From Death Row: This is Mumia Abu-Jamal; Part 1

My name is Mumia Abu-Jamal. I'm a journalist, a husband, a father, a grandfather and an African-American, I live in the fastest growing public housing tract in America. In 1981, I was a reporter for WUHY and president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. Currently, I'm a writer and a public radio commentator. I've been a resident on Pennsylvania's death row for 11 years. Tune in to hear my regular reports from death row. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal on your public radio station. U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Harry Blackmun, the court's senior justice who recently announced his retirement, has finally held as a matter of constitutional law that the death penalty as currently administered is unconstitutional. Blackmun, in a dissenting opinion in Chalons vs.. Collins, announced his position in a lengthy dissent that severely criticized the court majority for, quote, having virtually conceded that both fairness

and rationality cannot be achieved, unquote, in death penalty cases, added, the court has chosen to deregulate the entire enterprise, replacing, it would seem, substantive constitutional requirements with mere esthetics in what appeared to be judicial bitterness. Blackmun further announced, quote, From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death, unquote. Blackmun's dissent, recounting Supreme Court precedents from its death docket is a grim telling of judicial restrictions, cases stemming from the 1976 case. Greg vs. Georgia, which reinstated the death penalty to more recent cases like Kramer vs. Collins, where the court denied a hearing to a man trying to prove innocence. But if Blackmun's denunciation of his bench mates seemed bitter, the response from some on death row seemed equally acerbic. Why now? Asked one, what it means at another.

The 85 year old jurist long trek from Greg vs. Georgia with the death penalty was reinstated to Collins vs. Collins, where he condemns capital punishment process to unconstitutionality. In a singular dissent comes almost a quarter of a century too late for many in the shadow of the death house. Blackmun's critical fifth vote with a great majority made the death penalty possible and formed the foundation for the plethora of cases that he now condemns in Cowans. Like McCleskey, Herrera, Sawyer and others. For without Greg, the others would not be further Blackmun's dissent. The remarkable, impassioned discourse is of negligible legal force and will save not one life. Not even defended Callan's Blackmon and his death penalty jurisprudence at least assumes the late Justice Marshall's mantle of the lone dissenter, a Jeremiah preaching out in a dry, searing judicial wilderness

where few will hear and none will heed his lamentations. Had he joined Marshall while he lived and Brennan, while he adjudicated a life block, might have emerged with enough light and enough strength to fashion a bare majority by attracting to stragglers. But this never occurred, and in his dissent and Collins Blackmun suggests it may never occur as he wrote, quote, Perhaps one day this court will develop procedural rules and verbal formulas that actually will provide consistency, fairness and reliability in a capital sentencing scheme. I am not optimistic that such a day will come. I am more optimistic, though, that this court eventually will conclude that the effort to eliminate arbitrariness while preserving fairness in the infliction of death is so plainly doomed to failure that it and the death penalty must be abandoned altogether. I may not live to see that day, but I have faith that eventually it will

arrive, unquote, to which some on death row upon no time soon from death row. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal. For more information about my case, racism and the death penalty and what you can do. Contac Equal Justice USA at three 01 six nine nine oh four to. My name is Mumia Abu-Jamal. I'm a journalist, a husband, a father, a grandfather and an African-American, I live in the fastest growing public housing tract in America. In 1981, I was a reporter for WUKY and president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. Currently, I'm a writer and a public radio commentator. I've been a resident on Pennsylvania's death row for 11 years, tuned in to hear my regular reports from death row.

This is Mumia Abu-Jamal on your public radio station. She sits in utter stillness. Her coffee brown features as if set in obsidian, as if a mask barely perceptible, the tears threatening to overflow that dark, proud maternal face, a face held still by rage. A warm spring day in North Philadelphia saw her on her way home after her tiring duties as a housekeeper in a West Mount Airy home. Upon arrival, she was stopped by police who told her she could not enter her home of 23 years and that it would be torn down as part of a city program against drug dens. My saying no drugged in the 59 year old grandmother argued, This is my home. The cops, strangers to this part of town could care less. Mrs. Helen Anthony left the scene to contact her grown children. Two hours later, she returned to an eerie scene straight out of

the Twilight Zone. Her home was no more. A pile of bricks stood a bit hills of red dust and twisted debris, a lone wall standing jagged, a man suit flapping on a hook, flapping like a flag of surrender. After a war waged by bulldozers and ambitious politicians, Mrs. Athalie received no warning before the jaws of a baleful backhoe built into the bricks of her life, tearing asunder the gatherings and memories of a life well lived. She was served no notice that the City of Brotherly Love intended to grind her home of 23 years into dust because they didn't like her neighbors. They just showed up one day armed with television cameras and political ambitions. And did it gone? When reporters asked politicos about the black grandmother whose home was demolished, they responded with characteristic arrogance.

