An Excerpt from "The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal" by J. Patrick O’Connor
The Original Police Version of the Shooting
The Philadelphia Police Department did not apply the notion of a person being presumed innocent until proven guilty in this case. Within hours of Abu-Jamal’s arrest, the police department offered its version of Faulkner’s shooting, and the media showed no restraint in disseminating it.
The Philadelphia Inquirer quoted the police the next day as stating that radio reporter Wesley Cook, known professionally as Mumia Abu-Jamal, shot Faulkner. The police said Faulkner had stopped the reporter’s brother, Billy Cook, for driving the wrong way on 13th Street and was in the process of searching him when Cook struck Faulkner in the face. Faulkner then struck Cook. Abu-Jamal then ran across the street and fired at Faulkner’s back from about ten yards away, causing Faulkner to fall down. Abu-Jamal then stood over the prone officer and fired several more shots at point-blank range at his face.
The police said, “Abu-Jamal was wounded when the dying officer managed to get off one shot, which struck him in the chest.” The police said that a .38 caliber revolver registered to Abu-Jamal—which he was not licensed to carry—was recovered at the scene with five spent cartridges, and it was the gun used to shoot Faulkner.
If this had been a tennis match, the police version would have been point, set, and match.
When an Inquirer reporter asked the police spokesperson about allegations from Abu Jamal’s family that the police had beaten Abu-Jamal several times, the spokesperson said there was “no evidence” of a beating.
One by one, major details of the police version would fall apart. Within two days the police backtracked on the .38. “Initial tests by police ballistics experts, who compared four bullets recovered at the shooting scene to a test bullet fired from (Abu-Jamal’s) gun proved inconclusive,” Captain Jerrold Kane of the homicide unit told reporters. It would not come out until trial that the police had not bothered to run any tests of Abu-Jamal’s hands or clothing to determine if he had fired a gun or even if the .38 had been fired. (Tests such as these are so routine at murder scenes that it is almost inconceivable the police did not run them. It is more likely that they did not like the results of the tests.) The police further stated that the fingerprints on the gun were too smudged to determine who had fired it.
That same day police also undermined their account of the shooting—of Abu-Jamal standing over the prone officer and shooting several bullets into his face at point-blank range—by revealing that Faulkner had been shot only twice, once in the back and once in the face. The police said a single bullet was removed from Faulkner’s head; a second bullet passed through Faulkner’s body and struck a nearby building, and two other bullets missed Faulkner and were found lodged in the same building. They could not account for the fifth bullet they had claimed Abu-Jamal had fired. The police did not reveal that a preliminary report of Faulkner’s autopsy had noted that the two bullets that struck Faulkner bore the markings of a .44 caliber revolver, not a .38. At trial, this potentially crucial revelation never emerged, because the defense failed to raise the issue. (This apparent discrepancy—potentially a smoking gun in reverse—would later become a mistaken focal point for Abu-Jamal’s supporters. At Abu-Jamal’s post-conviction relief hearing in 1995, George Fassnacht, a ballistics expert called by the defense, testified that the deformed slug removed from Faulkner’s head was most likely a .38 after all.)
What the police, or the prosecution later, would never try to explain was how Abu-Jamal could have possibly missed hitting Faulkner with the other bullets he was alleged to have fired directly at Faulkner’s face from a distance of no more than twelve inches away. At trial, it was revealed that the bullet that struck Faulkner in the back also had been fired from within twelve inches, not from ten yards away, as the police had initially advanced. This finding sharply contradicted the original police version of events, which was based heavily on the statement given to police within thirty minutes of the shooting by key prosecution witness Cynthia White, the prostitute Inspector Giordano had arranged for detectives to interview within a half hour of Faulkner’s shooting. In her initial statement to police she said that Abu-Jamal, while running toward Faulkner, had gotten off four or five shots from about ten yards away before one of them struck the officer in the back, causing him to fall to the ground. According to White and two other prosecution witnesses, the shooter then stood over Faulkner and fired several more shots directly at his face. By White’s account, Abu-Jamal had discharged seven or eight rounds, but the .38 registered to him had only five chambers. To fix that discrepancy at trial, White testified that Abu-Jamal had fired only one or two shots as he approached Faulkner.
Similarly, the police and the prosecution were never able to explain how Faulkner could have gotten off the shot that struck Abu-Jamal in the chest. At trial, Charles Tumosa, a criminalistics supervisor for the police department, testified that the bullet that struck Abu-Jamal was also fired from a distance of one foot or less. At Abu-Jamal’s post-conviction relief hearing in 1995, Dr. John A. Hayes, an assistant medical examiner for New York City, testified that the downward path of the bullet recovered from Abu-Jamal during his surgery was inconsistent with the police and prosecution theory advanced at his trial as to how Faulkner had shot Abu-Jamal. Their theory was that a wounded Faulkner was able to get that shot off, after he was shot in the back, by spinning around and firing as he was falling to the ground. In that scenario, Hayes said, the bullet in Abu-Jamal would have taken an upward path. The evidence indicated that Faulkner, while standing on the curb, had shot Abu-Jamal in the chest as he got within one foot of him on the street. That same evidence would automatically rule out Abu-Jamal as Faulkner’s assailant because Faulkner was first shot in the back at near point-blank range.
--Reprinted from The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal, by J. Patrick O’Connor. Published by Lawrence Hill Books, an imprint of Chicago Review Press and distributed by IPG. Available in bookstores nationwide by calling 1-800-888-4741 or by visiting www.ipgbook.com.