H.Bennett: J.P.O’Connor, Autor v. The Framing of MAJ< im TV (nattyreb)

Von: „MUMIA ABU-JAMAL“ < >

J. Patrick O’Connor is the author of the new book The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal. During O’Connor’s SF Bay Area book tour this October, he was a guest onthe ‚Other Voices‘ television show, produced by the Peninsula Peace and Justice Center. The one-hour show can be viewed here.

If you like what you see, please download this special flyer providing

an overview of O’Connor’s key points, and help spread the word in your

community. Also, consider buying his book (available at your local

bookstore, and from the publisher or Amazon. All proceeds from the

book will go to both the MOVE 9 andKansas City 5 prisoners.

**Read the new articles on O’Connor’s book by Carolina Saldaña, Linn

Washington Jr., Hans Bennett, and radio shows Law and Disorder,Jazz

and Justice, and KOWA**

On May 2, the day after the book’s release The Framing of Mumia Abu-

Jamal was featured in The NY Times: „Book Asserts Black Reporter

Didn’t Kill White Officer in ’81.“

O’Connor argues that the actual shooter was Kenneth Freeman and he

criticizes the media, who „bought into the prosecution’s story line

early on and has never been able to see this case for what it is: a

framing of an innocent and peace loving man.“ For more on „The Framing

of Mumia Abu-Jamal“ we are featuring anexcerpt, a previous interview,

O’Connor’s review of „Murdered By Mumia,“ and his response to the

March 27 ruling.

Watch the Video Interview with J. Patrick O’Connor at Philadelphia

City Hall(PARTS 1, 2, and 3)

J. Patrick O’Connor’s April, 2008 interview focusing on the frame-up,

Kenneth Freeman, the March 27 court ruling, and Frank Rizzo’s legacy–

is featured below:

In his new book, O’Connor argues that Abu-Jamal was clearly framed by

police, and that the actual shooter was a man named Kenneth Freeman.

O’Connor criticizes the local media, who, he says „bought into the

prosecution’s story line early on and has never been able to see this

case for what it is: a framing of an innocent and peace loving man.“

In his review of the recent book „Murdered by Mumia,“ O’Connor writes

that „there’s a great deal to admire about Maureen Faulkner, the widow

of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner,“ but concludes that

her „obsessive hate for Abu-Jamal has blinded her to the prosecutorial

misconduct and judicial bias that plagued his trial and justifiably

fueled his rise to a world stage. The real villains in her life were

the police and prosecutors who framed Abu-Jamal for Officer Faulkner’s

killing. They are the ones, not the long drawn out appellate process

that has kept Abu-Jamal alive, who have denied her the closure she was

due more than twenty-five years ago.“

Hans Bennett: Advocates of Abu-Jamal’s conviction and execution always

say that a police frame-up of Abu-Jamal is a lunatic, far-fetched

„conspiracy theory“ that should be dismissed by any sane observer.

What do you mean when you say he was „framed“? How was this done?

J. Patrick O’Connor: Mumia’s early association with the Philadelphia

branch of the Black Panther Party marked him as a subversive to George

Fencl, the chief inspector of the Philadelphia Police Department’s

Civil Defense Bureau. His subsequent sympathetic coverage of MOVE

while reporting for the local public radio station made him an avowed

enemy of Mayor Frank Rizzo. Minutes after Officer Faulkner was shot at

3:55 a.m., Inspector Alfonzo Giordano – who reported directly to Fencl

– took command of the crime scene and personally set in motion the

framing of Abu-Jamal. It would be Giordano who claimed that Mumia told

him in the paddy wagon that he dropped his gun after he shot Faulkner;

