It's Not Mumia, It's the Cause
by Benjamin Kepple
FrontPagemag.com | November 8, 1999
THE ONE QUESTION that supporters of Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted murderer of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, never want to answer is whether their man is innocent or guilty. They complain about the unfairness of his trial, allege that the "racist" Philadelphia Police Department intimidated eyewitnesses, and conjure up half-baked stories about evidence tampering. They gladly expound on how everyone from Abu-Jamal's first lawyer to Judge Albert Sabo to Governor Tom Ridge is responsible for sending Mumia to the gallows. But they never address the difficult questions surrounding the case, such as: How it is it that the caliber of the bullets fired from Abu-Jamal's gun happen to be the same as the fatal bullet that killed Faulkner; or why, in 1995, Leonard Weinglass, Abu-Jamal's lawyer, called to the stand two eyewitnesses with contradictory stories about what happened on that night in 1981. To avoid such questions, they couch their arguments in entirely ideological terms.
Take, for example, a poorly written editorial by Angela Davis, June Jordan, and Alice Walker in the November 15 issue of The Nation. The rambling missive makes no attempt to address the charges against Abu-Jamal, except in a small editorial postscript proclaiming his innocence. But lest an observer consider the issue of Abu-Jamal's guilt the determining factor in whether he should be put to death, Davis and company argue otherwise. "He must not die," they write, "Even though these United States detain the world's largest death row population."
Such non-sequiturs and meaningless statistics abound in this screed against a state "gone mad with greed and the pathologies of uncontested, supremacist might." Laid out, as if they alone justify a new trial for a convicted cop-killer, are the facts that Gov. Tom Ridge has signed 176 death warrants for death-row prisoners—more than five times the number signed by his two predecessors—and that Judge Albert Sabo has presided over more trials resulting in death sentences for defendants than any other judge in the United States.
The authors apparently believe that because these numbers suggest a greater willingness to use the death penalty, Ridge and Sabo are obviously complicit in an anti-Mumia conspiracy. Likewise, they complain that the United States has increased its spending on prisons (which constitutes a mere 1.1% of total government expenditures) faster than it has its spending on education, as if that factoid had any bearing on the question of Mumia's guilt.
Such facile arguments and worthless (or deceptive) statistics are not, to any reasonable person, reasons to spare Mumia's life, let alone to "free" him. But they are everything to the Nation's editorialists, as well as to Abu-Jamal's fanatical supporters, who are concerned less with fairness than with stopping what they perceive to be the reactionary threat of mainstream American society—which Davis and friends describe as marked by "punishing, death-driven, merciless values." As long as Mumia's days remain numbered, they can wrap his case in a plethora of statistics and anti-prison rhetoric in order to recruit more converts to their true cause—destroying the American prison system. With the U.S. prison population approaching two million, consisting largely of minorities, many of whom are poor, it is an easy target for radicals who have seen their past causes ground up and thrown into the dustbin of history.
Angela Davis is a former "political prisoner" herself. She spent time in prison awaiting trial for her involvement in the infamous 1970 Marin County courthouse shooting, which left four dead, and for which she was acquitted in 1972. Ms. Davis is thus the natural leader of this growing movement—which, in her words, encourages "people to think radically … to think about alternatives, to think about abolishing prisons in terms of the roles they presently presume to play." It is a movement that hopes to weaken traditional thinking about incarceration—a worrisome development, since a return to that traditional thinking (more prisons, longer sentences, and less early release) in the past few years has contributed significantly to the drop in crime the country currently enjoys.
The movement has a lot invested in Mumia. Not only is he Political Prisoner Number One, but as Davis, Jordan, and Walker write, "he ennobles the rest of us to deepen, enlarge, and improve our political opposition to [the state]." His execution would deal a severe blow to the morale and future prospects of this nascent anti-prison movement.
This movement is not interested in justice other than that of the Sixties-era concept of "social justice." Its members care nothing for the family of Daniel Faulkner, just as they prefer to avoid looking at the case with all of its many tough questions—questions that undeniably point to Abu-Jamal's guilt. To serve the cause, they will evade, confuse, and deny whenever possible. Their radical goals are their only motivation. But if justice is served in Abu-Jamal's case, those goals will die along with him, and the rest of America—along with Faulkner's family—will all be able to rest a bit easier.
© 1999 FrontPagemag.com
Mr. Kepple is Associate Editor of FrontPage magazine. His e-mail address is [email protected].
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