I am, of course, disappointed that the DA in Philadelphia has given up the fight to have the execution of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal carried out after some thirty years. In the end, it was just too much time, trouble and expense. One can now only hope that this skunk will spend the rest of his days in prison for taking the life of Officer Daniel Faulkner.
http://dailycaller.com/2011/12/08/mumia-still-not-free-but-no-longer-on-death-row/
Of course, with our system, who knows? How long will it take for the next movement to begin to release Mumia? I can visualize it all now. His old defenders, academics, hip hopsters and various leftists not only in the US, but world-wide will be marching and demanding his release in the interest of "justice and human rights."
Or am I behind the times? Already, there is a benefit event for Mumia scheduled for Friday night in Philadelphia to mark his 30th year of incarceration. I won't take the time to research who the "stars" are, but I note that the "much-vaunted" Princeton professor Cornel West will be headlined.
How typical and pathetic.
Hopefully, these clowns will also be able to hold a 40, 50, and 60 year commemoration.
Totally unrelated but I Thought you might enjoy this:
ReplyDeletehttp://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2011/12/08/n-y-u-to-offer-classes-on-occupy-wall-street/
That's a 4 credit class no less brought to you by professor Lisa Duggan one of the 180 NYU Faculty and Staff Signatories of the letter calling TIAA-CREF to divest from Israel.
For the family of Daniel Faulkner: May peace be with you all, in this holiday season.
ReplyDeleteTo Mumia Abu-Jamal: May you rot in jail for the rest of your life, or until you become a loathsome pool of liquid putridity!
Squid
Thanks for the heads-up, Thillo. Here you are:
ReplyDeletehttp://garyfouse.blogspot.com/2011/12/nyu-offering-course-on-occupy-wall.html
I, of course, am heartened that the effort to murder one of America's best news writers has been abandoned.
ReplyDeleteI would cheerfully lend support to any campaign to get him released from prison. There is no chance he is a danger to society. There is a good possibility that he is innocent -- ballistics were not a good match, may have been the wrong caliber for his gun, witnesses threatened into silence by police reported a different man who shot Faulkner and ran.
There is little doubt that Faulkner shot Mumia. Whether he did so in self defence, or because he assumed it was his right to summarily execute a man getting up in his face -- even easier if the man had a dark complexion -- is difficult to know. Faulkner isn't talking, being dead.
This has to be the most outragious comment you have made.
ReplyDeleteWell Gary, if you start with the axiomatic premise that Faulkner did no wrong, and Mumia shot him
ReplyDeletea) in cold blood, or,
b) while interfering in Faulkner's lawful duties as a police officer,
then, indeed, my comments would be outrageous. You obviously start from such a premise, which is why you are outraged.
I have been following this case for over twenty years. I am impressed with the quality of Mumia's writing -- which of course is neither here nor there as to whether he is guilty, but it does render him a complex human being, rather than a two-dimensional cold calculating killing machine. I have also read enough to be impressed that he is neither racist nor black supremacist.
My reading of the evidence leaves open that Faulkner may have been abusing his authority, that he may have been the first to fire his gun, and that someone other than Mumia may have killed him.
I don't believe that Faulkner deserved to die. There are a lot of pressures on police, and being human, they make errors, they have bad days when their nerves are jumpier than other days. But I am pretty sure executing Mumia would have been a miscarriage of justice.
Miggie, as usual, is being silly. This has little or nothing to do with the Obama administration. The prosecutors are state officials, not federal. The appeals have been going on for decades, under presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush and now Obama. Chances are most of the appellate judges involved were appointed by Republican presidents.
Siarlys,
ReplyDeleteI hear Charles Manson was a pretty good guitar player.
I haven't heard that Gary, but it may be true. However, I know of no ballistics evidence which suggest that someone other than Manson and his immediate accomplices murdered Sharon Tate or the Biancas (maybe LoBianca... I'm not sure... funny how its the Hollywood names that stay in the news).
ReplyDeleteIn fact, ballistics evidence would be irrelevant, since the killing was done with knives. The difference between the two cases is clear and convincing evidence. Now then, you were saying?
Mumia was convicted and had his appeals heard. Yet you and others want to second-guess the jury and the courts who heard his case.
ReplyDeleteNo doubt those gays and Baha'is in Iran who were sentenced to be hanged were convicted according to some law or other, and some prescribed legal process. There might have even been a jury. Therefore, we shouldn't second-guess?
ReplyDeleteJuries, even in America, which has a relatively good judicial system, but a far from perfect one, sit in a controlled setting, hearing what the attorneys come up with, as and if the judge allows.
Appeals often are about whether the "expert testimony," which tells the jury what evidence means, correctly interpreted the evidence according to any kind of reliable science, whether relevant and probative evidence was denied to the jury, in short, procedural decisions that may deny the jury access to the truth.
Juries do the best they can with what they are given to work with. By the time Geronimo Pratt was released, better than half the jury that convicted him had said, in some fashion, "Huh, we weren't told that; if we had been we would have found him not guilty."
Incidentally, you say he "had his appeals heard" but you started off by trashing the decision of an appeals court...
And, as you usually do when you are losing an argument, you have shifted ground from "He was obviously guilty," to "Whatever the evidence, once the jury speaks, its over, plus maybe an appeal or two."
The knowledge that an innocent man is about to be executed can motivate people to work very hard at raising questions about the conviction and sentence. Rightly so.