The Hidden Cruelty of Trump’s Executions

Not only is Trump a Narcissist, a Zionist, a Clown and a Rapist but he is a Sadist too

In this article in The Intercept we learn that one more achievement of the, hopefully, one-term President Trump, is to restart Federal executions. In the United States not only individual states but the Federal Government carries out executions. Except that until now there had not been an execution in 17 years.

The last person was executed in 2003 under George Bush’s administration and before that under Clinton. It was Bill Clinton’s crime bill in 1994 and his 1996 Effective Death Penalty Act which mandated the disregarding of errors in the courts below, such as the exclusion of Black jurors. Clinton himself had won the Presidency on the back of executing 3 men in his native Arkansas. This is the man whom Tony Blair found so congenial.

The death penalty in civil society is an act of barbarism, designed to instil terror in the poor and working class. It is almost unheard of for rich white men to be executed in America. It and the prison system is the only place where Black men are overrepresented. That is why the death penalty is not just a humanitarian issue but a class issue.  Giving the state the power to deliberately kill people is to give power to the ruling class.

A view of the Terre Haute prison in Indiana where Federal executions are carried out

I don’t need to rehearse the arguments about the death penalty, such as the danger of killing someone who is innocent. In the United States, because of poor representation of Black and poor White people, a remarkably large percentage of those convicted of murder are innocent.  This is a testimony to a racist and corrupt police force. There are other arguments, prime amongst which are the fact that the death penalty demeans a civilised society. It reduces society to the level of the murderer. Far from bringing closure to the relatives of the victim, it simply fills them with the desire for vengeance.

Politically the death penalty is racist, a legacy of slavery and lynchings, inhumane in that it involves the slow and deliberate killing of an individual. 

You are 17 times more likely to be executed for killing a White person than a Black person in the United States. In 1987 in McCleskey v. Kemp the Supreme Court voted by 5-to-4 that even solid statistical evidence of race discrimination in the capital justice system did not offend the Constitution. In 1991, after he retired, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., the author of the majority opinion, was asked whether there was any vote he would like to change. “Yes,” he told his biographer. “McCleskey v. Kemp.”  As one of the dissenters in the case, Justice John Paul Stevens, wrote after his retirement in 2010.

“That the murder of Black victims is treated as less culpable than the murder of white victims provides a haunting reminder of once-prevalent Southern lynchings,”

he wrote that year in The New York Review of Books. Opponents of the death penalty have been deeply critical of the decision, comparing it to the Dred Scott case, the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling that enslaved Black people were property and not citizens.

“McCleskey is the Dred Scott decision of our time,” Anthony G. Amsterdam, a law professor at New York University, said in a 2007 speech.

“It is a declaration that African-American life has no value which white men are bound to respect. It is a decision for which our children’s children will reproach our generation and abhor the legal legacy we leave them.”

The argument that the death penalty is a deterrent is an obvious logical fallacy. I figured that one out as a child. I remember the last hangings, of 2 men in Liverpool and Manchester in 1964. In my childish innocence I wondererd why, if the death penalty was such a great deterrent why, did they ever have to use it?

There is only one exception where the use of the death penalty is justified and that is the case of war crimes against civilians.  Those who order or are responsible for genocide, the mass murder of people for no other reason than who they are or are not, are making political decisions that whole categories of people are no longer fit to live. Those tempted to make such decisions should be in no doubt that they will pay the ultimate price. 

They are not suffering from mental illness, temporary madness, blind love or even greed.  Nor are they psychopaths.  They took decisions for political decisions and should be accountable for those decisions. The military in Burma should be accountable for its crimes against the Rohinga. ISIS for its genocide of the Yazidis. 

It is the Bill Clintons, George Bushs and Tony Blairs of this world who deserve the ultimate penalty.  Why?  Because that is how society makes it clear that war crimes are literally beyond the pale. Hence I would defend the decision of the Nuremberg courts to execute the Nazi defendants. But war crimes apart, the use of the death penalty is indefensible.

In other words it is those who are most in favour of the death penalty who are most deserving of it.

It is no accident that at a time when the death penalty in the United States is decreasing and even the Republican state of Nebraska abolished it (only to reverse its decision) that Trump has decided to reintroduce it on the federal level.

It is also no coincidence that those who describe themselves as ‘pro-life’ i.e. anti-abortion in the United States are the most vociferous supporters of the death penalty.  It is the Christian Bible Belt which uses the death penalty most, led by Texas. We can assume that Amy Coney Bennett would have no compunction in supporting the conservative majority on the Supreme Court in favour of the death penalty.  Despite being a rigid Catholic she voted in favour of the execution of Daniel Lewis Lee, the first person executed on a federal level since 2003. Coney is a good example of the hypocrisy of pro-lifers.

Of course we should not be surprised at the actions of Trump. In 1989 he took out full page ads in 4 New York newspapers calling for the execution of 5 Black teenagers who were convicted of raping and killing a young woman. In 2002  DNA tests proved they were innocent and the actual culprit confessed.  Trump has still refused to apologise to those whose death he demanded. It says something about the United States and the American people that he is in contention for the post of President when he is unfit to be a dog catcher.

Below is an excellent article from The Intercept and links to a series of similar articles.

Tony Greenstein

Less than a week after executing Christopher Vialva in front of his mother and aunt, the DOJ announced it will kill Orlando Hall next.

October 17 2020, 12:00 p.m.

