The Case for a New Trial

Mumia Abu-Jamal is an African American journalist. He is on death row for the shooting death of a Philadelphia police officer despite evidence of innocence and police and prosecutorial misconduct.
 
Police Officer Daniel Faulkner was shot early in the morning of December 9, 1981 in downtown Philadelphia. After a controversial trial before Judge Albert Sabo in June and July of 1982, Mumia was convicted and sentenced to death. In 1989, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court denied his appeal. In 1990, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider his case.
 
In June 1995, Mumia filed a Petition for Post-conviction Relief (PCRA) seeking a new trial. An evidentiary hearing on his PCRA was held before Judge Sabo in July and August of 1995. Sabo denied the petition in September 1995. Mumia's appeal of this decision is pending in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Four independent eyewitnesses, viewing events from four different vantage points, told the police that they heard shots and then saw someone run from the scene. They each saw the person flee in the direction of a narrow alleyway, which provided an easy escape. Critically wounded by a gunshot, Mumia was unable to run away.

The first eyewitness, Dessie Hightower, told the police that he saw someone flee. A week after the shooting, the police submitted Hightower to a lie-detector test, which he was told he passed. The defense was never informed about the test. For the first time at the PCRA hearing, the police admitted to testing Hightower but claimed the test data showed "deception." When the defense challenged this finding and produced an expert, the court refused to turn over the data. Further, the police could not explain why this data included no question about a man fleeing the scene. Nor could they explain why Hightower, a college student with no criminal record, was polygraphed while three prosecution witnesses with criminal records were not.

The second eyewitness, a convicted prostitute named Veronica Jones, was pressured by police to recant her initial statement that she saw two men run from the scene.

The third witness, Deborah Kordansky, told the police that, after hearing gunshots, she looked out her window and saw a man running from the scene. The defense was unable to locate Kordansky to testify at the original trial.

The fourth witness, Robert Chobert, told a police captain at the scene that the shooter ran away. He repeated this assertion an hour later at police headquarters, describing the shooter as running "30 steps" east on Locust. He also described the shooter as weighing over 200 pounds. Mumia weighed around 170. Six months later at the trial, Chobert retracted this initial statement and said the shooter only ran 10 feet, placing him where the police found Mumia wounded.

The court kept from the jury the fact that Chobert was on probation and thus susceptible to lying under police pressure. At the PCRA hearing, Chobert, an unlicensed cabdriver, revealed that he expected the prosecutor would assist him in securing a chauffeur's license in exchange for his testimony.

William Singletary testified at the PCRA hearing that he witnessed the shooting. He said that Mumia was not the shooter and that the shooter fled minutes before the police arrived. When he told this to the police, however, they tore up his written statement, threatened him with physical harm to make him sign a false statement that he saw nothing, and harassed him until he left Philadelphia, making him unavailable for the trial.

The prosecution's key witness, Cynthia White, a convicted prostitute, changed her story several times before fingering Mumia at the trial. The prosecution's only black witness, she described the shooter as less than 5'8" while Mumia is 6'1". No other witness saw White at the scene. Singletary would have testified that White arrived after the shooting.

Veronica Jones testified at the trial that the police had offered her and White a deal: testify against Mumia and they could work the streets as prostitutes without threat of arrest. Trial Judge Albert Sabo ordered this testimony stricken from the record.

Arnold Howard testified at the 1995 hearing that he was taken into police custody within hours of the shooting as a suspect in the murder. In police custody for 72 hours, Howard was interrogated and his hands were tested for powder burns. He also came in contact with two other suspects, including a Kenneth Freemanÿ-ÿwho told Howard he had been at the scene and that Mumia had not shot the officer. The defense was never informed that the police investigated other possible suspects.

Police ballistics evidence was incomplete.

• The state did not prove its theory that the murder weapon was a gun legally registered to Mumia, which the police claimed to have found at the scene. A police ballistics expert testified at the trial that the bullets from the scene and Officer Faulkner's body were too fractured to make a definitive determination. The police lost a fragment from the fatal bullet, making it difficult even to determine its caliber.
• The police failed to perform tests - or if they did, covered up the results - to determine if this gun had been fired recently or if Mumia's hands had powder burns. The defense did not have adequate funds to perform additional, independent tests that could have excluded Mumia's gun.
• Medical Examiner Paul Hoyer, who removed the fatal bullet from Officer Faulkner, judged it to be a .44 caliber while Mumia's gun was a .38 caliber pistol.

Mumia was prevented from presenting an adequate defense at his trial.

