Mumia Abu-Jamal

Mumia Abu-Jamal’s conviction turned importantly on unreliable and conflicting testimony. It was significant that in taking up the case, elite news media went along for the ride, and sometimes drove the car—encouraging acceptance, for instance, of the fact that, though the guard assigned to Mumia immediately after his arrest reported “the negro male made no statements,” more to be believed was the other officer who subsequently came forward to say that, actually, from his hospital bed, Mumia had declared, “I shot the motherfucker  and I hope he dies.” Neither witness recantations or shifting accounts or evidence of jury-purging in Mumia’s case, nor the ever-expanding evidence of the terrible harms and injustices of the US prison system generally, seem to be enough to shake some media from their investment in the narrative of the “convicted cop killer,” and the need to keep him not just behind bars, but also to keep him and people “similar to” him quiet, to keep their voices and their lives out of public conversation and consideration.

This week on CounterSpin: A 1995 Washington Post story led with a macabre account from the widow of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, about how when her husband’s bloody shirt was held up in court, his accused killer Mumia Abu-Jamal turned in his chair and smiled at her. An evocatively sinister report, which the paper printed untroubled by the fact that the court record showed that Abu-Jamal wasn’t in court when the shirt was displayed. ABC‘s investigative news show 20/20 used all the techniques for their big 1998 piece on the conviction of Abu-Jamal for Faulkner’s killing—stating prosecution claims as fact, even when they were disputed by some of the prosecution’s own witnesses or the forensic record; stressing how a defense witness admitted being intoxicated, while omitting that prosecution witnesses said the same.