The Jamal Journal: The International Movement Supporting US Political Prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal: Press Release for March 12 protests, written by Mobilization4Mumia

Friday, March 12, 2021

Press Release for March 12 protests, written by Mobilization4Mumia

Mobilization4Mumia

Mobilization4Mumia.com, mobilization4mumia@gmail.com PRESS RELEASE - March 12, 2021

Contact: Johanna Fernandez: 917-930-0804, jfernandez1202@gmail.com; Joe Piette: 610-931-2615, jpiette660@hotmail.com

March 12 protests: Mumia has COVID, Congestive heart disease -- Release him and other PA prisoners now! Freedom is the only treatment!

Supporters of Pennsylvania political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal will gather outside the offices of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner and San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin on March 12 to demand the immediate release of 66-year-old Abu-Jamal, who has tested positive for COVID-19. In Philadelphia, the protest begins at 11am at 3 S. Penn Sq. In San Francisco, gather at Jackson Playground at 1pm for a march to the DA’s office. Join in person or virtually to the Philadelphia action at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Xp3Ps87ey4 . And the SF Action at: https://instagram.com/bringmumiahome?igshid=1o9jwf9vfh9qq

Last week, protestors in San Francisco were successful in persuading SF DA Boudin to send a text to Philly DA Krasner saying "FYI Free Mumia activists are at my office demanding action on the case. They tell me he has tested positive for COVID-19. I know you will do justice in this case as in all cases".

Abu-Jamal was hospitalized to remove excessive fluid from his lungs on March 3. During this treatment, his legs and arms were inhumanely shackled to the hospital bed, creating additional and unnecessary suffering—impacting open and bloody wounds from his unrelenting skin ailment.

His supporters describe this treatment as “medical torture,” reminicent of the much-criticized shackling of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, WI. last year, shot by the police seven times at close range in the back and shackled on an obscure domestic violence charge to his hospital bed after surgery. The charges were soon lifted, and protests led to the shackles being removed but the police refused accountability saying that "this is standard procedure." Shackling brings to mind their use against other political prisoners including Huey Newton and Assata Shakur and the chains of oppression going back all the way to their horrific use against enslaved Africans. Mumia himself was shackled to his hospital bed after surgery on Dec 9th/10th, 1981.

Abu-Jamal had previously been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver in 2015 due to the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections denial of hepatitis C drugs and is now suffering from congestive heart disease (CHD). Like many incarcerated people, his health crisis can be linked directly to years of medical neglect by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

Dr Ricardo Alvarez, who serves as Mumia's medical consultant, says of people diagnosed with congestive heart disease, 50% don't live past 5 years. To live past five years, CHD patients require proper meds, physical therapy, and other life-altering changes. The PA DOC's anti-humane policies make it impossible on anyone to change their diet, to exercise more, to get fresh air, to reduce stress or to receive the right medicines. That is why Mumia and other incarcerated people who suffer from similar life-threatening ailments must be released.

Dr. Alvarez, an Independent physician with decades of work in prison advocacy, explained that the prison infirmary where Mumia is now being held is no place for those who are ill or elderly. “The only acceptable treatment for Mumia Abu-Jamal is his freedom.” He added, “We have a simple cost-effective public health intervention in the face of COVID in prisons- release our elderly prisoners. Data shows they do not pose a public safety risk.”

Abu-Jamal's new medical diagnosis comes after 39 years of wrongful imprisonment due to police, judicial and prosecutorial misconduct—28 years unconstitutionally held in the infernal isolation of death row. He is innocent and is in the middle of legal challenges that could finally prove his innocence and win his freedom but Krasner and the F.O.P have purposely contested and delayed the process. Justice delayed is justice denied!

