The possibility of a different perpetrator of the crime was seemingly dismissed out of hand by the prosecution, despite rumours and accusations that there was a fourth person at the scene, Kenneth Freeman, riding in the car that was stopped by Officer Faulkner. He allegedly fled, leaving Mumia and his brother (who he had perhaps unwisely acted in defence of) to deal with the aftermath. Freeman was never apprehended or questioned regarding the crime, and was found dead in 1985 behind a local estate, with a needle injected and in suspicious circumstances. The trial itself, as is asserted in an open letter from over fifty UK lawyers to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, was alleged to be ‘hopelessly compromised by racism.’[1]
They were concerned to prevent the ‘prosecution’s systematic removal of Black people from the jury’[2] which had undermined the fairness of the original trial. They also discussed the ‘blatant bias and racist conduct of the trial judge,’[3] Albert Sabo. In addition to his record of putting more convicts on death row than any other US judge, he openly discriminated against the defendant and the black jurors. A stenographer overheard him assert he was going to help the prosecution ‘fry the nigger;’ Mumia was also denied the right to self-representation, and more generally ‘Witnesses reveal that the judge expressed his displeasure with those who were people of colour by the rolling of his eyes and in voice inflection,’ which contributed to one juror’s decision to leave the panel. While Mumia did describe, in his retrospective statement, his reasons for eschewing the help of the state-appointed lawyer as being because he was a ‘legal-trained lawyer’, he was probably justified in his concerns that his defence were ‘ignoring my instructions.’[4]
Before this new campaign was launched, in 1995 there was an attempt to launch an appeal against the initial verdict, to be presided over by Albert Sabo, who had a reputation for bigotry. This must be seen in light of events earlier in that year; Mumia had been commissioned to feature in radio programme called ‘Life from death row,’ but the authorities reacted badly and threatened to shut down public radio. He decided, therefore, to write a book instead, prompting officials to launch an investigation into ‘whether he was writing a book.’[5] Professor Washington has something he then claims is new information, and highly inflammatory: in the course of their findings, the prison authorities broke the privilege of sanctity of mail between a lawyer and their client. Furthermore, they photocopied the letters they opened and sent them to the governor’s office. Private discussions about the decision to appeal his conviction were forestalled when, two or three days before it was due to launch, the governor issued a death warrant for a month later. (This, in any case, he is not supposed to do before a prisoner has been granted a first appeal.) The judge declared that, because of the urgency of appealing the death sentence – which apparently had been imposed as a result of said appeal – the trial had to be expedited. A clever exercise in double-think. It is said that Sabo’s 158-page rejection of the defence’s arguments practically mirrored the prosecution’s report.
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