Well, the law of eminent domain gives us the right to tear down any house we want to, they said. When coverage turned negative, out came the olive branch will reimburse her. Oops, honest mistake compensation, they said. Left unsaid is the wisdom of a policy of mass destruction planned over a brunch of Bree and Croissance executed for the six o'clock news. With no regard for the lives and well-being of the people involved in a city with an estimated 30000 homeless people, why does the government embark on a blitzkrieg of bulldozing and demolishing homes, even abandoned ones? Mrs. Anthony offered a home in compensation by red faced city officials is less than enthused the way the city treated her or pinned her daughter, Geraldine Johnson. She does not want to live in Philadelphia. Her dreadful treatment at the hands of those who dare call themselves civil

servants points to the underlying indifference with which black lives property aspirations are treated by the political elite. One would be hard pressed to find this degree of destructive nonchalance utilized in a neighborhood where a white grandmother lived. Another chapter in the tragic comedy called The Drug War from Death Row. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal. For more information about my case, racism and the death penalty and what you can do. Contac Equal Justice USA at three oh one six nine nine oh oh four to. My name is Mumia Abu-Jamal. I'm a journalist, a husband, a father, a grandfather and an African-American, I live in the fastest growing public housing tract in America. In 1981, I was a reporter for NY

and president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. Currently, I'm a writer and a public radio commentator. I've been a resident on Pennsylvania's death row for 11 years, tuned in to hear my regular reports from death row. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal on your public radio station. In every phase and facet of national life, there's a war being waged on America's poor and social policy. Poor mothers are targeted for criminal sanctions, for acts if committed by mothers of higher economic class would merit treatment. At the Betty Ford Center in youth policy, governments haisten to close schools while building boot camps and prisons as their graduate schools. Xenophobic politicians hoist campaigns to the dark star of imprisonment for street beggars, further fattening the fortress economy. The only apparent solution to the scourge of homelessness is to build more and more prisons in America's Nyos.

To be poor is not so much socioeconomic status as it is a serious character flaw, a defect of the spirit. Federal statistics tell a tale of loss and wasnt so dreadful that Dickens of A Tale of Two Cities fame would cringe. Consider seven million people homeless with less than 200 dollars in monthly income, 37 million people, fourteen point five percent of the nation's population living below poverty levels. Of that number, 29 percent or African-Americans, meaning over ten point six million blacks living in poverty. Both wings of the ruling Republican Party try to outdo themselves in announcing new, ever more draconian measures to restrict, redress, restrain and to eliminate the poor. One is reminded of the wry observation of French writer Anatoly France. The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor

to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread. Already, U.S. manufacturers have fled to NAFTA friendly Mexico, and only the Zapatista insurgency in Japan has slowed an emerging flood of Western capital. Outgunned in the industrial wars by Japan and Germany, the U.S. has embarked on a low technology, low skilled, high employment scheme that exploits the poor, the stupid and the slow via a boom in prison construction. America's social growth industry. Increasingly, more and more Americans are guarding more and more American prisoners for more and more years. And this amidst the lowest crime rate in decades. No major political party has an answer to this social dilemma short of cages and grieves for the poor. The time is ripe for a new, brighter, life affirming vision that liberates,

not represses, the poor, who, after all, are the vast majority of this earth people neither serpentine politics nor a sterile economic theory which treats them people as mere economic units, offer much hope for the very politicians they vote for spit in their faces while economists write them off as nonpersons. It must come from the poor, a rebellion of the spirit that reaffirms their intrinsic human worth based upon who they are rather than what they possess from death row. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal. For more information about my case, racism and the death penalty and what you can do. Contac Equal Justice USA at three 01 six nine nine oh four to. My name is Mumia Abu-Jamal.

