Abstract

The killing of Mumia Abu-Jamal

On February 2 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court denied a radio journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal's petition to reargue his appeal upon conviction of killing a police officer. In doing so it left two institutional forces standing between the African American journalist and execution, the U.S. Supreme Court and the state's Governor. It also did something else. By disregarding its own precedent and standards of what constitutes a fair trial, the state's Supreme Court reinscribed a message to every African American and every political radical in Pennsylvania, "Legal rights assumed as guarantees can vanish as soon as you try to assert them." Jamal, who had no previous police record, was sentenced to death in 1982 for the shooting of a Philadelphia cop six months earlier. At the time of the incident Jamal, 27, was a prominent radio journalist in the city and president of the local chapter of the Association of Black Journalists.