 On the morning she buried her son Christopher Vialva, Lisa Brown arrived at Affordable Burial and Cremation Service, a small funeral home in a strip mall in Killeen, Texas. Her older sister was waiting, along with the funeral director, who wore a suit and a mask. The last time Brown had seen her son, he was lying under a blanket on a gurney in Terre Haute, Indiana, where a federal official had declared his time of death. Now he lay in a casket in a blue pinstripe suit, a prayer shawl, and a kippah he crocheted himself.

“I walked over to the casket and put my hand on his chest,” Brown recalled. It was the first time she had touched her son in more than 20 years. Looking down, she saw something she’d noticed inside the execution chamber. “The whole back of his hand was bruised,” she said. The funeral director said it was probably where they had inserted his IV. “And I said, ‘I know it was.’”

Brown moved her hands to Vialva’s hands and face. She touched him all over, so eagerly, the funeral director “probably thought I was mauling my son,” she chuckled. “I was thankful that he said he was an understanding man.” Brown’s sister did the same thing. “She was hugging on him and she was touching his chest. She kissed him on the forehead.”

A portrait of Stacie and Todd Bagley on the tombstone of Stacie Bagley’s grave in Dyersburg, Tenn., on Sept. 18, 2020 - Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept

Vialva had been executed one week earlier, on September 24, for the carjacking and murder of two youth ministers from Iowa in 1999. He was 19 years old when he shot Stacie and Todd Bagley on the grounds of Fort Hood, not far from the funeral home. Vialva’s co-defendant, Brandon Bernard, was only 18 at the time. Both were sentenced to death. After the Trump administration restarted federal executions following a 17-year pause, Vialva became the seventh man killed in the Terre Haute death chamber since July.

Even to those paying close attention, the loved ones of the condemned had remained largely invisible in Terre Haute. Although the Bureau of Prisons books travel and accommodations for the families of the victims — and arranges for them to address reporters following the executions — no such help is given to relatives of those facing execution. Until Vialva, none of the condemned had arranged for family to attend.

Brown was disturbed by the lack of communication from prison officials. After confirming that she would be in attendance, they did not speak to her until the day before he was to die. Brown was on an elevator leaving the prison after her last visit with her son when Vialva’s case manager told her that the Crisis Support Team was waiting to brief her. Answering her questions in the lobby, they were courteous, almost overly polite. “They almost seemed nervous. You know, like it was a new thing for them. Which it probably was.”

By the time she woke up on the morning of her son’s death, Brown had done as much as she could to prepare herself. She had even read the filings in a lawsuit over lethal injection, which warned that autopsies from executions carried out using pentobarbital showed clear evidence that the condemned had experienced pulmonary edema: the filling of their lungs with fluid. “For me, knowledge is power,” Brown said. “The more I’m aware of what can go wrong, the more comfortable I am.” Still, it wasn’t easy to read that Vialva might suffer a sensation akin to being waterboarded — “that same panic, suffocating, drowning feeling.”

Ron Kaz of Charleston, S.C., helps organize the Abolitionist Action Committee’s annual protest and hunger strike against the death penalty outside the U.S. Supreme Court on July 1, 2019, in Washington, D.C. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

A Well-Oiled Death Machine

Amid a global pandemic, national protests, and the impending presidential election, news of the federal executions had been largely eclipsed since they began this summer. Vialva had been dismayed by the lack of national media attention as the men around him went to their deaths. After the execution of Lezmond Mitchell on August 26, he wrote to a friend that they had mentioned him on the CNN crawl, but that was it. “A man’s life is taken by the government but not even a segment to talk about it,” he said.

“They are a well-oiled death machine now,” he went on. “It was sad watching them walk Mitchell right past me so they could drive him to the death house. Everything was so clinical.”

Vialva’s execution was a painful blow to those who knew and worshipped with him on death row. “I just want everyone to know that Chris was the real deal when it came to his faith and being sorry for all he had done,” one neighbor wrote to his own supporters in late September. As with every round of executions, a wave of anxiety spread across the Special Confinement Unit after Vialva died. “We don’t know when they will pick someone else, but we believe it will be 3-5 more people in the coming months.”

On September 30, the Department of Justice announced the next execution date. Orlando Hall, 49, is scheduled to die on November 19. He would be the second Black man killed in the federal execution chamber this year. In a media release, his lawyers noted that Hall was sentenced to death by an all-white jury, one of myriad ways in which the federal death penalty mirrors the same flaws and inequities of state systems. On October 16, the DOJ announced execution dates for two more people. One is Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row. The other is Vialva’s co-defendant, Brandon Bernard.

Politicians on both sides have remained almost completely silent about the federal executions. Although it was the Trump administration that was preparing to take his life, Vialva was particularly critical of the Democrats before he died. The party has enshrined opposition to the death penalty as part of its platform, yet ignored the issue during the Democratic National Convention. Presidential candidate Joe Biden, who was instrumental in the expansion of federal death row but now claims to disavow capital punishment, has said nothing about the executions. Neither has vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris, despite touting her opposition to the death penalty.

Two days before Vialva’s execution, as the DOJ prepared to kill William LeCroy on September 22, activists with Death Penalty Action gathered for a press conference in front of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. Faith leaders were present from different religious denominations. They spoke out against the executions and called out Attorney General Bill Barr, who was scheduled to be honored the next day during the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast.

The event featured New York Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the sponsor of a bill to abolish the federal death penalty introduced last summer. A parallel bill was brought forward by Rep. Ayanna Pressley, who last year called for an investigation into the federal government’s lethal injection plans.

“We’ve gotta be louder about this,” Espaillat said. He echoed a new report by the Death Penalty Information Center, linking the death penalty to the legacy of slavery and lynching in the United States. Not only are Black people overrepresented on death row today, he said, “defendants convicted of killing white victims are executed at a rate 17 times greater than those convicted of killing Black victims.” Indeed, of the seven men executed in Terre Haute, almost all of their victims were white.

