Mumia rips his old team

Says lawyers ducked threats

By JIM SMITH
smithjm@phillynews.com

Convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal doesn't think too much of his former attorneys, who tried for more than eight years to get him off death row.

He and his new lawyers, Nick Brown, Marlene Kamish and Eliot Lee Grossman, now contend that New York attorney Leonard Weinglass, who was chief counsel until recently, and fellow New Yorker Daniel Williams, who just published a book on the case, were so worried about a perceived death threat that they failed to bring to the court's attention a signed confession by a self-proclaimed mob hit man.

Arnold Beverly claims to have killed Officer Daniel Faulkner on Dec. 9, 1981, in Center City, at the behest of the mob and corrupt cops.

Citing "an all-pervasive conflict of interest" on the lawyers' part, Abu-Jamal on Tuesday filed a 272-page petition in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court asking that his murder conviction be overturned. He also asked U.S. District Judge William Yohn to hold his federal habeas corpus petition in abeyance, pending state court action.

"Attorney Weinglass and attorney Williams were unwilling to endanger their own lives and safety by pursuing a defense. . .that might threaten to unmask the powerful and ruthless people who planned Officer Faulkner's murder," the inmate's new lawyers wrote.

City prosecutors, quoting from Williams' book, "Executing Justice," call Beverly's confession a "patently outrageous story" and "a lie."

"None of the eyewitnesses saw anything resembling the preposterous scenario [Abu-Jamal] would now introduce, two decades after the murder," District Attorney Lynne Abraham and several staff members have asserted in federal court. *

Back to Top