4. A Tilted Trial
i. Witnesses for the DefenseJackson’s defense of Mumia was unimpressive to say the least. The first witness called by the defense was Anthony Colletta, a third-year surgical resident at the hospital. Colletta testified that Mumia had lost a great deal of blood and had numerous bruises and injuries of a sort consistent with a brutal beating. McGill asserted that Mumia was responsible for his own injuries because he had smashed his head into a lamp post while resisting arrest, and then flailed about violently causing the arresting officers to momentarily lose their grip and drop him face first on the pavement. Colletta’s testimony in court established that Mumia had been subject to police brutality, but had little relevance to a charge of murder. Jackson did not raise the question of the supposed “confession,” although later, when asked about it by television interviewers, Colletta said he had heard no such thing and that Mumia seemed physically incapable of shouting out anything. Besides Colletta, Jackson called only a few witnesses, and most of those were not particularly useful.(87) The most important defense witness was Dessie Hightower, a young accounting student at a local college, who testified that he had seen someone with dreadlocks flee the scene, but admitted under cross-examination that he could not tell if it was a man or a woman.(88) Hightower also reported seeing Faulkner’s gun still in its holster as his body was loaded into the ambulance, which contradicts the prosecution’s scenario and suggests that Mumia was shot by someone other than Faulkner. During cross-examination McGill asked Hightower, “Is there any particular reason that you focused on this holster?” Hightower replied, “Because, one of the officers grabbed him by his holster—by the belt I guess you would call it.”(89) Hightower also stated that the first police cars arrived almost immediately after the shootings, “Maybe ten seconds, fifteen. It was so very, very, prompt, very prompt.”(90) Jackson considered his most important witness to be a young prostitute, Veronica Jones, who on 15 December 1981 had given a statement to two detectives at her mother’s house in Camden, New Jersey in which she reported seeing two men flee the crime scene:
But when Jackson put Jones on the stand, she flatly denied seeing anyone flee the scene.(92) Jackson did not know that Jones, a 20 year-old with three small children, had been arrested a few weeks earlier and was facing ten years in jail on felony robbery and gun possession charges. Shortly before she testified, she was visited by two detectives in her jail cell who offered to have her charges dropped if she agreed to help the prosecution:
McGill objected that it was “irrelevant” whether or not Jones had been offered immunity in exchange for changing her testimony. Sabo upheld McGill, and ruled that the question of whether or not police officers had been suborning perjury was “irrelevant” and without implications for the credibility of other prosecution witnesses:
Fourteen years later, in October 1996, Jones again testified for the defense in Mumia’s Post-Conviction Relief hearing:
In one of the most brazen acts of intimidation in the whole frame-up, Assistant DA Arlene Fisk had Jones arrested on the witness stand at the PCRA hearing by New Jersey state troopers on a 1982 bench warrant for a few bounced checks. This was so outrageous that even the pro-cop Philadelphia Daily News complained, “Such heavy-handed tactics can only confirm suspicions that the court is incapable of giving Abu-Jamal a fair hearing.” On 1 July 1982, as his trial drew to a close, Mumia made his final protest against the kangaroo court proceedings, and denounced Sabo’s refusal to permit him to make the closing argument to the jury. Asked if he wished to waive his right to take the stand in his own defense he replied:
ii. Death Sentence for an Innocent ManOn 2 July 1982 the jury returned a guilty verdict. In most states after a guilty verdict is registered in a capital murder trial there is a second, “penalty” phase in which the jury hears testimony on whether or not to impose the death penalty. According to a long-standing common law tradition, in this phase a convicted person has the right of “allocution,” i.e., the right to address the sentencer before the sentence is imposed. A convicted person who chooses to speak at this time is not considered to be testifying and is therefore not subject to cross-examination. Mumia was permitted to read a statement in accordance with his right to allocution. He took the opportunity to criticize some of the more blatantly prejudiced aspects of his trial, including Sabo’s revocation of his right to defend himself and to seek John Africa’s assistance. He also criticized Sabo’s decisions limiting evidence and Jackson’s willingness to play by the rules laid down by the hanging judge:
Mumia proclaimed his innocence and roundly denounced all the “officers of the court”:
After Mumia concluded, Sabo outrageously permitted McGill to cross-examine him.(98) McGill used this opportunity to suggest that Mumia’s participation in the Black Panthers a dozen years earlier had somehow turned him into an “executioner”:
McGill talked of how people like his mother, then in her seventies, depended on police officers to protect them, and appealed to the jurors to help prevent a descent into the “jungle”:
In his summation McGill hinted that Mumia’s radical politics should incline the jurors to want to sentence him to death:
On 3 July 1982, after deliberating for only three and a half hours, the jury came back with a recommendation of death. iii. Gross Judicial PrejudiceMcGill’s attempt to make an issue of Mumia’s membership in the Black Panther Party is in itself sufficient grounds for overturning his sentence. In 1992, in Dawson v. Delaware, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the introduction of a defendant’s political views in the penalty phase of a capital trial is an unconstitutional violation of free speech. The Supreme Court stated that the prosecution had been wrong to introduce the defendant’s membership in the fascist Aryan Brotherhood in arguing for execution:
The Delaware Supreme Court, which had earlier thrown out Dawson’s appeal, had cited Mumia’s case as a precedent:
Another gross impropriety committed by the prosecutor, Joseph McGill, in the penalty phase of Mumia’s trial was his suggestion that Mumia would have recourse to a virtually limitless series of appeals:
Prosecutors know that jurors are more likely to deliver a death sentence if they think it unlikely to be carried out. In 1986 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had ruled that this was an illegitimate procedure, but later made a special exception for Mumia:
This conclusively demonstrates that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is a highly politicized body prepared to discard its own rulings in order to “fry” Mumia. Most of the court’s members, who win their posts through election, have unusually close relations with various police organizations:
Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Ronald Castille, a particular favorite of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), is the former Philadelphia DA whose name appeared on prosecution briefs arguing that Mumia’s trial was fair, and that there was overwhelming evidence of his guilt. Castille pointed out that most of the others who sit on Pennsylvania’s highest court share his bias:
Amnesty International observed, “The refusal of a judge to recuse himself from proceedings in which he previously served as an advocate for one of the parties is a serious breach of judicial ethics” and timidly ventured that, “the Court’s own rulings on Abu-Jamal’s appeals have left the unfortunate impression that the state Supreme Court may have been unable to impartially adjudicate this controversial case.”(107) As noted above, during Castille’s tenure as Philadelphia District Attorney in the late 1980s, his office produced a videotape instructing prosecutors on how to use peremptory challenges to eliminate blacks from juries.(108) This was outrageous enough to be condemned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, yet none of the learned justices considered it a reason to disqualify Castille from participation in adjudicating Mumia’s appeals. Footnotes(87) The testimony of Detective William Thomas is discussed above. Jackson also called Sergeant Frederick Westerman of the Philadelphia Police Homicide Unit and Stefan Makuch, an investigator for the Medical Examiner’s office, whose testimony is also discussed above. Dr. Regina Cudemo, a psychiatric resident at the hospital, testified about her observations of police treatment of Mumia in the Emergency Department. Jackson recalled Cynthia White to investigate some of the discrepancies in her story, and also sought to call Debbie Kordansky, a woman who had given police the following statement
Kordansky openly admitted being hostile to blacks and only acting in an attempt to aid the police. When approached by Jackson to testify at the trial she simply refused, and Jackson got no help from Sabo in compelling her to appear. When she did finally testify at Mumia’s Post-Conviction Relief hearing, she reported hearing gunfire, looking out her hotel window and seeing a man fleeing the scene. (PCRA, 3 August 1995, pp 240-42) (88) Trial transcript, 28 June 1982, p 10.127, p 10.148. The police were evidently not pleased with Hightower’s account of seeing someone fleeing the area immediately after Faulkner was shot and subjected him to a polygraph test. The issue of Hightower’s polygraph was raised in the PCRA hearing of 3 August 1995 (p 169) and was addressed during the testimony of Detective William Thomas, who had been in charge of the crime scene that night:
(89) Trial transcript, 28 June 1982, p 10.155-56 (90) Ibid., p 10.166. This is significant as it tends to confirm Arnold Beverly’s statement (see Appendix No. 1) that police where present when he shot Faulkner. (91) Statement of Veronica Jones, 15 December 1981, as read in court 29 June 1982, trial transcript p 11.106 (93) Amnesty International, February 2000, p 18. (Jones testimony in trial transcript, 29 June 1982, pp 11.129, 11.136) (94) Trial transcript, 29 June 1982, p 11.140-41 (95) PCRA, 1 October 1996, p 24 (96) Trial transcript, 1 July 1982, pp 13.41-42 (97) Trial transcript, 3 July 1982, penalty phase summations, pp 14-15 (98) In the “Petition for Post-Conviction Relief and/or Writ of Habeas Corpus,” filed in Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas 3 July 2001 Mumia’s lawyers argued:
The denial of Mumia’s right to allocution without cross-examination is cited in the 27 August 2002 appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court as one form in which Sabo’s gross prejudice deformed the original trial. A violation of this sort is normally considered sufficient grounds for overturning the sentence. (99) Trial transcript, 3 July 1982, pp 21-22 (101) quoted in Amnesty International, February 2000, p 25 (103) Trial transcript, 3 July 1982, pp 71-72 (104) Amnesty International, February 2000, pp 25-26 |
||||||
|