Activist and attorney Ashley Kincaid Eve leads a vigil across from the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., moments before the execution of Christopher Vialva on Sept. 24, 2020. Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept

Later that day, activists under the banner of the Terre Haute Death Penalty Resistance returned to the grassy field next to the Dollar General on Route 63, directly across from the federal penitentiary. Ashley Kincaid Eve, a lawyer and activist from Indianapolis, was leading the protests that week, although she still harbored hope that Vialva’s execution would not go forward. Eve had developed a close friendship with Vialva after he saw her on the news and wrote to thank her for caring enough to protest the executions. “We are here because people decided that we are trash to be thrown in the dumpster,” he said in his first letter. But over the years, 

“I have listened to men sing the praises of their children, mourn the loss of their loved ones, talk about their ambitions while knowing they will not come to fruition, discuss their spiritual journey, and lament the decisions that put them here.”

Eve had previously spearheaded a successful lawsuit against the Indiana State Police, who barred the activists from the area across from the prison during the first round of executions in July. It was one of many ways in which authorities tried to tightly control what the public was able to see. In a nod to the First Amendment, the BOP had designated two spots in the fields along Route 63 for protesters on either side of the issue, but required participants to be transported by government buses hours in advance. No phones or electronic devices would be allowed. In the briefings for press before each execution, BOP spokespersons have repeatedly told reporters that no one has shown up to protest the executions.

While in prison Vialva crocheted a number of stuffed animals and blankets for his mother, Lisa Brown, which she keeps at her home in Killeen, Texas - 16.9.20.

BOP officials have been tight-lipped with journalists. For media witnesses, who have waited long hours on prison grounds to carry out their assignments, there are few explanations or updates. In contrast to death penalty states where prison officials routinely provide detailed descriptions about the last meals of the condemned, the BOP refuses to disclose even such trivial information. But Vialva had told Eve about LeCroy’s last meal. He had asked for KFC but his request had been rejected, she told me. The bones in the chicken presented a security risk, he was told. So, like Vialva, he requested Pizza Hut instead.

Photographs of Lisa Brown, now 61, and her son Christopher Vialva, now 41, when Christopher played football at Ellison High School, photographed at her home in Killeen, Texas, on Sept. 16, 2020. Photo: Matthew Busch for The InterceptAdd caption

Victims on Both Sides

LeCroy’s execution went later than planned. Although it was scheduled for 6 p.m., he was not declared dead until after 9 p.m. LeCroy had been sentenced to death for the brutal killing of a nurse practitioner named Joann Lee Tiesler. Court records showed that LeCroy, who had a history of mental illness, said he had killed her in the mistaken belief that she was a former babysitter who had molested him when he was a child. In a clemency application for LeCroy, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, his attorneys pointed out that LeCroy’s own family had lost his brother, a Georgia state trooper, to murder in 2010. “The pain and sorrow felt by the LeCroy family at potentially losing two of their sons is unimaginable,” they wrote.

Lisa Brown visiting her son Christopher Vialva on federal death row in August 2020. Photo: Courtesy of Lisa Brown

Tiesler was engaged to be married when she was murdered; her fiancé witnessed LeCroy’s execution, as did her father, Tom Tiesler. In a written statement, Tom Tiesler thanked Trump and Barr for restarting federal executions. LeCroy “died a peaceful death in contrast to the stark horror he imposed on my daughter Joann,” he wrote. 

“He was allowed to live nineteen years longer than Joann, with us taxpayers paying for his food, shelter and medical care. I am unaware that he ever showed any remorse for his evil actions, his life of crime, or the horrific burden he caused Joann’s loved ones.”

LeCroy had prepared a lengthy statement of his own, which he mailed to Sister Barbara Battista, a Catholic nun who served as his spiritual adviser, to read at his execution. But it did not arrive on time. Two days later, on the morning of Vialva’s execution, Battista brought the letter to a press conference outside the Dollar General. It began with a quote from the poet W. H. Auden. “‘Those to whom evil is done do evil in return,’” it read. This was not an excuse, he said.

“Yet it describes many of us human beings in our primitive emotional states as children. It is a fact that some abuse — physical, emotional, and/or sexual — can stunt emotional growth. … We feel that we are what happened to us, that we cannot be that which we desire to become. And we lash out in anger. … We did things that we were unable to take back, harmed another human being, ourselves, and so many who loved us.”

Activists stood behind Battista as she read the letter, holding signs and wearing masks. They were joined by Lisa Brown. In a purple mask, a black headscarf, and a gold Star of David pendant, she came forward after Battista was done, to say a few words about her son. “This is really hard,” she said, her voice breaking. “This is the first venue that I’ve had in which I could say to Todd and Stacie’s family, I am so sorry for your loss. I’ve never been able to tell you that because I was told I could not have access to you.”

Lisa Brown addresses reporters on the morning of her son’s execution. Christopher Vialva was executed on Sept. 24, 2020, at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind. He was the seventh person executed by the Trump administration. Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept

Brown emphasized that her son was remorseful for his crime. But she also shared a story she told me the first time we spoke. Like LeCroy’s family, she had experienced the legal system from both sides of the courtroom. “In 2009, my daughter’s ex-husband attempted to murder her,” she said. 

“He bludgeoned her in the head with a hammer, poured gasoline over her and set her on fire. She survived with second and third degree burns over 80 percent of her body. And she forgave her attacker shortly after it happened. … And she taught me that I had to forgive. And it changed my life from being in a perpetual state of victimhood to a life that I can put that behind me, and see that there is peace in that.”

