Spiegel is third-year history student and a member of Spartacus
Youth Club.
By Lital Spiegel
The clock is ticking on the life of Mumia Abu-Jamal, an innocent
death-row political prisoner who was falsely charged with the
killing of a police officer, Daniel Faulkner, and convicted and
sentenced to death by Philadelphia’s notorious cop and court
frame-up machine. Evidence of Jamal’s innocence is
demonstrable and overwhelming, and his case exposes the racist
capitalist injustice inherent in the American “justice”
system.
On May 4, new attorneys for Mumia dropped a legal bombshell with
new papers filed in federal court. Among these papers is the sworn
confession of a man named Arnold Beverly, who states:
“I was hired, along with another guy, and paid to shoot
and kill Faulkner. I had heard that Faulkner was a problem for the
mob and corrupt policemen because he interfered with the graft and
payoffs made to allow illegal activity including prostitution,
gambling, drugs without prosecution in the center city area…I
shot Faulkner in the face at close range. Jamal was shot shortly
after that by a uniformed police officer who arrived on the
scene”(http://www.refuseandresist.org/mumia/2001/
050801beverly.html).
Mumia Abu-Jamal also submitted a sworn statement, declaring,
“I did not shoot Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. I had
nothing to do with the killing of Officer Faulkner. I am
innocent”(http://www.refuseandresist.org/mumia/2001/
050501affidavit.html).
At about 3:55 a.m. on Dec. 9, 1981, in downtown Philadelphia,
Faulkner had stopped a VW driven by Jamal’s brother, Billy
Cook, which was carrying another passenger. Jamal testifies that
while filling out his log sheet in the cab he was driving at the
time, he heard shouting and “recognized my brother standing
in the street staggering and dizzy. I immediately exited the cab
and ran to his scream.
“As I came across the street I saw a uniformed cop turn
toward me, gun in hand, saw a flash and went down to my
knees.”
As one of his new attorneys said, Jamal “was in the wrong
place at the wrong time when a hit was in progress on a police
officer who was causing problems interfering with police
corruption.”
But for the Philly cops, Jamal was in the right place at the
right time. They had been seeking him out since he was a
15-year-old spokesman for the Black Panther Party in 1969.
There has been massive evidence already submitted to the courts
showing Mumia’s innocence. Now the cop and D.A. frame-up of
Jamal has been blown to bits. But that does not stop them from
pursuing their “legal” lynching.
The pinnacle of the machinery of repression in the United States
is the barbaric death penalty rooted in the legacy of chattel
slavery. As Marxists, we do not accord the state the right to
decide who shall live and who shall die. The Spartacus Youth Club
calls on working people, minorities, youth and all opponents of
capitalist repression in the United States and around the world to
demand: Freedom now for Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the racist death
penalty!
Jamal’s new legal team was assembled after he dismissed
former lead counsel Len Weinglass and assistant counsel Dan
Williams. Jamal was forced to fire his longtime attorneys after
Williams authored a malicious book, which now serves as a brief for
the prosecution, purporting to be an “inside account”
of the case.
Appropriately titled “Executing Justice,”
Williams’ book tries to preemptively kill the evidence of
Jamal’s innocence presented in the new affidavits. Both
Williams and Weinglass were well aware of this evidence for some
time.
Williams’ central premise is that the cops never could or
would knowingly frame an innocent man, and he dismisses
Beverly’s confession. In fact, the cops were plenty worried
about possible FBI informants within their ranks. At the time, the
three senior cops who constituted the chain of command
“investigating” Faulkner’s killing were
themselves the target of a federal investigation of police
corruption.
In Philly alone, hundreds of convictions based on concocted
evidence and coerced confessions have been thrown out just in the
last several years.
The whole history of this country is littered with frame-ups of
those who have struggled to defend their unions, fight capitalist
injustice, fight racial oppression or to in any way challenge the
capitalist rulers. Panther leader Geronimo Pratt was imprisoned for
27 years for a crime the police and FBI knew he didn’t commit
““ because they had the wiretaps that would prove his
innocence.
The Feds and Philly cops long had their sights on Jamal. The FBI
amassed over 800 pages on Jamal in its murderous COINTELPRO
operation files. This vendetta against Jamal continued as he
refused to be silenced in his impassioned defense of African
American rights and remained unbowed in the face of state
repression.
While every possible legal avenue must be pursued, we recognize
that the capitalist state ““Â with its courts, prisons and
police ““ exists solely to maintain through organized violence
and terror the rule of the capitalist class over the working class
and the oppressed. Jamal will not and cannot get a fair hearing in
the racist, capitalist courts.
We have fought to bring the cause of Mumia’s freedom to
the multiracial working class, organizing united-front actions
across the country centered on the understanding that the social
power of labor must be mobilized in Jamal’s defense and
linked to the struggle against the entire capitalist system.
Bourgeois liberals say that Jamal’s frame-up is just an
aberration and seek to show that this system is inherently fair.
Their appeals to the state for “justice” and a
“fair” trial simply attempt to mask the true face of
bourgeois democracy, which represents nothing other than the
dictatorship of the capitalist system.
Focusing narrowly on the denial of Jamal’s right to
self-representation at the original trial, they have ignored the
state frame-up and downplayed Jamal’s innocence. This is
typified by groups who join in dismissing the new testimony as some
kind of deranged conspiracy theory. This whitewash of the bourgeois
injustice system serves to demobilize workers, youth and others who
want to fight for Jamal’s freedom. Why take to the streets if
it’s simply a constitutional matter to be settled in the
capitalist courts?
Our aim in the fight to free Mumia, as in all our work, is to
imbue the working class with an understanding of its own power and
of the unity of the interests of labor and the fight for African
American freedom in the U.S. We fight to make the working class
conscious that if it does not fight against racial oppression, it
will never break the chains of its own exploitation.
To use its social power, however, labor must break the hold of
the pro-capitalist trade union’s lack of good leadership,
which ties the workers to their own exploiters through its support
of the Democratic Party.
The war on laborers, African Americans, women and immigrants
waged by the American ruling class is the domestic side of its
imperialist depredations abroad, from arming the bloody Zionist
state in its slaughter of Palestinians to targeting the deformed
Chinese workers state for capitalist counterrevolution.
Class-conscious workers organized into a multiracial
workers’ party are the only force that can sweep away the
entire apparatus of capitalist repression to end an entire system
of racial oppression, exploitation and war.
We must mobilize labor power and African American power in mass
demonstrations demanding “Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the
racist death penalty!”