10.08.1995

US state’s licence to kill

Mumia Abu-Jamal was due to be executed on August 17. How long will the US state get away with murder?

THE MOST famous of all the USA’s 3,000 Death Row prisoners, Mumia Abu-Jamal, former Black Panther activist and campaigning radio broadcaster, has been granted an indefinite stay of execution.

Convicted and sentenced to death in 1982 for the alleged murder of a police officer, he has been incarcerated in a Pennsylvania prison ever since. However, it was only this year that the execution threat became real, following the election as state governor of Tom Ridge. Ridge is an extreme rightwinger who pledged to implement death sentences. In May, following a break of 32 years, Pennsylvania became the first industrialised northern state to recommence executions.

Ridge signed Mumia Abu-Jamal’s death warrant for August 17 in the full knowledge that Jamal was about to file for a retrial. The stay of execution - to allow for the completion of the appeals process - was granted just 10 days before he was due to die.

The case bears all the signs of a frame-up. Jamal’s attorney, Rachel Wolkenstein, points out that the recently received 700 pages of FBI documents make it “absolutely unequivocally clear” that he had been targeted by the FBI. Jamal was involved with the Black Power Party in 1969 when he was 15. As a result he is a permanent feature on the FBI’s notorious ‘Cointelpro’ hit list. At the time of his arrest he was making regular broadcasts on local radio stations, was a local leader of the Association of Black Journalists and a campaigner in defence of the state-persecuted, anti-establishment group, Move. Move’s surviors had themselves been the subject of police frame-ups.

The police stand accused in the Jamal case of coercing evidence from several witnesses. They ignored others, including a statement that someone else fired the shots which killed the police officer. The local Fraternal Order of Police has been insistent to the point of vindictiveness that “this very cunning but despicable murderer” must die.

In June, Jamal published Live from Death Row, a collection of essays on race, civil rights and the death penalty, written during his 14 years of incarceration.

Partly as a result of the efforts of the Partisan Defense Committee, sponsored by the Trotskyite Spartacist League, the protests have mushroomed throughout the world. In the United States Whoopi Goldberg and former Mash star Mike Farrell have helped publicise the campaign. South African ANC leader Cyril Ramaphosa and the CGT, France’s main trade union centre, have spoken out in favour of Jamal, while in Britain the National Union of Journalists and several union bureaucrats have given their support. Twenty-one MPs signed an ‘early day’ motion against the execution. Demonstrations were held in many countries, involving thousands of people across the world. All of this failed to move Tom Ridge.

The fight to save Mumia Abu-Jamal has become symbolic of the need to abolish the barbaric death penalty in the USA - the only advanced capitalist country where it is still permitted. The US constitution contains a clause banning “cruel and unusual punishment”, yet it condones the slow mental torture on Death Row of thousands of mainly black workers.

Above all the campaign highlights the burning need for a US communist party to break workers from loyalty to the bosses' state. Support for the death penalty is increasing in the US. Jamal’s cam-paign has hopefully dented opinion. But the extent to which Ridge and the Pennsylvanian police were able to rally opinion behind them is a grim warning - not only to workers in the US, but here as well.