Later that day, as Brown reported to the parking lot of the Vigo County Sheriff’s Office, Eve returned to the same spot at the Dollar General to set up for the protest against Vialva’s execution. She had said goodbye to Vialva on the phone the night before, hoping to convince him to let her file a last-minute challenge to his execution. But he asked her not to. Everyone on death row had seen what happened to Daniel Lewis Lee, the first man to be executed in Terre Haute this year: Lee was lying on the gurney for four hours before the government took his life, as lawyers fought over his fate. Vialva did not want that to happen to him.

“He’s lost faith in our courts and I don’t blame him,” Eve said. “I’ve lost faith in our justice system. But I haven’t lost faith in humanity.” In the last several weeks, she had heard from people all over the world who were moved by his story.

It was just after 6 p.m. when Eve introduced the final speaker, a woman named Katie, who had traveled to Terre Haute from Minnesota. “I don’t know Chris personally,” Katie said. But she knew Vialva’s younger sister, Audrey. The two had met at a retreat for survivors of domestic violence, where Audrey had shared the story of how her ex-husband tried to kill her. “I am at risk of being a murder victim,” Katie said. Before going to prison for violating a restraining order, her own abuser beat, choked, and sexually assaulted her, she said. He is no longer incarcerated — and he could still kill her one day, she said. But she does not want his life.

Katie pointed to the penitentiary complex behind her. “Do you think that what’s going on behind us right now is going to save my life?” she asked. “Do you think he knows that this is happening and it’s going to deter him from anything he wants to do? It’s not.”

At 6:48 p.m., a BOP spokesperson sent out an email to reporters. “Please report back to the Media Center at this time if you choose to,” he wrote. The execution had been carried out. At the media center, officials handed out a statement from the mother of Todd Bagley. She said she was “hurt and disappointed” by the coverage of the case that morning, which focused on Vialva and how he had changed. Todd and Stacie also touched many lives, she wrote. “We will never know how many people they could have influenced for good if they had been given the chance.” She was heartened by the fact that they were in Heaven, she said. “I know without a doubt we will have a glorious reunion with them one day!”

Lisa Brown with her son Christopher Vialva and his younger sister, Audrey, in 1988. Photo: Courtesy of Lisa Brown

The Ultimate Price

On October 1, a few dozen guests gathered at the Killeen City Cemetery for Vialva’s funeral. His gray casket was covered in white lilies and chrysanthemums. His mother and sister sat in the front row. Eve, who drove down from Indianapolis, sat behind them under the tent.

Vialva’s 11-year-old nephew read a tribute from Vialva’s best friend on death row. Then Vialva’s sister Audrey delivered his eulogy. She shared childhood memories: how they would break the rules and ride their bikes to Walmart; how he would tickle her, play freeze tag with her, and have water balloon fights with her every summer. As he got older, she said, Vialva started spending more time playing video games and listening to music with his friends. But she remembered the time they stayed up all night memorizing the lyrics to the 1994 song “Funkdafied” by Da Brat. “He kept hanging his head off the top bunk asking why it was taking so many playbacks for me to get it,” she said. “His memory was always better than mine.”

Brown read the letter Vialva had written for his funeral. He was no longer the angry 19-year-old he had been, he wrote.

“If you have written me a thousand letters or only just sat and thought about me from time to time, I appreciate it. If you came to visit me once a year or just saw my mother in passing and told her to tell me hello, I appreciate it. … If anyone here feels they could have done more, don’t. You did what you could and that is all that matters. So, thank you for those mercies and for your attendance today.”

The funeral director, Robert Falcon, was moved by the service. It was not the first time he had presided over the burial of a man executed by the state. Often times, he told me, such families “want to arrange something very private, something very, very quiet,” he said.

“I’ve had services where nobody shows up. … There may be a representative from the family, a minister, and the funeral director. And that’s it. And Christopher’s situation was quite unique in that there was about 40 people present. And I’ve never seen that.”

Falcon did not minimize the pain of the victims in cases like Vialva’s. In his decades helping families bury their loved ones, he had seen his share of murder victims. He knew that their families continued to hurt after an execution, he said. But “sometimes we forget that the person has now paid the ultimate price for their crime, and now that family is left to hurt.”

Five days after her son’s funeral, Brown spoke to the mother of Orlando Hall, the next man in line to die in Terre Haute. She learned that he has six children and a number of grandchildren. Hall’s mother is in poor health and was not sure whether she will attend the execution, Brown said. “I told her, I want to be able to help facilitate their peaceful transition through this process,” Brown said. “And she said, ‘Oh thank you, Jesus.’ She says, ‘You just made my day, Miss Lisa.’ That blessed me.”

Brown has not yet spoken to the mother of Brandon Bernard. But she feels called upon to support other families as their loved ones get execution dates. “There are so many more like me,” she said. It is also what her son would have wanted. Over the phone, she read from a card that was waiting in the mail when she returned from Terre Haute. “I know this is hard for you,” he had written. “I would even go so far as to say that it’s harder on you than me. … I just want you to stay strong. I need you to do that for me. If they do take me away, then you can let them know how much it hurts. Maybe one day your love will change things.”

 

See also

Trump’s Execution Spree Continues at Federal Killing Ground in Indiana - More federal executions have been carried out in 2020 than in the past 57 years combined.

