Hundreds at Rally for Abu-Jamal

PHILADELPHIA — As 1,000 supporters protested, convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal complained Friday about his former legal team and the decision to bar him from a hearing where attorneys pursued a last-gasp state appeal.

“Today I am banned from a proceeding in my own name . . . without justification,” he said in a two-minute statement read to the judge by his attorney Marlene Kamish.

In the tense 30-minute hearing, Judge Pamela Dembe directed lawyers for both sides to file briefs on whether she should have jurisdiction over Abu-Jamal’s petition for a new trial. She also refused a request by Abu-Jamal’s new attorneys to immediately schedule oral arguments.

Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and radio journalist, was sentenced to death for the 1981 shooting death of a Philadelphia police officer. Daniel Faulkner had pulled over Abu-Jamal’s brother in an early-morning traffic stop.

Celebrities, death penalty opponents and foreign politicians have rallied to Abu-Jamal’s cause, calling him a political prisoner and saying he was railroaded by a racist justice system.

The protesters marched from the courthouse to City Hall before going to the federal courthouse for a sit-in. Faulkner’s widow, Maureen, watched them through a window as they passed by the district attorney’s office shouting, “No justice, no peace!”

“They made the wrong decision in making Mumia Abu-Jamal their poster boy,” Faulkner said. “He knows what he did. He tried to portray himself as a martyr and a victim when the true victim was Danny.”

Said Faulkner’s former partner, Gary Bell: “In this case, there is no gray area. There is absolutely no doubt about his guilt.”

Abu-Jamal is housed at a western Pennsylvania prison.

Defense attorney Eliot Lee Grossman argued that Abu-Jamal should have been brought to the hearing, but prosecutor Hugh Burns said defendants almost never attend status hearings and Abu-Jamal was not singled out.

Abu-Jamal lost his first round of state appeals, but his latest petition argues that new evidence could clear him. The defense says it has an affidavit from a man who said he was hired to kill Faulkner because the officer had interfered with payoffs by gangsters to police.

Abu-Jamal’s former lawyers, who were fired in May after one published a book about the case, thought the confession was not believable. A federal judge last month refused to order the man to testify.

Burns called Abu-Jamal’s latest theory of the shooting “a hoax being perpetrated upon the small group of fanatical followers.”

One of the protesters, college student Khury Petersen-Smith, 19, of Albany, N.Y., had a different view: “Mumia is the Nelson Mandela of today.”