Check out this new interview with author J. Patrick O’Connor, author of the 2008 book "The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal". Part 2 of a July 1, 2009 interview, this was conducted during an important campaign calling for a federal civil rights investigation into Abu-Jamal’s case. Check out the campaign’s web page here, where you can take action in support:
http://freemumia.com/...
For more background, please read this article I have written, which lays out five instances of withheld evidence, that are grounds for a civil rights investigation:
http://www.sfbayview.com/...
Accompanying this SF Bay View article is a flyer I wrote about ballistics, definitively showing why the prosecution’s scenario for the shootings of Mumia Abu-Jamal and Daniel Faulkner is ballistically impossible:
http://abu-jamal-news.com/...
Interviewed on July 1, 2009, J. Patrick O'Connor is the author of the 2008 book "The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal" which has been completely ignored by the mainstream media in Philadelphia, despite a New York Times article released on the day of the book's release. On April 6, 2009, the US Supreme Court refused to consider an appeal from death-row journalist and former Black Panther, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting death of white Philadelphia Police Officer, Daniel Faulkner, at a 1982 trial deemed unfair by Amnesty International, the European Parliament, the Japanese Diet, Nelson Mandela, and numerous others.
Abu-Jamal had petitioned the US Supreme Court to review the US Third Circuit Court ruling of March, 27 2008, which rejected his bid, based on three issues, for a new guilt-phase trial. One issue was that of racially discriminatory jury selection, based on the 1986 case Batson v. Kentucky, on which the three-judge panel split 2-1, with Judge Thomas Ambro dissenting. Ambro argued that prosecutor Joseph McGill’s use of 10 out of his 15 peremptory strikes to remove otherwise acceptable African-American jurors, was itself enough evidence of racial discrimination to grant Abu-Jamal a preliminary hearing that could have led to a new trial. In denying Abu-Jamal this preliminary hearing, Ambro argued that the Court was creating new rules that were being exclusively applied to Abu-Jamal’s case. The denial "goes against the grain of our prior actions...I see no reason why we should not afford Abu-Jamal the courtesy of our precedents," wrote Ambro.
In his new essay titled "The Mumia Exception," author J. Patrick O’Connor argues that the Third Circuit Court’s rejection of the Batson claim and of the other two issues presented is only the latest example of the courts’ longstanding practice of altering existing precedent to deny Abu-Jamal legal relief. O’Connor cites many other problems, including the 2001 affidavit by a former court stenographer, who says that on the eve of Abu-Jamal’s trial, she overheard Judge Albert Sabo say to someone at the courthouse that he was going to "help" the prosecution "fry the nigger," referring to Abu-Jamal. Common Pleas Judge Pamela Dembe rejected this affidavit on grounds that even if Sabo had made the comment, it was irrelevant as long as his "rulings were legally correct."
The phrase "Mumia Exception" was first coined by Linn Washington, Jr., a Philadelphia Tribune columnist and professor of journalism at Temple University, who has covered this story since the day of Abu-Jamal’s 1981 arrest.
For more background, check out Journalists for Mumia’s compilation of articles about O’Connor’s book, including a New York Times article and a 3 part interview with O’Connor on the day of the book’s release:
http://www.abu-jamal-news.com/...
Then, read O'Connor's "Mumia Exception" article here:
http://www.phillyimc.org/...
In a nutshell, the majority denied Mumia’s Batson claim on a technicality of its own invention, not on its merits. It also broke with the sacrosanct stare decisis doctrine – the principle that the precedent decisions are to be followed by the courts – by ignoring its own previous opposite ruling in the Holloway v. Horn case of 2004 and the Brinson v. Vaughn case of 2005. It is a general maxim that when a point has been settled by decision, it forms a precedent which is not afterwards to be departed from. In a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in 1989 in a case entitled United States v. Washington, the decision stated that an appeal court’s panel is "bound by decisions of prior panels unless an en banc decision, Supreme Court decision, or subsequent legislation undermines those decisions." None of those variables were in play when the Third Circuit Court majority ruled against Mumia’s Batson claim.
Judge Thomas 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."