Letter
to the editor
Charges against Mumia Abu Jamal lack
sufficient evidence
I
am writing this letter in regards to Gerry
Wachovsky’s opinion piece about Mumia Abu
Jamal. Quite frankly, I found the editorial
to be misguided, uninformed and just plain
ludicrous. Wachovsky provided absolutely
no raw, hardcore evidence suggesting Abu
Jamal’s guilt. The fact is Mumia Abu Jamal
is innocent of the murder charge in which
he stands accused.
Officer Daniel Faulkner was killed with
a .44 caliber gun. Abu Jamal’s gun, which
he was licensed to carry as a taxi driver,
was a .38 caliber gun. The police never
tested Abu Jamal’s gun to see if it had
been recently fired, they never tested his
hands to see if he fired a gun (or the prints
on the murder weapon) and they never proved
that Abu Jamal’s gun was indeed the fatal
weapon. No police officers present at Abu-Jamal’s
arrest claimed to have heard Jamal’s “confession”
until two months after it allegedly occurred.
This was right after Abu-Jamal had filed
police brutality charges.
William Singletary, a Vietnam veteran and
local businessman, saw the whole incident
and had testified that Abu-Jamal was not
the shooter. However, the police forced
him to change his story and intimidated
him into leaving Philadelphia. Finally,
a man named Arnold Beverly confessed to
the killing of Officer Daniel Faulkner.
The prosecutor removed 11 qualified African
Americans from the jury. He also argued
for the death penalty because of Mumia’s
membership in the Black Panther Party, a
practice later condemned as unconstitutional
by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Mumia Abu Jamal has gained world wide support
for his cause, and it is my belief that
he is a political prisoner who should never
have been arrested in the first place. I
will end this letter due to space constraints
by presenting one last truth. For Wachovsky
to say that racial bias was not an issue
in this trail is retarded. If Mumia were
white, he would not be in his current plight.
Race and race issues are always just beneath
the surface. What’s said is that most folks
are too scared to deal with it as I suspect
Gerry Wachovsky of being.
—
Obi Adisa Asad
Senior English major
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