|
The Lancaster Voice
LCPJ-PO BOX 274
Lancaster, PA 17608-0274
631.512.3018
info@lancastervoice.org
www.LancasterVoice.org
To receive email updates (2-3 per
month), email
info@lancastervoice.org
Coordinator of LCPJ, John Schreck,
email
info@lancastervoice.org
|
Abu-Jamal Denied Again, New Evidence of Conspiracy
by Ben Weiss
 On
March 27th the US court of appeals for the Third Circuit rejected all
appeals for a new trial by death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was
convicted of the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel
Faulkner. The court upheld the 2001 decision of Judge William H. Yohn
Jr. who supported the conviction but negated the death sentence due to
discrepancies in the original sentencing hearing. The recent ruling
passed 2-1 with one judge, Marjorie Rendell recused, because her
husband, governor Ed Rendell, was District Attorney of Philadelphia at
the time of the original trial. The court has ordered the Commonwealth
of Pennsylvania to hold a new sentencing hearing within 180 days
wherein a jury would decide upon life imprisonment or death by lethal
injection. This decision can be appealed to the full Court of Appeals
or the US Supreme Court.
While the Third Circuit of Appeals
deliberated for two and half years upon procedural issues from the
1981 trial, new evidence surfaced in May of 2006 that not only damns
the testimony of the prosecution's key witnesses, but throws a lens of
scrupulous detail upon the moment to moment circumstances of the
murder of Officer Faulkner. While doing research for his book Freiheit
fur Mumia Abu-Jamal, Dr. Michael Schiffman of Heidelburg, Germany
discovered 26 photos taken at the crime scene by freelance
photographer Pedro Polakoff.
Abu-Jamal's defense had no prior knowledge of the photos, several of
which were published in Philadelphia newspapers in 1981. Polakoff, who
arrived 10 minutes before police photographers and was informed by
officers at the crime scene that Abu-Jamal was the culprit, offered
his photos to Ed Rendell, then District Attorney of Philadelphia, but
was ignored. He offered them again in 1995 during an appeal by
Abu-Jamal, but was ignored again. Polakoff, who until 2006 "had not
the slightest doubt that Mumia was the murderer," never offered his
photos to the defense. Abu-Jamal's current attorney, Robert Bryan, has
said that he "could have a field day in court with those photos."
On the night of December 19th, 1981,
Mumia Abu-Jamal was driving his taxi in Center City Philadelphia, when
he came upon his brother, Billy Cook, being beaten with a night-stick
by Officer Faulkner during a routine traffic stop. Abu-Jamal exited
his vehicle, crossed through a parking lot toward the incident, and
was shot in the chest, while officer Faulkner was also shot, and
subsequently died. During Abu-Jamal's 1982 trial, the prosecution
claimed that Abu-Jamal fired his .30 caliber pistol at Faulkner from
behind him. Faulkner, supposedly, was hit in the back, turned and shot
his assailant in the chest, and then fell to the sidewalk, whereupon,
Abu-Jamal was purported by several witnesses to have stood over the
fallen officer and fired several shots straight down, one hitting
Faulkner between the eyes and killing him instantly.
However, Pedro Polakoff's crime scene
photos, as well as his recollection of events seriously contradict
this reconstruction. Polakoff's photos of the corpse of Officer
Faulkner show no divots or cracks in the sidewalk where the errant
shots would have impacted. A ballistics expert consulted by Dr.
Schiffman for his book insists that the bullets would have visibly
damaged the pavement. The photos also show police relocating evidence
and handling the supposed murder weapon bare-handed before the
forensics team arrived, contrary to the testimony of an officer and
police photos offered at trial. Polakoff's photos also discredit the
testimony of one of the prosecution's key witnesses, cab driver Robert
Chobert, who claimed to have been parked directly behind Officer
Faulkner's vehicle and to have had a full view of the incident. None
of Polakoff's photos show Chobert's taxi in this location.
