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Abu-Jamal News

An interview with J. Patrick O’Connor, author of The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal

(released by Lawrence Hill Books prior to the March 27 Third Circuit Court ruling)

--How did you originally become interested in the Abu-Jamal case?

I was an associate editor for TV Guide at its headquarters in nearby Radnor, Pennsylvania during the time Officer Faulkner was killed and Abu-Jamal was put on trial and convicted of murdering him. I’d often listened to Abu-Jamal on the local public radio station (WHYY) where he was a reporter. I was impressed with his ability to make listeners feel what he was describing—they knew he cared. He had an incredibly distinctive voice, full of compassion for the downtrodden. The murder of a police officer did not fit my image of him even though the major Philadelphia newspapers made the case against him appear to be an open-and-shut one, the verdict of death justified.

--What inspired you to write The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal?

Sometime in the mid-1990s I began hearing and seeing the “Free Mumia” slogan. In 1996, when HBO premiered the one-hour documentary “Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Case for Reasonable Doubt?”, I developed some questions about the verdict and certainly the fairness of his trial. As the years passed and the Free Mumia movement intensified, those questions persisted. Shortly after Amnesty International published a report in 2000 stating it had “determined that numerous aspects of Mumia Abu-Jamal's case clearly failed to meet minimum international standards safeguarding the fairness of legal proceedings,” I began to research the case. By this time I was editor of the Internet site Crime Magazine (www.crimemagazine.com), and I thought I should write an article about the case for it.

--How did you set about researching the Abu-Jamal/Faulkner case?

I read all the trial transcripts as well as all of the transcripts from Abu-Jamal’s Post Conviction Relief Act hearings that were held in 1995, and continued in 1996 and 1997. I also read all the contemporaneous newspaper articles from The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, as well as all the books published about the case: Terry Bisson's biography On a MOVE: The Story of Mumia Abu-Jamal, published in 2000; former Abu-Jamal defense attorney Daniel Williams’s Executing Justice: An Inside Account of the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, published in 2001; and David Lindorff’s seminal account of the case published in 2003 entitled Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Because I became convinced that the police/MOVE battle was at the heart of the injustice in the Abu-Jamal case, I read a number of books about MOVE, the radical, back-to-nature group founded by John Africa in the 1970s.

--What impact do you think this controversy has had on society?

Abu-Jamal has become the face of the anti-death penalty movement, both in the United States and in Europe. At no time since the U.S. Supreme Court lifted its ban on executions, has the death penalty been under such review. Recently, for example, New Jersey abolished it. A number of states, including Florida, have suspended executions. From prison, Abu-Jamal’s writings about the unfairness of the death penalty have reached an enormous audience here and abroad.

--In her new book, Murdered by Mumia, Maureen Faulkner condemns celebrities for their backing of Mumia Abu-Jamal. What is your opinion regarding the effect celebrity endorsements have had on the case?

Celebrity endorsements were crucial to bringing Abu-Jamal’s case to the general public and made it possible for his defense to raise funds adequate to challenge his conviction in state and federal court.

--Why do you think getting to the truth behind this case has been so difficult and tainted for over 20 years?

What makes getting to the truth about this case so difficult is that the prosecution built its case on perjured, bribed and coerced testimony with a calculated disregard for what the actual evidence established. Maureen Faulkner, the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police and the Philadelphia D.A.’s office have consistently obstructed the truth about who killed Officer Faulkner from being known. Mrs. Faulkner, regrettably, has been made into a dupe by the prosecution.

--What impact did the controversial MOVE organization and Mumia Abu-Jamal’s involvement have on the Faulkner murder investigation?

With his hair braided in the dreadlock style of MOVE members and his radio reports openly sympathetic to MOVE’s plight, Abu-Jamal embodied MOVE to the police and D.A.’s office. His allegiance to MOVE made him a marked man, one the Philadelphia Police Department and D.A.’s Office would stop at nothing to bring down. MOVE was so detested by local government that the city was willing to firebomb the MOVE house and, in the process, burn down an entire city block of 61 row houses in 1985 to try to kill MOVE once and for all. It ended up killing MOVE founder John Africa and 10 other MOVE people, including five children, but MOVE lives on. Its support of Abu-Jamal has been the critical factor in his rise from obscurity to the world stage.

--What are your thoughts about the recent release of photos from the night of Faulkner’s murder? What impact do you think they will have on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals decision?

Any new developments on the factual side can only serve to get at the truth about who killed Officer Faulkner. These new findings will have no impact on the rulings to be issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit because that court limited itself to considering only three defense claims and one prosecution claim—none of these claims are relevant to the actual forensic evidence in the case.

--What do you anticipate the future holds for Mumia Abu-Jamal?

I expect the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit to grant him a new trial based on either the trial prosecutor’s improper, and unconstitutional, summation to the jury during the guilt phase of the trial or on the defense claim that the prosecutor unconstitutionally excluded blacks from Abu-Jamal's trial jury. Although it is difficult to imagine the D.A.’s Office retrying Abu-Jamal, its vendetta for him runs so deep that it most likely will. At a new trial, I expect Abu-Jamal will be found not guilty and set free.

--J. Patrick O’Connor is the author of The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal, 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.