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This week on CounterSpin: A 1995 Washington Post story led with a macabre account from the widow of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, about how when her husband’s bloody shirt was held up in court, his accused killer Mumia Abu-Jamal turned in his chair and smiled at her. An evocatively sinister report, which the paper printed untroubled by the fact that the court record showed that Abu-Jamal wasn’t in court when the shirt was displayed.
ABC‘s investigative news show 20/20 used all the techniques for their big 1998 piece on the conviction of Abu-Jamal for Faulkner’s killing—stating prosecution claims as fact, even when they were disputed by some of the prosecution’s own witnesses or the forensic record; stressing how a defense witness admitted being intoxicated, while omitting that prosecution witnesses said the same. At one point, actor and activist Ed Asner was quoted saying, “No ballistic tests were done, which is pretty stupid”—but then host ABC‘s Sam Donaldson’s voiceover cut him off, saying: “But ballistics test were done”—referring to tests that suggested that the bullet that killed Faulkner might have been the same caliber as Abu-Jamal’s gun, but refraining from noting that tests had not been done to determine whether that gun had fired the bullet, or whether it had been fired at all, or if there were gunpowder residues on Abu-Jamal’s hands.
ABC used clips of Abu-Jamal from the independent People’s Video Network, without permission, and, as PVN told FAIR at the time, the network added layers of echo to the tape, making him sound “like a cave-dwelling animal.”
No one paying attention was surprised when it was revealed that in a letter asking permission from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to interview Abu-Jamal (a request that was denied), ABC noted that “we are currently working in conjunction with Maureen Faulkner and the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police.”
That kind of overt, proud-of-it bias has shaped coverage of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case from the outset; and current mentions suggest little has changed. Elite media will report without question a right-wing Senate candidate’s tossed-off reference to Mumia as the face of unrepentant criminality—while, out of the other side of their mouths, respectfully noting how Brown University is “acquiring the papers” of Mumia Abu-Jamal, as he’s an acknowledged representative of the very serious problem of mass incarceration, whose communications are “historically important.”
Meanwhile, Abu-Jamal’s chances for a new trial, based on significant new evidence, were shot down summarily this week—but a glance at national media coverage, as we taped on October 27, would tell you, well, nothing about that.
CounterSpin got an update, and a reminder of the real life vs. the media story of Mumia Abu-Jamal, from someone involved from early days: Noelle Hanrahan is legal director at Prison Radio. We spoke with her for this week’s show.
Transcript: “‘This is America. That’s the Kind of Trial Mumia Abu-Jamal Had.'”
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Amazon‘s campaign contributions and FCC nominee Gigi Sohn.
The fact is that Mumia is obviously guilty since his gun was at the scene of the crime and he had a bullet wound in him from the cops gun. Those are incontrovertible facts and all the rest if BS about nitpicking flaws in the prosecution. While there is no question about the trial being flawed in some respects, it hardly proves his innocence. That is why nobody who has responsibility for justice takes these flaws seriously. This reminds me of the Rosenberg trial and their claims of innocence and that of Sobel who also clamed he was framed, only later to admit at the end of his life has WAS GUILTY. No reasonable person looking at the facts of the case can possibly believe Mumia is innocent. You are not only fooling yourself, but damaging those of us on the left who may swallow such nonsense. One has to be critical of such poor cases so as to not hurt our own credibility.
So, Mumia had a gun, and he was shot by Faulkner. How does that make
him ” obviously guilty ” ? You are excluding one very obvious possibility – that
there was someone else on the scene with a gun who shot Faulkner. And several
witnesses, whose statements were suppressed by police , said there was another
actor on the scene – that they saw a man whose build differed considerably from Mumia’s, being much stockier , running eastbound on Locust street from the shooting scene and ducking into an alley between 12th and 13th Sts. It is not nitpicking to bring out the major Brady violations on the part of police and prosecutors.
The lie concerning Mumia allegedly smirking in court in 1982 when Daniel Faulkner’s bloody shirt was shown to the jury was repeated on the US Senate floor by Pennsylvania
Senator Patrick Toomey , who in remarks of about ten minutes in length in February 2014 stated his opposition to President Obama’s nomination of Debo Adegbile to head the civil rights division of the US Justice Department . This opposition was based on Adegbile ‘s
heading the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP, which filed a post-conviction brief on behalf
of Mumia. Toomey also repeated the lie of Mumia’s alleged confession to the murder of
Faulkner while strapped to a hospital bed in the emergency room of Jefferson Hospital
on Dec. 09, 19081, after he had sustained a bullet wound to the chest from Faulkner’s
gun. The alleged confession was not heard by the emergency room physician attending
to Mumia for the entire duration, and was not reported until after a full two months after
it supposedly occurred. ( The trial judge , Albert Sabo, blocked the testimony of a key
potential witness, Philadelphia police officer Gary Wakshul, on duty and guarding Mumia
at the hospital, who wrote in his logbook at the end of his shift, ” The Negro male made no comment “. )
You can’t reform a fascist system! It has to be stopped!
transcript,please