it would be Giordano who arranged for prostitute Cynthia White and

felon Robert Chobert to identify Abu-Jamal as the shooter. Giordano

and White would be the D.A. Office’s only witnesses at the preliminary

hearing to hold Abu-Jamal over for trial where Giordano repeated this

„confession.“

Giordano is as corrupt a police officer as one can imagine. For years

he had been extorting kickbacks – personally averaging $3,000 per

month – from Center Cityprostitutes, pimps and bar owners, which

explains his early arrival at the crime scene. He knew Cynthia White

and her pimp. He coerced her at the scene to identify Abu-Jamal as the

shooter. She would be the only witness the D.A. had to claim to see

Abu-Jamal holding a gun over Faulkner. In her original statement to

the police – given within an hour of the shooting – she had Abu-Jamal

running from the parking lot and from as far away as 10-yards firing

off „four or five shots“ at Faulkner before the officer fell. In her

third interview with police detectives, given on December 17, she fine-

tuned her statement to comport with the actual evidence in the case

that Faulkner was shot at close range. (In one of the most sinister

aspects of Abu-Jamal’s case, 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.)

Incredibly, the police arriving at the crime scene would later claim

not to have conducted any tests to determine if Abu-Jamal had recently

fired a gun by checking for powder residue on his hands or clothing,

nor did they claim to even feel or smell his gun to determine if it

had been recently fired. Tests such as these are so routine at murder

scenes that it is almost inconceivable the police did not run them. It

is more likely that they did not like the results of the tests.

From the outset, the investigation into the shooting death of Officer

Faulkner was conducted with one goal in mind: to hang the crime on

Mumia Abu-Jamal. There was no search for the truth, no attempt at

providing the slain officer with the justice he deserved. Giordano

handed Abu-Jamal to the D.A.’s Office with his own lie about Abu-Jamal

confessing to him and packing off Cynthia White in a squad car to tell

her concocted account of the shooting. When the D.A.’s Office was

forced to back away from the corrupt Giordano, Assistant D.A. Joseph

McGill elicited a new „confession“ to replace Giordano’s in February

when security guard Priscilla Durham and Officer Garry Bell,

Faulkner’s best friend on the police force, responded to his

promptings by saying they heard Abu-Jamal blurt out at the hospital,

„I shot the mother-fucker and I hope the mother-fucker dies.“ Not one

of the dozens of other officers present at the hospital would make

such a claim. In fact, the two officers who accompanied Abu-Jamal from

the time he was placed in the paddy wagon until he went into surgery,

reported that he made no comments in signed statements given to

detectives assigned to the case that morning.

The prosecution knew that its new „confession“ could be skewered if

Abu-Jamal’s defense attorney, Anthony Jackson, called the two officers

who accompanied Abu-Jamal to the stand, so all the prosecution really

had was Cynthia White. With White saying she saw it all from beginning

to end, and willing to testify that she saw Abu-Jamal blow the

helpless Faulkner’s brains out in ruthless cold blood, McGill had his

case made, providing White’s credibility could survive Jackson’s cross-

examination. McGill bet the entire case that it could, and despite the

utter web of lies she told the jury, was right.

Bennett: Why do you think that Kenneth Freeman was the actual shooter

of Police Officer Daniel Faulkner?

O’Connor: Kenneth Freeman was Billy Cook’s street vendor partner and

was riding with him in the VW when Faulkner pulled the VW over.

Freeman got out of the VW and subsequently handed Faulkner a phony

driver’s license application bearing the name of Arnold Howard, which

Howard had recently loaned to him. Howard’s papers were found in

Faulkner’s shirt pocket. Police rounded up both Howard and Freeman in

the early morning hours of December 9 and brought them in for

questioning. At the Post-Conviction Relief Act hearing in 1995, Howard

testified that on several occasions, Cynthia White picked Freeman out

of a lineup.

At Billy Cook’s March 29 trial for assaulting Officer Faulkner, with

McGill as the prosecutor, White told McGill in direct testimony that

the passenger in the VW „had got out.“ McGill said, „He got of the

car“? White responded, „Yes.“ (At Abu-Jamal’s trial, McGill got White

to testify that only Abu-Jamal, Cook, and Faulkner were at the scene.)

