violations.

On the morning he murdered Officer Daniel Faulkner, Mumia Abu-Jamal had not worked as a reporter for nearly a year. By all accounts, he had become a media pariah in Philadelphia, and was working as a cab driver.

In June of 1982 a trial was convened to hear the case against Mumia Abu-Jamal. The fact that this was a police murder combined with Jamal's notoriety in Philadelphia's inner city caused the trial to be highly publicized. The case was heard in a crowded courtroom in Philadelphia's nearly 100 year-old City Hall. Members of the Police Department, the Faulkner family, Jamal's family and various groups supporting Jamal filled the gallery each day of the six-week trial. Judge Albert Sabo presided over, and tried to maintain control over, a tension-filled proceeding.

In the 1982 courtroom, acts of civil disobedience, shouting, chanting, violent outbursts, disruptions, forced removals, fist fights and threats by Jamal's supporters were daily occurrences. Jamal regularly disrupted the proceedings to espouse his support for MOVE and its leader, John Africa. Due to his intentionally disruptive actions he was physically removed from the courtroom over 13 times. Throughout the jury selection process and the trial itself, Mumia Abu-Jamal directed a continuing verbal barrage against the prosecutor, the judge, and even his own personally selected attorney.

On July 3rd 1982, having heard all the evidence against him, it took a racially mixed jury of 12 people that Mumia Abu-Jamal personally helped to select, just 3 hours to unanimously convicted him of the premeditated murder of Officer Daniel Faulkner. The sentencing phase of the trial saw the same jury unanimously sentence Jamal to death in Pennsylvania's electric chair for his crime.

For the next several years, Mumia Abu-Jamal slipped into anonymity on Pennsylvania's Death Row. His conviction was appealed, reviewed, and denied by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in March of 1989. Subsequently, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his case.

Through a series of promotions and personal introductions, Jamal's case was taken up as a "cause celeb" by a sampling of social action groups. In Jamal, the anti-Death Penalty movement felt that it had, for the first time, an articulate and educated black man (a journalist, no less) to serve as an example of the supposed unjustness of the system. In 1990, Jamal's appeal was taken over by a new group of attorneys. Leonard Weinglass, a protÈgÈ of noted radical mouthpiece William Kunstler, headed Jamal's new team of lawyers.

Weinglass had made a career of representing various leftist radicals accused of various crimes. Some of Weinglass' better-known clients include Abby Hoffman, several individuals convicted of kidnapping Patty Hearst, the Chicago Seven and Daniel Elsberg. Mumia Abu-Jamal is not the first "cop killer" that Weinglass has represented. He has taken on several clients convicted of killing police officers, most notably Leonard Peltier, who was convicted of killing several FBI agents.

Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, Pennsylvania's governor Robert Casey stalled the appeal process by refusing to sign Jamal's death warrant. On Thursday June 1, 1995, Pennsylvania's new governor, Tom Ridge, signed Mumia Abu-Jamal's death warrant and set August 17, 1995 as his execution date. Ridge's action prompted a sudden flurry of long-deferred appeals. The following Monday, Jamal's new attorneys filed a petition for a hearing under Pennsylvania's Post Conviction Relief Act (PCRA). Statements made by defense witnesses verify that Jamal's lawyers had been holding this step in readiness for several years in order to insure a maximum period of delay of Jamal's execution. (Jamal's attorneys allege that Ridge somehow knew exactly when they intended to file this appeal, and contrived to sign the Death Warrant only days beforehand, supposedly for the purpose of making it look like they had been stalling. It is unclear why the Governor would want to go to such trouble in order to arrange such a purely symbolic gesture).