I'm a journalist, a husband, a father, a grandfather and an African-American, I live in the fastest growing public housing tract in America. In 1981, I was a reporter for WUKY and president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. Currently, I'm a writer and a public radio commentator. I've been a resident on Pennsylvania's death row for 11 years, tuned in to hear my regular reports from death row. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal on your public radio station. Every day in America, the trek continues, a black march to death row in Pennsylvania, where African-Americans constitute nine percent of the population, well over 60 percent of its death row inhabitants are black across the nation, although the numbers are less stark. The trend is unmistakable. In October 1991, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released its national update, which revealed 40 percent of America's death row population is black.

This out of a population that is a mere 12 percent of the national population. The five states with the largest death rows have larger percentages on death row than in their statewide black populations. Statistics are often flexible in interpretation and like scripture, can be cited for any purpose. Does this mean that African-Americans are somehow innocents subjected to a set up by state officials? Not especially. What it does suggest is that state actors at all stages of the criminal justice system from slating at the police station, arraignment at the judicial office, pretrial trial and sentencing stage before court, treat Afro-American defendants with a special vengeance that white defendants are not exposed to. This is the dictionary definition of discrimination. In the nineteen eighty seven case, McCleskey versus Kempe, the famed boldest study revealed facts that unequivocally proved one defendants

charged with killing white victims in Georgia or four point three times as likely to be sentenced to death as defendants charged with killing blacks to six of every 11 defendants convicted of killing a white person would not have received the death sentence if their victim had been black. And three cases involving black defendants and white victims are more likely to result in a death sentence than cases featuring any other racial combination of defendant victim. Although the U.S. Supreme Court, by a razor thin five four vote, rejected McCluskey's claim, it could hardly reject the facts underlying them. Retired Justice Powell said in essence, differences don't amount to discrimination. The bedrock reason why McCleskey was denied relief was the fear again expressed by Paul that McCluskey's claim, taken to its logical conclusion, throws into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system.

How true McKlusky can't be corrected, or else the whole system is incorrect. Now, that couldn't be the case, could it, from death row? This is Mumia Abu-Jamal. For more information about my case, racism and the death penalty and what you can do. Contac Equal Justice USA at three 01 six nine nine oh four to. My name is Mumia Abu-Jamal. I'm a journalist, a husband, a father, a grandfather and an African-American, I live in the fastest growing public housing tract in America. In 1981, I was a reporter for WUKY and president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. Currently, I'm a writer and a public radio commentator. I've been a resident on Pennsylvania's death row for 11 years, tuned

in to hear my regular reports from death row. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal on your public radio station. The federal trial of four Los Angeles cops forced by the public orgy of rebellion and rage, which rocked the city a year before in response to acquittals stemming from the brutal Rodney King, beating ended in a jury compromise, too guilty to acquitted. While observers may be dispirited by the fact that two cops who brutalized, traumatized and pummeled King were acquitted, the trial itself raises some serious and disturbing questions. While no one would call the writer a cop lover, it is my firm opinion that the federal retrial of the four L.A. cops involved in King's legalized brutality constituted a clear violation of the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which forbids double jeopardy. The Fifth Amendment provides in part, quote, Nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put

in jeopardy of life or limb, unquote. Like millions of Africans in America, Chicanos and a host of Americans, the acquittals of the L.A. Cop four and the Simi Valley state assault trial was an outrage that solidified the conviction that there can be no justice in the course of this system for black people, although not a reason for the L.A. rebellion, it certainly was a psychic straw that broke the camel's back. The Simi Valley trial, like the king beating itself, was both an obscenity and a commonality for neither all white propolis juries nor state sanctioned brutality or rarities to those who live in us tomb's as opposed to reading about them. The point is the federal LAPD King's civil rights trial was a political prosecution spurred by international embarrassment stemming from the raging flames of L.A., without which no prosecution would have occurred. It also reveals how the system, under the pressure of an outraged people,

