To:
Eric Holder, Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice
Tom Corbett, Governor, Pennsylvania Office of the Governor
R. Seth Williams, District Attorney, Office of the District Attorney of Philadelphia
We, the undersigned, call on Attorney General Eric Holder and the U.S.
Department of Justice to intervene in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal and
recommend that Governor Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania immediately release
Abu-Jamal from prison. In 2011, the death sentence of this
world-renowned journalist was declared unconstitutional and commuted to
life without parole for allegedly murdering Philadelphia police officer
Daniel Faulkner in 1981. Abu-Jamal is an outstanding citizen, who has
been racially profiled and targeted for his political affiliations by a
Philadelphia police department with a long history of brutality and
corruption. For thirty years, he has been denied basic rights.
Systemic
police corruption, judicial and prosecutorial misconduct, and
Abu-Jamal’s steadfast assertion of innocence, have all made this case a
global symbol of U.S. justice gone wrong. In 2000, Amnesty International
found that the case “was irredeemably tainted by politics and race and
failed to meet international fair trial standards.”
Because for
28 years Abu-Jamal was wrongly subjected to inhumane conditions on death
row, because he has been denied his Fifth Amendment right to a fair
trial, and because of the uninterrupted history of police corruption and
conspiracy in this case, we call on the Department of Justice to
recommend that Governor Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania immediately release
Mumia Abu-Jamal from prison.
Judicial and Prosecutorial Misconduct
•
The prosecution's case is built on the erroneous assumption that only
three people were present at the time of the shooting, but a fourth
person – the probable perpetrator – was seen fleeing the scene after
Officer Faulkner was shot. The police, prosecutor Joe McGill, and the
trial judge suppressed this from both the defense and jury.
•
Abu-Jamal was convicted in the absence of material evidence. The bullet
that killed Officer Faulkner could not be matched to Abu-Jamal’s gun.
The police also failed to perform routine tests on Abu-Jamal’s hands,
which would have determined that he had not shot a gun that night.
• A
freelance journalist’s photographs of the crime scene – which also
disprove key points of the state’s case theory – were never made
available to the defense or the jury.
• A court stenographer
testified in an affidavit that during the trial she heard the presiding
judge, Albert Sabo, say, “I’m going to help them fry the nigger.”
Police Corruption
•
In 1979, the Department of Justice filed an unprecedented lawsuit
against Philadelphia’s mayor and 21 top city and police officials. Its
conclusions? That the police department’s behavior – which included
shooting nonviolent suspects, abusing handcuffed prisoners, and
tampering with evidence – “shocks the conscience.”
• The officers who
arrested and later brutalized Abu-Jamal came from the 6th District,
which was under yet another federal investigation for police corruption
by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Philadelphia, with the approval of the
U.S. Department of Justice under Ronald Reagan.
• As a result, fully a
third of the 35 officers involved in this case, including the top
officer at the crime scene, Inspector Alfonzo Giordano, were
subsequently convicted of rank corruption, extortion and tampering with
evidence to obtain convictions.
We call on the Department of Justice to support the release of Mumia Abu-Jamal
Sincerely,
[Your name]
https://theblacklist.net/
Replies