PCRA hearings are designed to afford the convicted an opportunity to either prove their innocence or show that the appeal process somehow missed the fact that they were unconstitutionally imprisoned. The PCRA appeal is heard before a Common Pleas Court Judge, who serves as a "fact finder" for future State and Federal Appeals. This "fact finder" is charged with hearing the arguments presented by the defense and the rebuttal to those arguments offered by the prosecution. The arguments made by the defendant and their attorney may be made in reference to old testimony, newly discovered evidence and the testimony of "newly discovered" witnesses, who were not known to the defendant at the time of the original trial. Having reviewed the newly discovered evidence and testimony, the presiding judge, who also has the authority to overturn a conviction or sentence, reaches factual findings and legal conclusions. In a capital case, the PCRA court's decision may be appealed directly to the State Supreme Court.

Mumia Abu-Jamal's PCRA Hearing was convened in June, of 1995. Because he had presided at the 1982 trial and he was still a sitting judge, the case was assigned under local rules of court to Judge Albert Sabo. Though Judge Sabo had honorably presided over the original trail, Jamal's attorneys argued that Sabo should voluntarily remove himself from the PCRA proceedings for reasons of alleged bias against Jamal. Judge Sabo declined, stating that he was unbiased and quite capable of objectively presiding over the hearing. Dissatisfied, Jamal's attorneys asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to remove Judge Sabo from presiding over the PCRA hearing. The State Supreme Court reviewed this request, as well as the record of the 1982 trial, and determined that Sabo had not displayed any bias against Jamal in 1982. They denied Jamal's removal request and cleared the way for Sabo to preside over the ensuing PCRA hearings.

The 1995 PCRA hearing -- such hearings usually take less than a week to complete -- ground on for over two months. Much of the 1995 hearing was held in the same courtroom as the original trial had been, 13 years earlier. As in the 1982 trial, during the course of the 1995 PCRA hearing, several individuals supporting Jamal were forcibly removed from the courtroom for acts of civil disobedience. There were daily disruptions caused by Jamal's supporters both inside and outside the crowded courtroom. Those who were unable to enter chanted and played loud drums directly outside the courtroom window, so that the prosecutor could not be heard.

In addition to the substantial local media attention, the 1995 PCRA hearing garnered great international media attention as well. Outside the courtroom, Jamal's attorneys frequently made statements to the waiting international press, spinning the day's testimony and touting their client's innocence. They seized on every opportunity to lambaste Judge Sabo, the Philadelphia Police and the District Attorney's office.

Upon the completion of the 1995 PCRA hearing, Judge Albert Sabo found nearly all of the testimony presented by Jamal's attorneys to be incredible. The matter was handed up to the State Supreme Court.

In the midst of conducting their review of the 1995 PCRA testimony, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania decided to grant Mumia Abu-Jamal a highly unusual supplemental PCRA hearing. At the behest of Jamal's attorneys, this 1996 PCRA hearing was convened to hear the testimony of an individual they claimed they could not locate in 1995. This "newly discovered" witness was Veronica Jones, who had also testified in the 1982 trial as a defense witness. With great fanfare Leonard Weinglass touted Jones to the press as someone whose testimony would prove Jamal's innocence and demonstrate that there was "rampant police intimidation and coercion at the original trial."

The 1996 PCRA hearing, which was now moved to the new Criminal Justice Center, lasted several days and was again plagued by the same disruptions and delays. Jones claimed to have perjured herself in her 1982 testimony, instantly casting doubt on her 1996 account. She was also caught in several additional lies while offering her 1996 testimony. She ultimately produced no credible evidence in support of the notion that Mumia Abu-Jamal was innocent. In 1982, what Jones basically stated was that, after the shooting she had walked around the corner. Then, from a distance of roughly 300 feet, she had supposedly seen two black men near the fallen Officer Faulkner who had remained at the scene. In her 1996 version, supposedly her "true" version, Jones said she had waited several minutes after the shooting, and had then walked around the corner and allegedly saw two men who "jogged across Locust Street" before police arrived. (It's likely these two men were Desie Hightower and Robert Pigford. See the map posted on this site.)