Abu-Jamal is one of thousands of Pennsylvania elderly prisoners with ailing health due to inhumane prison conditions. These include the lack of proper food, contaminated water, medical neglect, and the stress for nearly a year of 23-hour-per-day confinement and isolation because of COVID-19. Under the policies of the Pennsylvania DOC, incarcerated people have borne the brunt of this pandemic, while prison guards and staff – the carriers of the virus – travel freely from communities outside the prison, and within prison blocks.

DA Krasner, Gov. Tom Wolf and PA DOC Secretary John Wolf are responsible for healthcare for Mumia and all those incarcerated. Their refusal to release Mumia and to deny him and other ill and elderly incarcerated people proper healthcare amounts to nothing less than death by incarceration.

Free Mumia and all incarcerated people over 50 in Pennsylvania and every state prison immediately! Freedom is the ONLY treatment!

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/16MwvXSa0fQS5NnYqWhnM3j_Hr_3Sy5nyVZIfiADgzVs/edit?usp=sharing

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ICFFMAJ’s Network of Supporters

Philadelphia:

Mobilization 4 Mumia

(215) 724-1618

mobilization4mumia@gmail.com www.mobilization4mumia.com

New York:

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC)

(212) 330-8029

info@freemumia.com

www.freemumia.com

Campaign to Bring Mumia Home

info@bringmumiahome.com

www.bringmumiahome.com

California:

Prison Radio

(415) 648-4505

info@prisonradio.org

www.prisonradio.org

SF Bay Area Mobilization to Free Mumia

(510) 268-9429

www.free-mumia.org

Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia

www.laboractionmumia.org

France:

Collectif Unitaire National De Soutien A Mumia Abu-Jamal

Telephone: 01 53 38 99 99

Fax: 01 40 40 90 98 contact@mumiabujamal.com

www.mumiabujamal.com

International Solidarity Committee for Mumia Abu-Jamal and Political Prisoners (COSIMAPP), co-founder Julia Wright

julianahrv1966@gmail.com

Mumia’s Legal Team:

Contact the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (click here)

Mumia FAQ by Mobilization 4 Mumia

On December 9, 1981 Mumia Abu-Jamal, a journalist and former Black Panther, was arrested for the murder of white Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. He was convicted and sentenced to death in a trial that was rife with perjured testimony and manufactured evidence that Amnesty International found, "did not meet the minimum international standards for a fair trial."

Mumia was working as a cab driver to make extra money when he happened upon Officer Faulkner, who had stopped his brother Billy Cook, and was beating him in the head with a metal flashlight.

The prosecutor, Joseph McGill, presented a story that has Mumia running behind the officer and shooting him in the back. He then claimed that the officer turned around and pulled his weapon shooting Mumia in the chest. McGill ends the story by saying the officer fell to the ground where Mumia stood over him and unloaded on him, missing with several shots but hitting him once between the eyes. McGill also claimed that Mumia confessed to the shooting later on in police custody.

None of the physical evidence supports the prosecution's case! Mumia did legally own a gun, not uncommon for anyone driving a cab in Philadelphia during that time. However, the police never tested his gun to see if it had been fired nor tested his hands to see if they had recently fired a gun. They bullet taken from Faulkner could not be matched to Mumia's gun.

There were no divots in the sidewalk around the officer's head as there would have been if the shooter had stood above him. The only bullets that were found were approximately eight feet west to where Faulkner was laying and were from an angle that would not have been possible from the trajectory where Mumia entered the scene.

The bullet wound that hit Mumia also debunks the prosecution's scenario. The bullet was traveling at a hard downward trajectory suggesting that his body was learning forward while still running to the scene when he was shot, and that the officer was elevated, likely standing on the sidewalk.

The prosecution witnesses told different stories in their original statements than they did at trial. One, a prostitute named Cynthia White, changed her story five times by the time she reached trial. Another, a cab driver named Robert Chobert, who was driving with a suspended license while on probation for arson, first told arriving officers, "the shooter ran away." He then said the shooter ran thirty feet and fell despite the fact that Mumia was laying less than three feet from Faulkner.

