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Supreme Court denies writ of certiorari for Mumia
By Jeff Mackler
On May 17, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition by Mumia Abu-Jamal
for a
writ of certiorari, a request that the court certify for a hearing
important
points raised in Mumia's defense.
Several months earlier Mumia's legal team, headed by Robert R. Bryan,
had
asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in the normal appeals process
and
consider two points that were rejected by the Pennsylvania Supreme
Court.
The refusal to do so is not a decision on the merits of the issues
raised by
Mumia but rather a decision to first have Mumia's federal appeal
proceed
through the usual federal courts.
The first point in Mumia's petition asked the U.S. Supreme to overturn
his
conviction, based on the fact that the presiding judge in his 1982
murder
trial, Albert Sabo, had expressed overtly racist comments as he was
preparing to judge Mumia's case.
Proof of this assertion was provided to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court
in
the form of a written affidavit signed by award-winning court
stenographer,
Terri Maurer Carter. Carter, married to a Pennsylvania policeman,
affirmed
that as she passed through Judge Sabo's antechambers, she had overheard
Sabo
state in reference to Mumia's trial, "Yeah, and I'm going to help 'em
fry
the nigger."
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected consideration of this evidence
on
the specious grounds that the issue of Judge Sabo's racism had been
previously litigated by Mumia and was therefore not admissible because
it
constituted "reopening" a point that had been previously closed.
The spurious nature of this decision is evidenced by the fact that the
Maurer Carter affidavit was submitted several years after Mumia's
original
charges against Sabo had been litigated. That is, at the time of the
original filings, the Terri Maurer Carter information did not exist.
Both Pennsylvania and federal courts have gone to incredible lengths to
avoid the simple fact that Judge Sabo, who earned the reputation of a
"hanging judge" because he had sentenced more people to execution than
any
other judge in the country, was a racist. The majority of Sabo's
victims
were Black.
The 10,000 pages of Mumia’s trial record clearly indicate racial
prejudice.
Eleven of 14 Blacks were summarily challenged and removed from the jury
panel by the prosecution.
When Terri Maurer Carter's affidavit was originally submitted to
Pennsylvania Common Pleas Court Judge Pamela Dembe and then rejected,
the
grounds were again incredible. Dembe argued that even if Judge Sabo's
remarks were clearly racist there was no evidence that Sabo's rulings
during
the trial were racist. Again, a perusal of the Sabo trial transcript
demonstrates that Judge Dembe was dead wrong in this instance as well.
The Maurer Carter affidavit was submitted in a timely manner. There is
a
broad array of precedents for ordering a new trial when clear evidence
of
racism is presented.
In Mumia's case, the bending of the rules of law has enabled one legal
atrocity after another to be perpetrated in the name of justice. The
low
point of this charade was the statement of Federal District Court Judge
William H. Yohn Jr., ruling that "innocence is no defense." The ruling
was
in response to clear evidence produced by Mumia that he had not been
and
could not have been the person who murdered Police Officer Daniel
Faulkner
on Dec. 9, 1981.
Yohn's logic held that innocence is trumped by timeliness—that is, if
the
evidence is submitted beyond a statutory deadline, even if conclusive,
it is
irrelevant. The legal process must embody "finality," says the "law of
the
land" today, even if the final result is the execution of an innocent
man.
The second issue contained in Mumia's petition for a writ of certiorari
involved the refusal of Pennsylvania Supreme Court Judge Ronald
Castille to
recuse (remove) himself from the panel of judges hearing Mumia's
appeal.
Castille was a prosecutor in Mumia's original 1982 trial. The law holds
that
the legal system must exclude the state serving as prosecutor and judge
in
the same case. Again, the law was ignored in Mumia's case.
It is noteworthy that it was also Judge Castille, as state attorney
general,
who ordered the production of a training video instructing state
prosecutors
how to remove Blacks from Pennsylvania juries. The "good" Judge
Castille
believed that Blacks were less likely to convict in murder cases than
whites
and therefore should be removed.
The refusal of the U.S. Supreme Court to entertain Mumia's petition for
a
writ of certiorari was not unusual. Most such petitions are denied as a
matter of course, with the court preferring to have outstanding issues
litigated by the federal courts.
But the constitutional issues raised in Mumia's petition were far from
routine. They pertained to the essence of justice itself—the right to
be
judged without prejudice, not to mention without a judge who enters the
courtroom having stated his commitment to "fry the nigger."
The U.S. Supreme Court's refusal to accept Mumia's petition for a
hearing
must be rejected as a continuation of the racist bias that has
permeated
every aspect of the proceedings against Mumia.
The article above first appeared in the June 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.
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