Due to her repeated inability to tell the truth, the Court found that Jones was not a credible witness. The Court further found that, because she had consistently admitted that she had not seen the shooting, Veronica Jones could not identify either of the two supposedly running men as the "real killer," where four eyewitnesses at trial had testified to watching Jamal shoot Officer Faulkner to death. Therefore, the Court found, her testimony in no way exonerated Mumia Abu-Jamal.

In June 1997, prior to completing their review of the case, the State Supreme Court of Pennsylvania granted a highly unusual third PCRA hearing. This time, Jamal's attorneys had come across another individual allegedly unknown to them until 1996. This newest witness, Pamela Jenkins, was a prostitute and, supposedly, a former police informant. Ms. Jenkins claimed that Cynthia White, a key prosecution witness in 1982, had recently told her that police had intimidated her into giving her 1982 testimony and that she was now fearful of the police. According to Jenkins, as recently as a month before the 1997 hearing, she had personally met with Cynthia White and discussed this matter. Jenkins claimed that Cynthia White told her that the police had forced her to testify falsely against Jamal, at the 1982 trial.

The problem with Jenkins' insistence she had spoken to Cynthia White only two months before the 1997 hearing was that Cynthia White had been dead for five years. The prosecution produced a death certificate from the Camden County, New Jersey Coroner's Office verifying that Cynthia White had been dead since 1992. The identify of the corpse had been verified by its fingerprints.

The hearing came to a halt while Wineglass and his associates sat in stunned, slack-jawed silence for several minutes at the revelation that their witness was either insane or an all-out liar. It had never occurred to them to take the elementary step of using one of their many investigators to check on Jenkins' story.

On the morning after the prosecution's bombshell, Leonard Weinglass was interviewed on a California radio program. There, he claimed that he had been fully aware of the existence of the death certificate. This spin meant that he knew Jenkins was perjuring herself, and had knowingly attempted (and botched) a fraud on the court. It's difficult to say whether the spin or the reality made him look worse.

Not surprisingly, the court found that Jenkins, who claimed to have been given important new information by a dead person, was not a credible witness.

On October 31, 1998, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ruled on the numerous issues raised by Mumia Abu-Jamal's attorneys in their 1995, 1996 and 1997 PCRA appeals. (These issues make up the greater part of the myths about this case, which we address on this website.) In their unanimous decision to deny Jamal a new trial, the Justices of the Supreme Court found that all of the issues raised by Mumia Abu-Jamal and his attorneys were without merit. The "Opinion of the Court," (posted at danielfaulkner.com) was written by Justice Cappy, a former Public Defender. It was not only a resounding rebuke of the issues that allegedly show Jamal's innocence and the evidence of an unfair trial, it is a blistering indictment of the underhanded tactics employed by Jamal's lawyers. In addition to finding many of the claims made by Jamal and his attorneys, "preposterous," on no less than 5 separate occasions the Court chastised Leonard Weinglass for misrepresenting the facts to support his arguments.

A short time after this defeat, Jamal's attorneys filed a petition in the United States Supreme Court for a "Writ of Certiorari." Early in the spring of 1999 the US Supreme Court again declined to review Jamal's claims.

In October of 1999, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge again signed Mumia Abu-Jamal's Death Warrant. Jamal's attorneys again waited the maximum period of time permitted by law before taking his case to federal court, by filing a petition for a federal writ of habeas corpus. This appeal suspended Jamal's execution until Judge William Yohn, of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania decides on Jamal's petition. Jamal's lawyers continued to do all that they could to prolong the appeals process. In this they have been given significant help from Judge Yohn, who seems to be in no hurry to decide the case. He has now had it before him for nearly two years, without so much as deciding whether or not to schedule an oral argument.

Ultimately, Judge Yohn has one of three choices to make. He can uphold Jamal's conviction; he can grant Jamal a new sentencing hearing; or he can overturn Jamal's conviction and grant him a new trial. Whatever his decision, it will no doubt be appealed to the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals by the losing side.

Questions or Comments?

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c. 2001, Justice for P/O Daniel Faulkner, all rights reserved.