by Linn Washington Jr.
Knight Ridder-Tribune Columnist
The U.S. District Court delivered a blow to justice when it recently denied Mumia Abu-Jamal a new trial. Abu-Jamal was convicted of murdering a policeman in 1981, amid legal flaws during his trial, and has been on death row since 1982.
On Dec. 19, one day after U.S. District Judge William Yohn denied Abu-Jamal a new trial, another Philadelphia judge granted one of Abu-Jamal's death-row colleagues a new trial on the legal point that prosecutors improperly excluded blacks from the jury during the initial trial. Yohn rejected the same legal point for Abu-Jamal.
And one month before Yohn upheld Abu-Jamal's conviction, another federal judge in Philadelphia granted a new trial for a death-row inmate on another legal point rejected by Yohn - misconduct by trial judge Albert Sabo, the jurist during Abu-Jamal's 1982 trial who is infamous for his pro-prosecution reputation.
These two rulings, and others by judges in Philadelphia who review first-degree murder convictions, expose contradictions in Yohn's decision on Abu-Jamal's case.
An Amnesty International report released in 2000 found that judges frequently ignore established law when denying Abu-Jamal's requests for a new trial. The group criticized contradictory rulings by appellate courts that leave the "disturbing impression" that judges invent new standards "to apply to one case only: that of Mumia Abu-Jamal."
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Yohn's decision dismissed 28 of Abu-Jamal's 29 appeal claims, many of which cited disturbing evidence of misconduct by police, prosecutors and judges in Pennsylvania. But Yohn granted Abu-Jamal's lawyers the right to appeal their claim of improper jury-selection tactics by prosecutors, even though he specifically rejected the charge that prosecutors used racism to stack Abu-Jamal's 1982 trial jury with 10 whites and just two blacks.
Philadelphia prosecutors have historically practiced racial profiling in selecting capital-sentencing juries, excluding blacks at twice the rate of other jurors, according to two studies by Professor David Baldus of the University of Iowa. Baldus' most recent study, published by the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law in 2001, tracked more than 10,000 Philadelphia district attorney office's jury selection choices between 1981 and 1997. Amnesty International's report stated that the "politicization of Mumia Abu-Jamal's case may not only have prejudiced his right to a fair trial, but may now be undermining his right to fair and impartial treatment in the appeals courts."
Denying a person his right to a fair trial is nothing short of a gross miscarriage of justice.
Linn Washington Jr. is a journalism professor at Temple University.