Various witnesses said they saw a black man running from the scene

right after the shooting. Some of the eyewitnesses said this man had

an Afro and wore a green army jacket. Freeman did have an Afro and he

perpetually wore a green army jacket. Freeman was tall and burly,

weighing about 225 pounds at the time.

Cab driver Robert Harkins was driving right by the parked police car

and the VW when he saw a police officer grab a man. The man „then spun

around and the officer went to the ground,“ falling face down

backwards, landing on his hands and knees. The assailant shot the

officer in the back, causing him to roll over on his back, and then

executed him with a shot to his forehead.

Harkins described the shooter as a little taller and heavier than the

6-foot, 200-pound Faulkner. Robert Chobert told police in his first

statement that the shooter had an Afro and weighed about 225 pounds.

(Abu-Jamal, also about 6-foot, wore in his hair in dreadlocks and

weighed 170 pounds at the time.)

In Billy Cook’s April 29, 2001, affidavit he declared that Freeman was

with him the night of the shooting, was armed, and fled the scene

after Faulkner was shot. Cook said he did not see who shot Faulkner.

Freeman would meet an ignominious death hours after Philadelphia

police firebombed the MOVE house on Osage Avenue in 1985, killing 11

MOVE members, including John Africa, whose corpse had been beheaded.

Freeman’s dead body was found bound, gagged and naked in a vacant lot.

There would be no police investigation into this obvious murder. The

coroner listed his cause of death as a heart attack. The timing and

modus operandi of the abduction and killing alone suggest an extreme

act of police vengeance.

Bennett: In your book, you were very optimistic about the Third

Circuit granting Abu-Jamal a new guilt-phase trial. Were you surprised

by the March 27 ruling? If so, how do you account for such a

surprising ruling?

O’Connor: I was incredulous. I thought the oral arguments on May 17

had gone extremely well for Abu-Jamal and that he would get a new

trial. The 2-1 majority ruling demonstrated anew just how politicized

this case always has been from the beginning and continues to be

still. The two Republican-appointed judges on the panel formed the

majority and the lone Democrat-appointed judge dissented. I hate to

make it sound that simple, but the U.S. Supreme Court itself is not

above making decisions based on party or ideological lines, and all

too frequently does.

In its ruling, the majority stated it believed Abu-Jamal had

„forfeited his Batson claim by failing to make a timely objection. But

even assuming Abu-Jamal’s failure to object is not fatal to his claim,

Abu-Jamal has failed to meet his burden in providing a prima facie

case.“ The majority stated that he failed because his attorneys at his

PCRA evidentiary hearing neglected to elicit the prosecutor’s reasons

for removing 10 otherwise qualified blacks by means of peremptory

strikes during jury selection.

„Abu-Jamal had the opportunity to develop this evidence at the PCRA

evidentiary hearing, but failed to do so. There may be instances where

a prima facie case can be made without evidence of the strike rate and

exclusion rate. But in this case, we cannot find the Pennsylvania

Supreme Court’s ruling [denying Abu-Jamal’s Batson claim] unreasonable

based on this incomplete record,“ the majority wrote. In a nutshell,

the majority denied Abu-Jamal’s Batson claim on a technicality of its

own invention, not on its merits.

Judge Ambro’s dissent was sharp: „…I do not agree with them [the

majority] that Mumia Abu-Jamal fails to meet the low bar for making a

prima facie case under Batson. In holding otherwise, they raise the

standard necessary to make out a prima facie case beyond what Batson

calls for.“

In other words, the majority, in this case alone, has upped the ante

required for making a Batson claim beyond what the United States

Supreme Court stipulated. When ruling in Batson in 1986, the U.S.

Supreme Court imposed no timeliness restrictions as to when a Batson

claim may be raised, nor has the court done so in the intervening 22

years. Neither did it require that the racial composition of the

entire jury pool be known before a Batson claim could be raised. (In

fact, the Supreme Court recently added heft to its Batson ruling,

ruling in Synder that the purging of only one black juror on the basis

of racial discrimination was grounds for a new trial.) In addition,

the Supreme Court ruled in 1986 that to establish a prima facie case

for a Batson claim, the defendant must show only „an inference“ of

prosecutorial discrimination in purging even one black from a jury.

