Mumia faces new execution threat

originally published:
5th November 2009

Pennsylvania prosecutors, twice rejected in their efforts to impose the death penalty on Mumia (in 2001 and 2008), may have found new support in the U.S. Supreme Court.

After almost 28 years on Pennsylvania’s death row and innumerable battles in the U.S. criminal injustice system, innocent political prisoner, journalist and world renowned “Voice of the Voiceless” Mumia Abu-Jamal lost his final appeal on April 6, 2009.

Ignoring it’s own precedents and those of the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals below it, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to affirm what had been the “law of the land” for decades, that the systematic and racist exclusion of Blacks from juries voids all guilty verdicts and mandates a new trial.

In Mumia’s 1982 trial presided over by the notorious “hanging judge” Albert Sabo, the prosecutor Joseph McGill used 10 or perhaps 11 of his 15 peremptory strikes against Black jurors.

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Posted by Alison Leslie on 09/11/2009. Filed under Breaking News & Digests,Capital Punishment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry