On the same week that the French Secretary of State,
Laurent Fabius, pledged that France would help lead the worldwide
efforts to abolish the death penalty, elected officials of the city of
Bobigny (pronounced BO-BEE-NYEE) held an inaugural ceremony for the
naming of a street in honour of the celebrated former death row
prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Mumia Abu-Jamal's eldest son, Jamal Hart, travelled to Bobigny to
accept the honour on behalf of his father. The ceremony marked the
second time that a working-class suburb of Paris named a street after
Mumia; the first street was named after him in 2006 in Saint Denis.
The Bobigny event drew people from both sides of the Atlantic,
including Native American activist Bill "Jimbo" Simmons, Lanquiray
Painemal, a Maputhe Indian activist in Chile, as well as dozens of
immigrants and their supporters, who have been victims of police
violence in France.
Despite the relative silence on this famous court case in mainstream
discourse in the United States, the eloquent imprisoned journalist
behind the case continues to be an object of marvel and inspiration to
people of conscience around the world.
Most famous prisoner in the world
The man that the world knows simply as Mumia is a prolific writer and
radio journalist, who has maintained equanimity in the face of an
unrelenting campaign of persecution and demonisation at the hands of the
Pennsylvania courts and Fraternal Order of the Police.
In the United States, his recorded commentaries and live interviews
are requested every week by local radio programmes that are seeking to
connect with thousands of listeners who are daily affected by mass
incarceration and the growing surveillance and policing of predominantly
black and Latino urban communities across the country.
For many, the case of the most famous prisoner in the world is a
primer for understanding the relationship between racism and the
criminal justice system in the US in the post-civil rights era.
The unveiling of the street sign in Bobigny on October 13, 2012, took
place a year after Abu-Jamal's death sentence was vacated on October
11, 2011. At that time, the Supreme Court allowed to stand the previous
rulings of four federal judges who determined that the manner in which
the death sentence was sought by the Philadelphia prosecutor, 30 years
earlier, was flawed and unconstitutional.
"Bobigny
is the most ethnically diverse city in all of France, where immigrants
belonging to over 120 different ethnicities have made
their home."
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In her address, Bobigny Mayor Catherine Peyge told the crowd of
100-plus people who gathered outdoors on that rainy Saturday afternoon,
that the "The heart of Bobigny is in solidarity with progressive men and
women who fight for the dignity and the liberation of humanity".
Comparing the fight for Mumia's freedom to the historic struggles to
free Nelson Mandela and Kurdish political prisoner Leyla Zana, she
asserted that, "one day Mumia will walk a free man, on this street that
bears his name".
The Mayor's remarks, which linked Mumia's case to the global fight
for justice and racial equality, resonated with residents of Bobigny.
Bobigny is the most ethnically diverse city in all of France, where
immigrants belonging to over 120 different ethnicities have made their
home.
The street-naming ceremony was part of a week of public events around the case, which included a screening of the film, Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal,
an exhibit of photographs of the movement to free Mumia, the
longest-standing social movement of the post-civil rights era, as well
as the staging of a scene from a play written by award-winning
playwright Alain Foix whose plot develops around a conversation between
Martin Luther King and Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The naming of a street in Bobigny after Abu-Jamal climaxed after a
hard-won campaign that spanned approximately 10 years, required the
construction of a new street, and involved a series of debates in city
council about the importance of the case and its constitutional and
human rights violations.
Erosion of civil liberties and democracy
The project was begun following a special trip to the US taken by the
city's former Mayor, Bernard Birsinger, to visit Mumia in Western
Pennsylvania's supermax facility, SCI Greene.
Birsinger, who died in 2004, wrote poignantly about his visit in the
French Press and about his sense of Mumia's courage, eloquence and
dignity. Today, in France, discussions of Mumia's case prompt echoes of
Birsinger's often quoted words: "I have seen a free man on death row."
Cognizant of the alarming carceral statistics in the US, which
represents 5 per cent of the world's population but holds 25 per cent of
the world's prisoners, progressive voices in France tie the violations
in Mumia's case to the erosion of civil liberties and democracy across
the globe.
They argue that, as a prescription for social ills, the violent and
repressive character of incarceration normalises social control and
erodes the fabric of freedom and liberty in society.
Abu-Jamal was arrested on December 9, 1981, for the alleged fatal shooting of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.
He was convicted and sentenced to death in July 1982 in a trial
riddled with constitutional violations that included judicial bias,
prosecutorial misconduct, discrimination in jury selection and tampering
with evidence by police to obtain a conviction.
An Amnesty International report written in 2000 concluded that the
Abu-Jamal trial "failed to meet international standards safeguarding
fair trial proceedings".
The clearest sign that the Abu-Jamal trial was a miscarriage of
justice came only two weeks after the end of the trial, when a third of
the police officers involved in the case, including its lead
investigator, police inspector Alfonzo Giordano, were tried and
eventually convicted of rank corruption, extortion and tampering with
evidence.
These police convictions were the result of a federal investigation
of the Philadelphia Police Department - the largest the US Department of
Justice had ever conducted of a police department - that concluded that
the level of corruption discovered "shocks the conscience".
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Since the early 1990s, the people of Bobigny have been leading
voices in the international fight to keep Abu-Jamal alive [AFP] |
Years later, a court stenographer, Terry Maurer Carter, testified
under oath that she heard the presiding judge in the case, Albert Sabo,
say to another judge, "I'm going to help them fry the nigger", referring
to how he was going to instruct the jury.
Of all the compelling evidence of innocence in this case, the most
important and least known is the existence of a fourth person at the
crime scene, a man named Kenneth Freeman. In Patrick O'Connor's
excellent book, The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal, he argues that Freeman, not Abu-Jamal, killed the officer, Faulkner.
Within hours of the shooting, a driver's licence application found in
Faulkner's shirt pocket led the police to Freeman, who was identified
as the shooter in a line-up. Yet, Freeman's presence at the scene was
concealed, first by inspector Giordano and later, at trial, by
prosecutor Joe McGill.
Prosecutorial and judicial misconduct
Yet, despite widespread evidence of innocence and prosecutorial and judicial misconduct during the conviction phase of the trial, the only relief that the courts have granted Mumia has been on his sentence - and even that came after 30 years on death row.
Following the Supreme Court motion last year, which confirmed the
unconstitutionality of his original death sentence, the Philadelphia DA,
Seth Williams, announced in a press conference on December 8, 2011,
that his office would not pursue a new death sentence in the Abu-Jamal
case.
The next day, Mumia was transferred to a new facility in Pennsylvania
where for 50 days he was housed in Administrative Custody or a
Restrictive Housing Unit (RHU), the prison's sanitised designation for
solitary confinement.
He was finally transferred to general population on January 27, 2012,
after an unrelenting campaign by his supporters, which included an
impromptu sit-in and the delivery of 5,000 signatures to the
Pennsylvania Department of Corrections alongside of a special statement
by United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez, denouncing
human isolation for more than 15 days, as torture.
The latest egregious violation of due process in the case came on
August 13, 2012, when Judge Pamela Dembe, President of the Philadelphia
Court of Common Pleas, in secret filed an order sentencing Mumia to life
in prison, without notifying him or his attorneys of the motion.
Had the clandestine filing not been discovered, by chance, by his
former attorney Rachel Wolkenstein, the 10-day window within which
defendants are allowed the right of appeal in such instances would have
elapsed and any future challenges to his confinement irreparably
compromised.
In the end, Mumia filed a Pro Se Motion for Post-Sentence Relief and
Reconsideration of Sentence without a second to spare, exactly 10 days
after the sentence was secretively issued in violation of the
Pennsylvania Rules of Criminal Procedure.
Mumia's eloquent prison broadcasts and writings have made him world famous as the "Voice of the Voiceless".
But after having lived through the gamut of punishments meted out in
America's prisons, from death row torture to solitary confinement and
the slow death of incarceration in general population, Mumia now stands
in a unique position to continue to analyse and fight against the
nation's machine of mass incarceration.
Following his transfer to general population, Mumia reported that
while he wrote about mass incarceration for close to 30 years, he didn't
realise the extent to which his isolation on death row, ironically,
mitigated his grasp of the human cost of mass incarceration.
Despite his political understanding of the problem, he was not prepared for its horrid and inhumane reality.
In a live conversation at the Cathedral Saint John the Divine with
the activist-scholar and former political prisoner, Angela Davis, in
April 2012, Mumia observed that at SCI Mahanoy, where he is currently
housed, there are over 200 men in wheelchairs, another 500 walking with
canes and the remainder look like children.
Thirty years of death row torture
In the 1990s, Mumia was served three death warrants. The fact that
for 30 years an international movement kept Abu-Jamal alive long enough
for the appeals process to run its course is sobering.
"Mumia's life, work and influence is the subject of an excellent new film, Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal, directed by Stephen Vittoria."
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In each of these dreadful instances, tens of thousands of people
marched in protest of Abu-Jamal's execution from New York and Oakland to
Philadelphia and Washington, DC, and before the American consulates in
cities around the world, from Paris to Sao Paulo.
Since the early 1990s, the people of Bobigny have been leading voices in the international fight to keep Abu-Jamal alive.
In 1999, Bobigny granted Mumia honourary-citizen status and in so
doing, it became one of over two-dozen cities around the world -
including, Venice and Palermo in Italy, Montreal, Detroit, San Francisco
and Saint-Anne in Martinique - to confer such an honour on Mumia.
The most widely recognised of such ceremonies happened in 2003 in
Paris. Its mayor at the time, Bertrand Delanoe, invited Angela Davis to
accept that city's honourary citizen award on behalf of Mumia, an honour
that had last been bestowed in 1971 on the legendary artist, Pablo
Picasso.
During the same period and since, international bodies, including the
European Parliament, the UN, the Japanese Diet and the Congressional
Black Caucus in the US have written formal statements denouncing his
death sentence, condemning the manner in which his conviction was
obtained and calling for a new trial or for Mumia's freedom.
The recent Supreme Court motion that vacated his death sentence also
came amidst a massive shift in public sentiment against the death
penalty and mass incarceration occasioned by the ruthless execution of
Troy Davis, the emergence of the Occupy movement, the murder of Trayvon
Martin and the growing public discussion of Michelle Alexander's
ground-breaking book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
In a letter to Mumia dated December 8, 2011 - the same day that the
Philadelphia DA's decision not to pursue another sentencing trial
signalled that Mumia's death sentence would be commuted to life in
prison without parole - the Mayor of Bobigny, Catherine Peyge, wrote:
"Like all the people of Bobigny, I am personally relieved by the choice
made by the Supreme Court not to follow the fury of those who want to
see you dead. I know that this decision does not end your torment. In
Bobigny we will continue to fight for a new trial that will eventually
prove your innocence."
The appellate process, which is now exhausted, failed Mumia as it has
hundreds of thousands like him. What we need now is to build a movement
that will not compromise with the continued imprisonment of one of the
most eloquent voices of justice and freedom of the 20th and 21st
centuries.
Mumia's life, work and influence is the subject of an excellent new film, Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal, directed by Stephen Vittoria.
After 30 years of death row torture - which the State formally
acknowledges was imposed unconstitutionally - Mumia should be
immediately released from prison and awarded restitution for time
served.
Freeing Mumia and ending mass incarceration in America is one of the most important moral assignments of our time.
Johanna Fernandez is assistant professor of History at
Baruch College of the City University of New York and writer and
producer of Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
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