Furthermore, Polakoff says, "all the
officers present expressed the firm conviction that Abu-Jamal had been
the passenger in Billy Cook's VW and had . . .killed Faulkner by a
single shot fired from the passenger seat of the car." Polakoff claims
that when he arrived the officers on hand told him that three
witnesses said that Abu-Jamal had emerged from the passenger seat of
Billy Cook's car. None of this information appeared in police reports,
and these unknown witnesses never testified at the trial. In fact,
during the trial, the witnesses, prosecution, and defense all agreed
that Abu-Jamal had approached from his taxi through the parking lot
across the street.
Veronica Jones, one of the witnesses who
testified against Abu-Jamal in 1982 has since reversed her testimony
in a sworn affidavit, claiming coercion by police as her motives for
perjury. Another witness, Desie Hightower, who also testified, claimed
to have seen a man fleeing the scene. A slew of other witnesses have
reported varying and contradictory versions of the events of the
crime, but in light of the statements of Pedro Polakoff regarding the
early opinions of the police that Abu-Jamal had been Cook's passenger,
it is the testimony of witness Cynthia White that becomes incredible.
According to J. Patrick O'Connor, author
of "The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal", "minutes after Officer Faulkner
was shot . . .Inspector Alfonzo Giordano took command of the crime
scene. Giordano and White would be the D.A. Office's only witnesses at
the preliminary hearing. Giordano (was) as corrupt a police officer as
one can imagine. For years he had been extorting kickbacks– personally
averaging $3,000 per month– from Center City prostitutes, pimps and
bar owners, which explains his early arrival at the crime scene. He
knew Cynthia White and her pimp. She would be the only witness the
D.A. had to claim to see Abu-Jamal holding a gun over Faulkner. The
police department waited until the Monday after Abu-Jamal's conviction
to "relieve" Giordano of his duties on what would prove to be
well-founded "suspicions of corruption." Four years after Abu-Jamal's
trial, Giordano pled guilty to tax evasion in connection with those
payouts and was sent to prison."
The prosecution's case against Mumia
Abu-Jamal has always rested in the argument that Abu-Jamal, his
brother Billy Cook, and Officer Faulkner were the only three people
involved at the crime scene. Cynthia White supported this with her
testimony of Abu-Jamal as the assailant who executed Faulkner.
However, the transcripts of the March 29, 1982 trial of Billy Cook
show the following exchange between Cynthia White and prosecutor
Joseph McGill who also served as the prosecutor in Abu-Jamal's case:
McGill: "When the officer went up to the car, which side of the car
did the officer go up to?" /White: "The driver side." /McGill: "The
driver side?" /White: "Yes." /McGill: "What did the passenger do?"
/White: "He had got out."
There was a driver's license application
under the name of Arnold Howard found in the shirt pocket of slain
officer Daniel Faulkner. Howard later testified that he had given the
paper work to a man named Kenneth Freeman, Billy Cook's business
partner. Freeman and Howard were both questioned by the police within
24 hours of the murder. Both Dr. Michael Schiffman and J. Patrick
O'Connor conjecture in their books that Kenneth Freeman was the true
killer of Officer Faulkner, and was the passenger in Cook's car, as
alluded to by Cynthia White's testimony.
At the time of the murder, Mumia Abu-Jamal was a radio-journalist who
worked for NPR and served as the president of the Philadelphia
Association of Black Journalists. He was both renowned and reviled as
an outspoken critic of Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo's use of police
brutality and intimidation against the West Philadelphia based
back-to-nature organization known as MOVE. Nine members of that
organization, some sentenced as teenagers to 30-100 years in prison
for the shooting of a police officer in 1978, are still incarcerated.
Kenneth Freeman was found dead, handcuffed, beaten, drugged, and naked
in a parking lot in North Philadelphia on the night of May 13th, 1985,
the same night that the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a bomb
onto the roof of the MOVE house, spraying automatic weapons fire as
the members tried to escape the inferno, killing 11 people, including
several children, and burning the entire block to the ground.
ion about helping, contact Mindy Nolt 717-381-2891
or Michelle Sultan at 717-358-9278.
|