Blood in the Water - Disregarding the Virus and Victims’ Families, Trump Rushes to Execute as Many People as Possible

The Life and Death of Jerry Givens, Virginia’s Executioner-Turned-Abolitionist - After killing 62 people in the death chamber, Givens became an activist against the death penalty. Then Covid-19 took his life.

The Life and Death of Jerry Givens, Virginia’s Executioner-Turned-Abolitionist

Executions Are On Hold, but States Are Still Pushing for Death Amid the Coronavirus Pandemic

The Abolitionists - A Push to Repeal the Death Penalty Gains Ground Across the Western United States

Trump Prepares to Execute Christopher Vialva for a Crime He Committed as a Teenager

The Last Chance of Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal, the United States' Mandela – Framed for Killing a Racist Cop

Alice Walker once said of Mummia abu-Jamal that "He reminds me of Nelson Mandela.". 

Mumia Abu-Jamal was the victim of a frame-up 37 years ago on charges of killing a cop.  He is one of the last Black Panther prisoners and having caught Hepatitis C in prison, he now has cirrhosis of the liver. He was only cured of Hep C after a legal fight because the prison authorities did not want to spend the money on a cure. One assumes that given the nature of the US medical system the only cure for cirrhosis, a liver transplant, is out of the question.

Mumia’s long and determined fight against a system that for many years kept him on death row is a testament to his political will and consciousness. It is to be hoped that the decision to give him the chance of appeal won’t be appealed by the current Pennsylvanian authorities who pose as being more progressive.

Tony Greenstein 

Political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal granted a chance to appeal his case

A Court decision in Philadelphia will allow Mumia Abu-Jamal to reargue his case. Mumia has spent 37 years in prison after being falsely convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer in 1981.

Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and renowned writer and activist of 64 years, who has spent 37 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit, has been allowed to reargue his case before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. A judge in Philadelphia delivered the decision on December 27 on the grounds that the Chief Justice at the time of sentencing, Ronald Castille, refused to recuse himself from the case despite his earlier role as a district attorney during Abu-Jamal’s appeal.

Activists across the world celebrated the decision by the court that could mean that freedom for the 64 year old revolutionary is within reach.

Let is not be thought that the poison of Rupert Murdoch is only confined to the Sun - here the radio equivalent Fox News demonstrates its faux outrage at the idea that an innocent person might be granted an appeal

Abu-Jamal was arrested in 1981 on charges of killing a white police officer, Daniel Faulkner. In 1982, he was convicted and sentenced to death in a trial that was filled with violations and irregularities, including witnesses changing their testimonies several times, court clerks stating that they wanted to convict him and concrete proof of evidence tampering, among others.

The sentence was condemned by activists and human rights organizations across the globe and since then, there has been a fierce campaign demanding his release. In 2011, after strong pressure and campaigns, Mumia was sentenced to life without parole and was moved off the death row.

After he was moved off death row, Mumia talked to Democracy Now in a rare live interview in 2013 about what it felt like: “Well, I could, but I’d be lying, because I call this “slow death row.” “Life” in Pennsylvania means life. Pennsylvania has one of the largest “life” populations of any State in the United States. It has the distinction of having the absolute highest number of juvenile lifers of any state in the United States—indeed, of any jurisdiction in the world. So, that should give you some sense.”

A couple years ago, activists had to fight a sustained struggle in order for Mumia to have access to proper health care when his life was at risk. After Mumia fell ill in prison, it was discovered that he was suffering from hepatitis C. The Pennsylvania prison system refused to treat Mumia or the other 7,000 prisoners suffering from hepatitis C, as the treatment cost would be around $100,000. His legal team filed a suit and won and guaranteed treatment for Mumia, a decision which not only affected him but set a precedent for other incarcerated people to have access to treatment.

Though these victories are important, the objective for activists has always been and will always be Mumia’s complete freedom, (and that of all political prisoners).

The latest verdict represents a new possibility in the struggle for Mumia’s freedom. In the appeal, Mumia’s defense team may have the opportunity to present all of the violations that have occurred throughout the legal process, information that unequivocally points to bias by the judiciary to seal his sentence. However, like all of the victories that have been achieved thus far in Mumia’s case, and in the cases of many other political prisoners, a victory in the courtroom now will only be possible if if there is accompaniment and solidarity from activists and movements across the world.

The best known of all incarcerated black radicals speaks out in a two-year email correspondence with Ed Pilkington on the ‘continuum’ of the Black Panthers to Black Lives Matter

‘Intoxicating freedom, gripping fear’: Mumia Abu-Jamal on life as a Black Panther

Ed Pilkington

Mon 30 Jul 2018

Former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal. Photograph: April Saul/Philadelphia Inquirer

The letter was dated 30 August 2016. Written in black ink in spidery, meticulous handwriting, it proclaimed at the top of the page: “On a Move!”, the mantra of the Move group of black liberationists from Philadelphia who clashed violently with the city’s police force 40 years ago, sending nine of them to prison for decades.

The author was Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is the closest thing that exists today to an imprisoned Black Panther celebrity. He joined the Black Panther party in the 1960s when he was just 14, and later became a prominent advocate for the Move organization.

For the past 36 years he has been incarcerated in Pennsylvania prisons, including two decades spent on death row, having been convicted of murdering a police officer at a Philadelphia street corner in 1981. His case has reverberated around the world, inspiring admiration and opprobrium in equal measure, in what has become a global cause-celebre.

As such, he could be regarded as the figurehead of the cadre of imprisoned African-American militants who are still behind bars today. Collectively they amount to the unfinished business of the 1970s black liberation struggle, as they languish still in prison in some cases almost half a century after they went in.

