http://www.labournetaustria.at/InwSchiff.wmv
Karl Fischbacher: Good evening Michael, I’m glad that we’re still able to do the interview at this late hour…
Michael Schiffmann: Yeah, that’s great.
KF: I would like to ask you, after this pretty successful day, with the press conference, the visit at the U.S. Embassy, and finally the presentation of your book, to perhaps again summarize the peculiarities of the present situation of Mumia Abu-Jamal and to talk about the dimensions of the danger to him and about how we should prepare for this.
MS: I’m more than glad to answer your questions… Today we actually really had an overwhelming success, given the tiny forces who organized this, you in particular. Let me expand a and go back on this question a little bit. In 1999 or 2000, all of us activists more or less thought the decision in this matter was immediately pending. At the time, Mumia’s October 14, 1999 habeas corpus petition had just been filed, there had been an execution order that was lifted shortly afterwards, also in October 1999. And the judge who was on the case – this judge issued a decision a good two years later on with which he threw out Mumia’s death sentence but upheld his conviction for murder in the 1st degree, a decision that resulted in a long break or hiatus.
At present, Mumia’s case is before the highest legal institution below the Supreme Court of the United States, and there is a high, in fact like 99 percent, likelihood that this appeals court, the 3rd Federal Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, will take a decision that will finally stand. That is, whatever that court decides will very likely finally be actually put into practice. The defense is supposed to have filed its last petition by October 16 [note: that time-span was prolonged and the petition was duly filed on October 23, 2006], and if prosecution and defense are not granted additional petitions, these petitions are the last to be filed for the time being. And after this, within a probably short time span of perhaps three months, there will be a public hearing in the matter, and then within a probably equally short time span, there will be a decision by that institution composed of three judges, and that decision will be of enormous importance for Mumia.
What’s on the table here is the following, and apart from the details and beyond the details these are the decisive points. So here’s what’s on the table now: Either the death penalty against Mumia is reinstated, since the prosecution wins their appeal, or Judge Yohn’s December 18, 2001 decision is upheld, which would mean life in prison for Mumia without any possibility of parole, or the court agrees with the defense in one of the three defense claims it has certified for appeal, and that would mean that Mumia gets a new trial, and his status would the be the same as the one he had when he was arrested. Here, too, there is a detail, since in one of these three points his status would be a bit different, but for now, that’s no main point of interest: The third alternative is basically that he gets a new trial.
And this is of course what the defense is trying to achieve. Previous decisions by the 3rd Federal Court of Appeals in similar cases have been very good for defendants, whose claims were upheld, which means that from a legal point of view, Mumia’s claims should also be upheld. But as Mumia’s attorney, Robert R. Bryan stresses, our opponents exert enormous political pressure, and therefore it is very important for us to try to offset that pressure by making the true facts of the case known. There are certain grounds for optimism, and if we approach the task before us by means of a broadly based, non-sectarian campaign, I believe we will be able to really contribute something to the desired outcome and to the goal of justice for Mumia.
KF: In 2001, career criminal Arnold Beverly confessed that he, not Mumia Abu-Jamal, killed Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. How do you see this confession today?
MS: Well, going back to the year 2001, April/May, when the confession was presented for the first time, we naturally also asked ourselves, what do we think about it? And of course our reflections also included the background: Shortly after the confession, the then defense team filed new motions that also put forward some new evidence, including ballistic evidence, which was very credible… In that context, giving this confession serious consideration was what we thought we should do. Of course we had to add in here what all of us had known for a long time about the immense amount of police brutality and corruption rampant in the Philadelphia Police Department, and against this background one has to say that Arnold Beverly’s confession according to which he was hired by corrupt cops and their partners in the mob to do away with what one could call a „clean“ cop who was investigating their criminal practices – against this background it doesn’t seem implausible.
But if one does seriously consider the matter with some precision, which one has to, I believe that in the end one will come up with a different result. In my own case, however, this didn’t happen right away. At the time, together with Annette Schiffmann and Jürgen Heiser I co-edited a book that came out in the German Atlantik Verlag, and in the book we collect reasons why we think the Beverly confession, this man’s version of the murder, is plausible. But this was, if I remember correctly, in April 2002. Since that time, however, some amount of water has flown down the Danube, and keeping to my own case, I’ve been able in the meantime to converse with many people, to look at additional evidence, to further probe into the background, and last not least to think about all this more precisely and rigorously, and based on all these considerations and research efforts I conclude – and this is also in my book – that this version is actually untenable.
Moreover, Mumia’s defense, the defense team lead by Robert R. Bryan which has been in charge since August 2003, doesn’t mention this confession anymore. I think the background to this is that they, too, don’t think the confession is credible, and that they believe it’s too risky to present this witness in court, and from there, I think the right thing for us is to drop this version and to focus on what is actually at the core of the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal: First, there is all the faked evidence; second, there is a „grotesquely unfair trial,“ and these are not my words, but is a statement by a conservative American lawyer; third, there is the question, is Mumia guilty in the legal sense? And here, one must say unequivocally No, since by now there is no evidence against him anymore that supports an indictment.
Fourth, the question of actual innocence, and here, we have the same thing: Even without looking at the Arnold Beverly confession, all the facts disprove that Mumia was the one who fired the first shot in the shoot-out that flared up that night. That is, even if he had fired shots, which I don’t believe, it would have been self-defense. And what is more, in my book I give at least six reasons why it is all but impossible that he fired any weapon at all.
In my opinion, these are the most important points which we should focus on. I have all due respect for people who even today still stick to the thesis that Beverly is the real perpetrator, and I think it should be possible to discuss this freely within the support movement for Mumia Abu-Jamal, but to oblige people to believe this seems totally wrong to me – natural for me, since, among other factors, I myself no longer believe that thesis to be correct.
At present (October 26, 2006), Hans Bennett (AWOL Magazine) and Michael Schiffmann are working on a long interview on Schiffmann’s book Race Against Death. Mumia Abu-Jamal: a Black Revolutionary in White America which just came out in German. The original English version still has no publisher, but is waiting for one.