Mumia
was a prominent radio journalist who allowed
the angry and anguished voices of the
oppressed onto the air waves. In retaliation,
he was framed up on a murder charge by the
Philadelphia police.
In
Decemeber of 1981, Mumia was shot by a
Philadelphia police officer and almost died
when he came upon a scene where his own
brother was being brutally beaten by the same
cop.
The
police officer was also shot and killed, and
wtinesses saw two men run from the scene. Yet
when the police arrived, they beat Mumia
before taking him to the hospital. When they
discovered that they had a prominent critic
of the police department, he was instantly
charged with murder. Mumia's brother and
wtinesses at the scene were later harassed
and driven out of town. No attempt was made
to identify the men seen fleeing the scene.
And the dead officer was holding a drivers
license of yet another man. But it was only
Mumia the police wanted.
WHen
people began to question the charging of
Mumia, the police put forward the absurd
story two months after the incident that
Mumia had confessed in the hospital emergency
room, and they had simply forgotten to
mention it at the time or write it in their
reports. The written reports and the
emergency room doctor said this never
happened.
Mumia
was then barred for most of his own trial for
protesting an incompetent court-appointed
attorney who was later disbarred. Eleven
pre-emptory challenges were used to knock
almost all blacks off the jury. Vital
evidence was withheld from the defense,
witnesses were intimidated, and the fatal
bullet has disappeared from the police files.
The political motivation of the prosecution
was made clear when the prosecutor argued for
the death penalty by reading revolutionary
quotes from Mumia's political writings. IN a
recent hearing, a witness used against Mumia
in the first trial came forward to say that
she lied under police coercion. In
retaliation, she was arrested in the
courtroom as she stepped of the witness stand
on an old warrant from another state that she
knew nothing about.
ALl this
takes place against a back drop of massive
police scandal in Philadelphia. Dozens of
people have been released from jail because
they were originally convicted on the basis
of phony evidence fabricated by the police.
Mumia
has spent over 15 years in prison, facing
execution for a crime he did not commit. In
1995 he was put in disciplinary confinement
for writing a book, Live
from Death Row. The
police frame up of Mumia came at the end of
the turbulent late sixties and seventies when
the government declared war upon the Black
Panther Party and Black radicals in general.
In Philadelphia under Mayor Frank Rizzo, much
of this became concentrated in the citys war
on the militant MOVE organization, a war that
culminated in the 1985 police boming of the
MOVE house, the murder of 11 occupants
(including 5 children), and the burning of 60
homes in the neighborhood.
Mumia
had exposed an earlier police attack on MOVE,
and allowed MOVE activists to present their
side of the story on the air. Before that he
had been a founding member and Minister of
Information of the Black Panther Party in
Philadelphia. When Mumia's new lawyers
obtained his FBI files, they found that he
had been under government surveillance since
he was 15 years of age!
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