will betray the trust of their own agents. So one need not ask how they will treat or do treat one not their own, especially when there is public pressure to support it. The same system that denied the four L.A. cops their alleged constitutional rights denies the rights of the poor and politically powerless daily with impunity, and will further utilize the court case to deny others to be silent while the state violates its own alleged constitutional law. To prosecute someone we hate is but to invite silence when the state violates its own laws to prosecute the state's enemies and opponents. This we cannot do. We must deny the state that power. The national ACLU is also of the opinion that the second federal prosecution violated the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, a position that seems sound. I believe it is upon that basis that the convictions will later be reversed by

an appellate court. It is ironic that many of those who did not oppose the federal civil prosecutions feel it inappropriate for the federal system to review state convictions under habeas corpus statutes. All this second federal civil rights violation case has done is provide the system with camouflage to give the appearance of justice. The illusion is never the real from death row. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal. For more information about my case, racism and the death penalty and what you can do. Contac Equal Justice USA at three 01 six nine nine oh four to. My name is Mumia Abu-Jamal. I'm a journalist, a husband, a father, a grandfather and an African-American, I live in the fastest growing public housing tract in

America. In 1981, I was a reporter for WUKY and president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. Currently, I'm a writer and a public radio commentator. I've been a resident on Pennsylvania's death row for 11 years, tuned in to hear my regular reports from death row. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal on your public radio station. A woman working to feed the homeless gets involved in a confrontation with transit cops down in a major metropolitan subway. She's accosted, manhandled, thrown to the ground and held under restraint. Another woman has her window shattered by highway patrol when she doesn't move her car fast enough nor open her window on command. She is seized, handcuffed and arrested. What makes these cases remarkable is the identity of the women described here. The first, in addition to being a political leader in her own right, is the wife

of a United States congressman. The second, a prominent professional, is the wife of a Pennsylvania state representative. Both women are African-American, although charges were later dropped against these women. The very fact that they were treated so crudely despite their prominence and influence makes one wonder about how cruelly people without such influence are treated by agents of the state. The two events just described actually occurred in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1993, the first involving Philadelphia city councilwoman Mrs Janie Blackwell, the wife of freshman United States Democratic Representative Luciane Blackwell. The second involved a leading Philadelphia black lawyer, Mrs. Rene Hughes, past president of the prestigious Barista's Association, local affiliate of the National Bar Association, and wife of State Representative Vincent Hughes of the 170 district.

That both cases were administratively resolved is of less importance than the fact the incidents occurred at all. Such incidents are but daily occurrences in the lives of black men and women in America, regardless of class, rank, status or station in life, that cops can treat people so shabbily. Indeed, the very people who literally pay their salaries and set their operating budgets gives a grim glimmer of life at the social, economic, political bottom, where people have no influence, no clout, no voice. These cases reveal the cold contempt held by white cops for black men and women, even if those women are in positions of state power which are presumed to be in control. In truth, any control is illusory and is totally effervescent as power itself. Police are out of control.

Black politicians are out of power when these events occur. We can only conclude that if such events can happen to them. One of us, if people can watch the massacre of Move People on May 13th, 1985, as police firebombed move headquarters, the ATF, FBI ramming and destruction of the conditions of Waco, Texas in April 1993 and still claim the police are under control, then nothing said here will convince them. The police are agents of white ruling class capitalists will period. Neither black managers nor black politicians can change that reality. The people themselves must organize for their own defense or it won't get done from death row. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal. For more information about my case, racism and the death penalty and what you can do. Contac Equal Justice USA

at three 01 six nine nine oh four to. My name is Mumia Abu-Jamal. I'm a journalist, a husband, a father, a grandfather and an African-American, I live in the fastest growing public housing tract in America. In 1981, I was a reporter for WUKY and president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. Currently, I'm a writer and a public radio commentator. I've been a resident on Pennsylvania's death row for 11 years, tuned in to hear my regular reports from death row. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal on your public radio station. In the case known as Strickland versus Washington, the U.S. Supreme Court drastically narrowed the range of challenges to the effectiveness and competence of counsel at criminal trials. The Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution provides a right in all criminal cases

to assistance of counsel. The Sixth Amendment notwithstanding, are people facing imprisonment and severe punishment actually receiving effective and competent assistance of counsel? You decide if your lawyer actually went to sleep during your trial, would you think he or she was effective? This is what an appeals court ruled in a case told People versus Tippens 1991. Although defense counsel slept during portions of the trial, the opinion read counsel and provided defended meaningful representations. What about if your lawyer was high on drugs during the trial? Would an appellate court was faced with just such an instance in the case known as People vs. Badia 1990? This was their learned analysis. Quote, Proof of a defense counsel's use of narcotics during a trial does not amount to a perceived violation of constitutional right to effective counsel, unquote.