By the Guardian’s count, there are 19 of them, two women included. That headcount is very slowly being diminished, as the debate around whether they have earned their freedom grows more intense with every passing year.

Last week one of Abu-Jamal’s peers, Robert Seth Hayes, was released from a New York maximum security prison on parole having served 45 years for the murder of a city transit officer.

I had sent that initial letter to Abu-Jamal to ask his views about Albert Woodfox, a former Black Panther from Louisiana who had been held in solitary confinement in a 6ft by 9ft concrete box for 43 years until his release a few months earlier.

In my opening letter to Abu-Jamal, I’d mentioned that the warden of Angola penitentiary in the 1990s, Burl Cain, had tried to justify keeping Woodfox in total isolation for four decades because of the prisoner’s commitment to “Black Pantherism”.

Abu-Jamal, 64, found that expression very diverting, judging by his response. Until Woodfox’s “illegal and unjust imprisonment,” he wrote back, “I had never heard nor read of the so-called crime of ‘Black Pantherism’! Leave it to the prisoncrats of Angola to actually coin the term!”

A supporter of inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal outside City Hall in Philadelphia, in 2006. Photograph: Jeff Fusco/Getty Images

Then Abu-Jamal did something that was to become familiar to me over the ensuing months. He took that one comment of a Louisiana prison warden and riffed off it to create an entire social theory of modern American society.

“As we see from the obscene and unprecedented mass incarceration of Black people,” he wrote, “‘Black Pantherism’ is but a synonym for Blackness itself. For in a society deeply imbued with white supremacy, Blackness is itself a crime.”

Abu-Jamal spent 20 years on death row and during that time concerns about the fairness of his death sentence drew international attention. Amnesty International took up his cause, the New York Times crowned him the “world’s best known death-row inmate” and a Paris street was named after him. Among the movie stars, writers and intellectuals who protested on his behalf were Paul Newman, Alice Walker, Salman Rushdie and Noam Chomsky.

As impressive as the high-profile support he attracted over the years was the vitriol he inspired in detractors. Philadelphia police unions worked tirelessly to keep him on death row and since he was moved to the general prison population in 2012 they have continued to work equally tirelessly to prevent him going free.

Maureen Faulkner, the widow of Daniel Faulkner, the police officer Abu-Jamal was convicted of murdering, has been equally consistent. Earlier this year she wrote a column in the Philadelphia Inquirer in which she said the real political prisoners in this story were her family. “We committed no crime, yet we received life sentences with no possibility of parole or reprieve.”

In April, when Abu-Jamal’s case came up before a Philadelphia judge in a legal dispute over the handling of his appeals, Maureen Faulkner appeared on the steps of the court and proclaimed to local TV cameras: “Mumia Abu-Jamal will not – not ever – be free, and I will make sure of that.”

My initial letter to Abu-Jamal in August 2016 developed into a correspondence that continues two years later. Over time it mushroomed into a larger project in which I reached out to several of his peers – black radicals incarcerated like him for decades – in an attempt to understand how they came to be given such lengthy sentences and how they cope with their enduring punishment today.

At a time when America is still grappling with the racial legacy of slavery and segregation, when the issue of police brutality has welled up again through Black Lives Matter, when at least one in four black males born today can expect to end up in prison, and when inequality shows no sign of abating for African Americans, there is renewed interest in the perspective of the Black Panthers. Just ask Beyoncé, who injected a Black Panther homage into the 2016 Super Bowl.

Black Pantherism’ is but a synonym for Blackness itself. For in a society deeply imbued with white supremacy, Blackness is itself a crime

And so Abu-Jamal and I began to correspond. We would contact each other through a closed email network set up by the Pennsylvania prison system.

With each email I would try and probe a little deeper, trying to get under the skin of what it was to be a black radical for whom, in some sense, time had stood still through long years of incarceration. Sometimes he would answer in short staccato emails, as though his mind were elsewhere; sometimes he would be thoughtful and expansive.

Sometimes he didn’t reply for weeks. It’s remarkable how busy a man locked up around the clock can be. “I’ve been meaning to write to you,” he said in November 2017, “but my projects (I just finished my booklet last nite) have eaten my time – oops, I’m about to get on the phone…”

In our exchanges he reflected on how he had become involved as a teenage boy in the black resistance struggle of the late 1960s, and why decades later so many black militants remain behind bars. He talked also about how his militancy as a former Panther relates to the critical movements of today, notably Black Lives Matter, which controversially he called a “continuum” of the Black Panthers.

Early on, I asked him why he thought the judicial system had borne down on him singularly harshly by giving him the death penalty. He replied in an email on 23 September 2016: “I think we posed an existential challenge to the very legitimacy of the System – and it unleashed unprecedented fury from the State. That’s why they used any means, even illegal, to extinguish what they saw as a Threat.”

He added: “The State reserves its harshest treatment for those it sees as revolutionaries.”

Construction workers at a rally in 2001 near the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, calling for Mumia Abu-Jamal’s execution. Photograph: Tom Mihalek/AFP/Getty Images

Mumia Abu-Jamal was born Wesley Cook and brought up in a low-income African American neighborhood of Philadelphia. He was given the name Mumia by a high school teacher as part of a class on African culture and he later changed his last name to Abu-Jamal (“father of Jamal”) when his son was born in 1971.

In 1968, when he was 14, a friend introduced him to a copy of the Black Panther party’s newspaper, and he was instantly transfixed. “A sister gave me a copy of The Black Panther newspaper and I was dazzled,” he wrote to me in an email. “I made up my mind to become one of them.”