Even the Third Circuit has never previously allowed the timing of a

Batson claim to be material, nor had it ever ruled previously that not

knowing the racial composition of the entire jury pool was a fatal

flaw in lodging a Batson claim.

The fact that the prosecutor in Abu-Jamal’s case used 10 of the 15

peremptory challenges to exclude blacks from the jury – a strike rate

of 66 percent against potential black jurors – is in itself an

inference of discrimination. The result was that only three of the 12

jurors impaneled were black.

The Third Circuit should have remanded the case back to Federal

District Court Judge Yohn – the judge who ruled on Abu-Jamal’s habeas

corpus petition in 2001 – to hold an evidentiary hearing to determine

the prosecutors’ reasons for excluding the 10 potential black jurors

he struck. If that hearing revealed racial discrimination on the part

of the prosecutor during jury selection, Judge Yohn would be compelled

to order a new trial for Abu-Jamal.

Abu-Jamal is left with only two remedies to correct the flawed Third

Circuit ruling. His first option is to request the Third Circuit to

review its decision en banc where the entire panel of judges sitting

on the Third Circuit would conduct oral arguments anew. There is some

likelihood that the Third Circuit might agree to meet en banc because

the panel’s decision to deny Abu-Jamal’s Batson claim went against

that court’s own well-established precedents in granting similar

Batson claims in the past. However, the barrier to en banc

deliberations is a high one: a majority of the sitting judges must

vote to reexamine the case. On the Third Circuit Court, there are 12

judges eligible to vote, but four have already recused themselves from

this particular case, meaning five of the remaining eight judges would

be needed to go forward en banc. Abu-Jamal has most probably had his

one day before the Third Circuit.

Barring a reversal by the Third Circuit, Abu-Jamal’s final option is

to appeal the Third Circuit’s ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, which

has on three previous occasions denied to take up his case. This time,

though, there is a remote possibility that the high court may take the

case up because the Third Circuit’s ruling created new law by placing

new restrictions on a defendant’s ability to file a Batson claim.

Bennett: With the media spotlight on the PA Primary Elections, and the

major demonstrations supporting Abu-Jamal on April 19, what would you

like the world to know about this famous death-row case? How far has

the city of Philadelphia come since the days of Police Commissioner

and Mayor Frank Rizzo, a notorious racist and public advocate of

police brutality?

O’Connor: In a real sense, D.A. Lynn Abraham, just as Frank Rizzo

before her, embodies the worst of Philadelphia. Known as „the Queen of

Death“ for her zeal in seeking the death penalty, she was depicted as

the nation’s „deadliest D.A.“ in a New York Times Magazine article in

1995. Her personal vendetta against Abu-Jamal equals that of Officer

Faulkner’s widow. The day Federal District Court Judge Yohn overturned

Abu-Jamal’s death sentence in 2001, Abraham put her antipathy for Abu-

Jamal this way: „Today, Mumia Abu-Jamal is what he has always been: a

convicted, remorseless, cold-blooded killer.“

The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal represents an enormous miscarriage of

justice, representing an extreme example of prosecutorial abuse and

judicial bias. What makes getting to the truth about this case so

difficult for people, particularly people in Philadelphia, is that the

prosecution built its case on perjured testimony with a calculated

disregard for what the actual evidence established. The local media

bought into the prosecution’s story line early on and has never been

able to see this case for what it is: a framing of an innocent and

peace loving man.

Two things account for the unprecedented national and international

interest in this case. First and foremost is the man himself. Despite

more than 25 years of the bleakest existence possible in isolation on

death row, Mumia Abu-Jamal remains what he has always been: an

articulate, compassionate righter of wrongs. The second thing that

makes this case so compelling to such a wide audience is that his

trial represents such a monumental abuse of government power to

railroad one man that it really says no citizen is truly free until

this wrong has been undone.