• Seeing that his attorney, Anthony Jackson, was failing to master the details of the case, Mumia sought and was granted the right to defend himself. But three days into jury selection, trial Judge Albert Sabo abruptly removed Mumia from his own defense. Sabo ordered Jackson - who was assisting as back-up counsel - to take over. Jackson insisted that he was not prepared nor did he have the time to handle the case, but Sabo prevailed. Mumia repeatedly protested and was banished from much of the trial.
• Jackson did not mount an adequate defense. He failed to excuse jurors who were clearly biased against Mumia, nor did he challenge the prosecution's unlawful exclusion of 10 of 16 potential black jurors. He put defense witnesses Jones and Hightower on the stand without even talking to them beforehand.
• Despite repeated defense pleas for more funds, Judge Sabo allocated a meager $150 for each defense expert. Consequently, the defense was unable to retain expert services to rebuke the prosecution's presentation of the physical evidence and located only two of over 125 potential eyewitnesses.
• Judge Sabo disregarded the growing rift between Mumia and his attorney and even exacerbated it by forcing Jackson to continue with the case despite his and Mumia's objections.

At his trial, Mumia was not allowed to present critical evidence challenging the police's false claim that he had confessed.

• The state presented testimony from police officer Gary Bell and hospital security guard Priscilla Durham that Mumia had loudly and arrogantly confessed as he lay shot and beaten on a hospital waiting-room floor. This concocted confession was never reported until two months after the shooting, following Mumia's filing of a police brutality complaint.
• Police documents reveal that arresting officer Gary Wakshul reported, both the day of the shooting and a week later, that he was with Mumia the whole time and that Mumia "made no comment." Sixty four days later, during an interview with the department's Internal Affairs Bureau regarding Mumia's brutality allegations, Wakshul suddenly "remembered" hearing Mumia confess.
• Police documents explicitly noted that Wakshul should not take a vacation during the trial. Yet, when the defense attorney attempted to call Wakshul as a witness, the prosecutor insisted that he was on vacation and not available to testify. Despite defense pleas, the court refused to interrupt the trial long enough to call Wakshul at home to verify the prosecution's claim that he was unavailable. Instead, Judge Sabo taunted Mumia for his attorney's belated request, saying "your attorney and you goofed."
• At the 1995 hearing, Wakshul testified that he had vacationed at home and could have come to testify. He also revealed, for the first time, that the police had met with the prosecutor to coordinate testimony regarding Mumia's charges of police brutality. Had the defense been informed of such a meeting, they could have used it as further evidence that the police fabricated the confession story.
• Also at the 1995 hearing, Wakshul could not recall seeing Bell or any hospital security personnel near Mumia. Yet, Sabo refused the defense's attempt to call Bell and other officers to the stand to further explore its claim that the police fabricated the confession.

Judge Albert Sabo's handling of the case typifies his record of bias against capital defendants.

• Judge Sabo has sentenced more than twice as many people to death (32 total) than any other judge in the country - all but two of whom are people of color.
• Even though Sabo is a longtime member of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), a group actively lobbying for Mumia's execution, he refused to recuse himself from Mumia's appeal.
• Sabo rushed the PCRA hearing, denying the defense the usual time granted for preparation and discovery. He has a long reputation in the Philadelphia bar as a "prosecutor in robes." Sabo's behavior at the PCRA hearing was so outrageous that the American Lawyer described him as "oozing partiality toward the prosecution." He ruled with the prosecution 100% of the time, denying every defense motion, and routinely threatened defense attorneys with contempt, ultimately jailing one and fining another $1,000.
• At the PCRA hearing, Sabo refused to compel the prosecution to turn over all case documents despite evidence that key information had been withheld from the defense. He also quashed over 25 defense subpoenas, including one for a juror who would have testified that three jurors met during the trial to discuss the case.
• Sabo denied Mumia a new trial, issuing his written opinion just three days after the hearing concluded, in time for an anti-Mumia rally held by the Philadelphia FOP on September 16, 1995. The ruling denied every constitutional claim Mumia raised. It adopted, virtually verbatim, the prosecution's findings and conclusions. Every police witness was deemed credible and every defense witness incredible.

The trial violated Mumia's First Amendment rights.

During the sentencing phase, the prosecutor questioned Mumia about statements he had made as a teenager in the Black Panther Party and his overall political philosophy. He then used Mumia's radical associations and views to argue he had a propensity to kill police officers and thus deserved the death sentence. The U.S. Supreme Court has found that such arguments by a prosecutor violate First Amendment rights of free speech and association.

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