Three years of head-spinning activity ensued as a Black Panther in Philadelphia. The party, though relatively small in numbers, quickly began to make an impact with its revolutionary talk, its audacious opposition to police brutality in black neighborhoods, and its social programs that quickly expanded to include food and clothing banks for low-income communities and even Black Panther elementary schools.

The city at that time, he told me, was a place of “intoxicating freedom, and gripping fear. The freedom? To be active in a part of a vast Black Freedom Movement was Living, Breathing, Being Freedom. We spoke and acted in the world in ways our parents never dreamed possible.”

The fear? “Every Panther knew, in her/his heart, that the State was willing to kill a Panther in his/her bed.”

He was alluding to the death of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in a police raid on a Panther house in Chicago in December 1969. Hampton was shot and killed while asleep in bed. A subsequent federal investigation into the killing found that in the shoot-out the Panthers had fired one bullet, while the police fired up to 99.

“I was one of several Panthers sent to Chicago,” Abu-Jamal wrote in an email. “We entered the apartment. We saw the bullet holes which raked the walls. We saw the mattress, swollen with Fred’s blood. I was 15.”

The death of Hampton was just one of several bloody shootouts that erupted as confrontations between law enforcement and the Panthers became more frequent. Many years later it was revealed that the FBI had put several prominent members of the movement – the teenage Abu-Jamal included – under a vast web of surveillance.

The State reserves its harshest treatment for those it sees as revolutionaries

The FBI’s director J Edgar Hoover had come to see the Panthers, with their links to revolutionary parties around the world and growing popularity in black inner cities, as a major threat to national security. He instructed his agents to redirect the secret domestic surveillance operation, known as “Cointelpro”, specifically onto black radicals.

Abu-Jamal recalled the naivety that existed within the Panther party about the governmental forces targeted at them.

“We didn’t know about Cointelpro. When people raised questions, we’d laugh at them and tell them: ‘Stop being paranoid!’ The very idea the government would read your mail, or listen to your phone calls, was crazy! We never believed we were important enough.”

The FBI certainly did think them important enough. It made sure the party was thoroughly infiltrated with informers, leaders were rounded up and imprisoned, internal dissent fomented. By 1970 open warfare had started to break out between west coast and east coast factions of the party, leading to threats, expulsions and internecine violence.

An exodus of Panthers began, among them Abu-Jamal who quit the party towards the end of 1970. From then, he turned his hand to journalism, becoming a prominent reporter on Philadelphia race relations as well as a vocal supporter of Move.

It was not until 1982 that the Black Panther party formally disbanded. By then Abu-Jamal was already in captivity and facing murder charges relating to the death of Officer Faulkner.

The events of the early hours of 9 December 1981 have been the subject of reams of analysis and conjecture over the past almost four decades. Faulkner carried out a traffic stop at an intersection in Philadelphia, pulling over William Cook, Abu-Jamal’s younger brother.

Demonstrators supporting Mumia Abu-Jamal in Los Angeles, California, in 2000. Photograph: Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images

Abu-Jamal at that time was working as a taxi driver to supplement his journalism income. He happened to be driving past when he spotted the altercation between Faulkner and his brother.

A shootout occurred. Faulkner died at the scene from gunshot wounds. Abu-Jamal was shot once in the stomach. In June 1982 he was put on trial, found guilty and sentenced to death.

Since then he has consistently professed his innocence of the charges leveled against him, though he has declined to discuss what actually did happen that night. I wrote to Abu-Jamal in June asking him whether he’d talk to me about Faulkner’s death. I said: “So what did happen? What do you recollect of the incident? Who shot Officer Faulkner?”

Earlier this month he replied to me. He began the email by saying that he’d just returned from the eye doctor who in order to inspect his inner eye had dilated his pupils. “My vision is so impaired that I can’t read the newspaper so this won’t be long, I haffa be quite brief.”

He did address his case, in general terms. “The question arises, how can you getta fair result with an unjust, unfair process? Due process. A judge who wuzza life member of the FOP [Fraternal Order of Police] said at one of my hearings: ‘Justice is just an emotional feeling’.”

Abu-Jamal did not address in the email my questions about the specifics of his own case.

While doubts persist about the nature of the crime, what is not in doubt is that Abu-Jamal’s prosecution, as he remarked, was riddled with flaws. Amnesty International investigated it in 2000 and concluded that though they could not pronounce on his guilt or innocence, “numerous aspects of this case clearly failed to meet minimum international standards”.

A long struggle to fend off execution followed, sending reverberations around the globe. Twice he had a death warrant issued that would have sent him to the death chamber; twice it was averted in the courts.

Every Panther knew, in her/his heart, that the State was willing to kill a Panther in his/her bed

It took two decades of almost constant appeals to overturn his death sentence in a federal court. Since moving off death row, he has more privileges but he’s less in the limelight now, less of an international figure, as he alluded to when I asked him how much mail he receives. “I probably get 6-10 pieces a day or 30 to 50 pieces a week (which is nothing like I used to get).”

He has slowed down in recent years in other ways too. “I used to read 2-3 books a week. Now? 2 per month. It’s a different environment. I leave the cell often here: not so on death row.”

As he gets older, health becomes more of an issue. He fought a tough legal battle after the Pennsylvania department of corrections denied him treatment for Hepatitis C, winning a federal court ruling that has set a precedent that will help thousands of other prisoners across the country defeat the virus.

He complains though that the prison authorities are still denying treatment to many inmates on grounds they aren’t sick enough. “People are dying from their denials and delays. Literally. $$$ over life.”