Crime scene photographs that were never disclosed to the defense until 2007 show that Chobert was not parked where he said he was. They also show confirm that there were no bullet divots around Faulkner's head, that police collected evidence incorrectly - damaging its integrity, and that the officer's hat had been moved from its original place on the roof of a car suggesting that Faulkner was talking to a passenger.

Four different witnesses claimed that they saw someone running from the scene. In 1995 at a post-conviction relief act hearing it was discovered that Faulkner had a temporary drivers license for another person in his pocket when he was killed. The owner of that license, Arnold Howard, revealed at the 1995 PCRA hearing that though he was able to prove he was not there that night that he had loaned his license to a friend named Kenneth Freeman who was close with Billy Cook.

There were three different police officers who claimed that Mumia confessed. The only officer who testified at trial, Gary Bell, claimed that after Mumia was brought into Jefferson hospital for his gunshot wound, he yelled, "I shot the motherfucker and I hope the motherfucker dies."

However, the officer never made a report of the incident and claimed to have forgotten this crucial information for over sixty days. He had no recollection until after Mumia's defense attorney file police brutality charges due to the fact that the officers beat him when they arrived on the scene. After that filing all three officers came forward in the subsequent weeks with stories of a confession. The two other officers, Gary Wakshul and Thomas Bray came forward and neither of them had made a report on the night of the shooting. Wakshul even went as far in his original report to say, "The male negro made no statements." He made a second report a week later where he offered recollections of tiny details even so far as to remember the make and model of a camera found in Faulkner's car but made no mention of a confession. He later claimed that he just forgot.

Wakshul claimed that Mumia said, "I shot the motherfucker and I hope the motherfucker dies" while lying on the ground in the ER, unlike Bell, who claimed he said it while entering the hospital. Bray claimed that later while on a gurney Mumia confessed to him but in his story Mumia said, "I shot him and if you let me go I will kill all of you cops." The doctor who operated on both Mumia and Faulkner heard no confession and neither did any of the hospital staff. None of the officers corroborated each others stories.

After the police officers came forward with a confession story a hospital guard named Priscilla Durham came forward and claimed she heard a confession as well, but never alerted the police. She was interviewed by the prosecution and brought to trial. During the trial she claimed, for the first time, that she made a handwritten report about the confession the day after the shooting but only gave it to her superior officer. She somehow never mentioned this to the prosecution or the police despite being interviewed by both. During the trial the judge sent a police officer to the hospital who returned with a piece of paper that was not on hospital letterhead, was typed, and was not signed. This document was allowed to be submitted as evidence over the objections of the defense.

At the trial the defense tried to call Gary Wakshul after Mumia discovered his report claiming that "the male negro made no statements." The prosecution claimed that Wakshul was unavailable due to being on vacation. The judge refused to delay the trial and told Mumia and his attorney that they, "goofed." The defense would later learn that though Wakshul was technically on vacation he was instructed by the DA's office to stay at home incase he was called for trial, a fact that was hidden by the prosecutor.

Mumia had a court appointed lawyer who did not have the funds to investigate witnesses or do any ballistics investigations whatsoever. The judge who presided over the case was Albert Sabo, a former Sherrif and member of the Fratneral Order of Police who presided over more trials ending in death sentences than any other judge in the US. A third of all lawyers surveyed by the American Bar Association in Philadelphia said that he was unfit to be on the bench.

While the original trial was underway a court stenographer, Terri Maurer-Carter, for Judge Richard Klein entered Sabo's chambers and overhead Sabo complaining about the performance of the prosecution and said, "I'm gonna help them fry that nigger".

During Mumia's Post Conviction Relief Act Hearings Judge Sabo was brought out of retirement to preside. He sustained every single prosecution objection and quashed most of the subpoenas brought forth by the defense. He did not find that Mumia deserved a new trial and said so in a finding of fact that was a carbon copy of the prosecution's closing brief.

Friday, March 12, 2021

Press Release for March 12 protests, written by Mobilization4Mumia

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