Note in this case, counsel admitted using heroin and cocaine throughout the trial and in the case Commonwealth vs. Africa, specifically involving move political prisoner Mike Africa. The trial lawyer later admitted to daily cocaine and marijuana use, but that issue wasn't raised on appeal. It would seem that a fairly competent lawyer, having researched the evidence, would pay some attention to how his client was dressed at trial. Not so that a court of appeals in the case noticed People vs. Murphy 1983, quote, counsel's seeming indifference to defendants attire, though defendant was wearing the same sweatshirt and footwear in court that he wore on the day of the crime did not constitute ineffective assistance, unquote. In all of these real cases, the attorneys involved were deemed competent in their representations, in their client's convictions, were upheld.

Under these cases, counsel means little more than presence by a lawyer at trial, for even if he is asleep, even if he or she is a drug addict. Indeed, high at the trial itself. And I think counsel under Strickland's tortured logic is presumed effective. This is just a few of the many cases from across the United States that show the poverty of the Sixth Amendment. For more information you can read Effective Assistance Isn't Much, an article by Roger Darlow off in the January February issue of The American Lawyer. Increasingly, the amendments to the US Constitution are merely filler for dusty history books, which have no application in real life, as the courts have shown repeatedly from death row. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal. For more information about my case, racism and the death penalty and what you can do. Contac Equal Justice USA

at three 01 six nine nine oh oh four to. My name is Mumia Abu-Jamal. I'm a journalist, a husband, a father, a grandfather and an African-American, I live in the fastest growing public housing tract in America. In 1981, I was a reporter for WUKY and president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. Currently, I'm a writer and a public radio commentator. I've been a resident on Pennsylvania's death row for 11 years. Tune in to hear my regular reports from death row. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal on your public radio station. The brutal police bludgeoning of black Detroit father Melissa Green has illustrated the battle lines at the so-called war on drugs could more accurately be drawn around a war on blacks.

Published reports surfacing since the flashlight beating of the West Side father of five, which left him dead of head trauma, speculated on the issue of whether Greene was a user of crack cocaine, as police charged. So what if he was? The purported justification behind the so-called drug war is to undo or lessen the damage that drugs do to people. To be sure, drugs do serious harm to people by destroying their health and taking lives as well. But was malice Greene beaten to death in his car to save him from the scourge of drugs? Were the police so concerned with saving green from drugs ill effects that they beat his skull in with flashlights? One is reminded of the saying that came out of the Vietnam War when U.S. troops ravaged and napalm villagers. We had to destroy the village in order to save it, they said. Did police destroy him to save him from the sickness of drugs so soon after the high tech brutality against Rodney King of L.A.

and the scene is repeated, this time fatally. The drug war is a cruel farce designed to obliterate those they claim to protect. In the U.S. alone, over 300000 people perish annually from that well-known legal drug cigarets. In the US alone, well over twenty thousand people die every year from the equally popular illegal drug alcohol. As a result of cocaine, an estimated 18000 people died between 1989 and 1990. Cigarets produced an addictive substance nicotine which poisons lungs, causing emphysema and death. Alcohol is literally an organic poison which destroys living tissue such as brain tissue and livers is a stimulant to crime. Countless traffic accidents, suicide and death will those who wield deadly to themselves and others through passive second hand smoke inhalation tobacco be beaten down in the

street? Will drinkers find Uzi's pointed at their bodies when they imbibe their next alcoholic fix? I don't think so. So when is a drug a drug, when it destroys human life, or when it fails to return a tidy profit to U.S. industries? Every single day, lives are shattered by police and judicial actions, which crumble careers and families in the name of a war on drugs. While popular, financially respected drugs continue untold social psychic and human damage, the malice Greene case shows how the state, instead of solving a problem, creates an absurdity of destroying a life only to save it from death row. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal. For more information about my case, racism and the death penalty and what you can do. Contac Equal Justice USA

at three oh one six nine nine oh oh oh four to.