Despite health issues, he keeps closely engaged with political currents. In March I asked him what he thought were the similarities and contrasts between the Black Panthers in the 1970s and Black Lives Matter today. I was curious to see whether he was critical of BLM in an echo of the criticism the Panthers directed in the 1970s at the civil rights movement ­– that it’s a reformist compromise rather than the black power revolution that’s needed.

He replied that in his view the Panthers and BLM are “part of a continuum. The BPP was born in an age of global revolution. Black Lives Matter came into being during an era of sociopolitical conservatism, and rightist ideological ascendance. What is possible is subject to the zeitgeist of the period.”

He went on: “I am reminded of [Frantz] Fanon’s adage: ‘Every generation must, out of relative obscurity, find its destiny, and fulfill it or betray it.’ I think both movements have done so, if only in their own ways.”

He also keenly follows his fellow imprisoned black radicals’ efforts to gain their freedom, decades after they were arrested. In one email, sent in May, he commented on the release of Herman Bell, a former Black Panther and member of its clandestine wing the Black Liberation Army, who had secured his own parole a couple of months before partly by denouncing his involvement in the struggle. There was “nothing political” in the double police killing that he was involved in, Bell told the parole board, “it was murder and horribly wrong”.

Abu-Jamal told me that in his view Bell’s release was the exception that proves the rule. “If a man is only truly parole-eligible if he renounces his political ideas, how could those who aren’t ‘eligible’ because they aren’t renunciators be seen as anything but political prisoners?”

What I always find interesting is how profoundly different the American systems of ‘justice’ are from those that exist abroad

There are many who will disagree with the argument that the 19 imprisoned Black Panthers and Move members are political prisoners. For the police unions and the families of victims, they are “cop killers”, pure and simple.

Yet no one could accuse Abu-Jamal of being a “renunciator”. Since coming off death row he has been resentenced and put onto life without parole. That means that he has no chance of ever persuading a parole board to release him, which in turn, paradoxically, has given him his own kind of freedom – to speak his mind.

“Parole is a political tool,” he wrote. “It’s especially used against radicals to punish them for their political beliefs. I think it should be abolished. Period.”

One of the most evocative emails he sent me was composed on New Year’s Eve last year. Maybe the end of the year had put him in a reflective mood, or maybe the calendar means nothing to a man who has lived for 37 years in a cell.

In any case, he started riffing again, this time about the US justice system. He talked about how parole appeared to be a pipe-dream for black radicals in particular.

He referenced the Move 9 again, the group from his home town of Philadelphia, six of whom will next week mark the 40th anniversary of their incarceration. He spoke too of other former Black Panthers who had in recent years been granted release orders only to have them overturned by the higher courts.

Then he switched, in his own rather professorial way, to a more personal point. “What I always find interesting is how profoundly different the American systems of ‘justice’ are from those that exist abroad,” he wrote. “Under Pennsylvania law, life means life, with no parole eligibility for anybody.”

For “anybody”, read Mumia Abu-Jamal. He went on to spell out for my benefit his probable fate.

Legal scholars and activists in Pennsylvania have a name for it, he said: “Death by incarceration”.

UPDATE

February 19, 2019

The event at Yale organizing the REBLAW conference, happened on Friday and Saturday February 15^th and 16^th and was a great success.  Mumia called in on Friday night.  Confrontations of Krasner wherever he speaks are continuing and educating many audiences. 

 On December 27, Judge Leon Tucker, surprised and pleased Mumia supporters by ruling that Mumia was entitled to a new appeal of his case.  His position was very clear:  Ronald Castille, who ultimately became Chief of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, after having worked in the District Attorney’s Office prior to becoming a Pennsylvania Supreme Court Judge, should have recused himself from the case when it came before him at the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.  Though Tucker did not conclude direct involvement of Castille in Mumia’s case, he ruled that Castille’s well known and well publicized support for the death penalty, close relationship  with the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), and the high profile of Mumia’s case all led to the appearance of bias on the part of Castille, and that that appearance of bias was not acceptable.   

Mumia was thus granted an opportunity for a review of his post-conviction review before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, that is, the opportunity to present all the material previously rejected on the Castille court, all over again.  This was a major breakthrough in opening up the possibility of Mumia’s release.  Regardless of this very significant and unusual ruling, Mumia should have of course been released long ago, in fact, should never even have been arrested since he was and is an innocent political prisoner.  He was clearly framed by the police (the Fraternal Order of Police playing a major role), the prosecutors, and the judiciary, with the cooperation of other significant players in the Government and even additional sectors because of his effectiveness as a political activist and well-known writer and journalist. 

To the disappointment of some, who had expected “progressive District Attorney” Krasner to play a positive role in this case, as he had promised during his campaign to address all cases of prevous miscarriage of “justice”, Krasner appealed the very positive judge’s ruling, thus closing off the possibility of a quick process potentially leading to Mumia’s release.

As word, and organizing to pressure Krasner to change his position, spread, a group of students at Yale Law School took a dramatic position in “disinviting” Krasner as a keynote speaker at a conference at Yale on “rebellious lawyers”.  See letter below where the students ask Krasner to withdraw his appeal of Judge Tucker’s ruling if he wishes to speak at the conference.  Mumia Abu-Jamal was immediately scheduled to replace Krasner as a key speaker at the conference.

Additionally, on December 28, Krasner announced that he found six boxes of Mumia materials marked with Mumia’s name, that had not been discovered before and were therefore not reviewed in the court proceedings of the past two years!  He passed that information on to Judge Tucker on January 3, 2019 and released it to the public on January 9^th, 2019.  On January 25, 2019 District Attorney Krasner gave notice of his appeal of Judge Tucker’s ruling!