The late, but not lamented
Judge Sabo's legacy: racist repression, death row
prisoners
By Imani Henry
On May 8, Judge Albert F. Sabo, who helped railroad African
American journalist and political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal to
Pennsylvania's death row, died of heart failure at age 81.
Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther framed for the murder of
white police officer Daniel Faulkner, has spent the last 20
years in prison for a crime he did not commit.
Sabo, a notoriously racist judge, leaves behind the legacy
of having sentenced more people to death row than any other
judge in the history of the United States. According to the
Philadelphia Inquirer, one in every six people sentenced to die
in Pennsylvania was condemned in Sabo's courtroom.
Statistics gathered for 2000 show that 225 prisoners,
including 221 men and four women, reside on Pennsylvania's
death row, the fourth-largest number of any state in the U.S.
Ninety percent of them were unable to afford a private attorney
at their original trial. One hundred fifty-five are people of
color.
For the anti-death-penalty movement Sabo symbolized the
racist character of the U.S. "injustice" system. Sabo's racist
record helped expose the terror that the cops, courts and the
prison-industrial complex wield against people of color and the
poor across the country. His home was the target of
anti-death-penalty demonstrations on several occasions.
Sabo's record of racism
Sabo was a card-carrying member of the racist Fraternal
Order of Police. He also made securing a death-penalty
conviction against Mumia Abu-Jamal his personal vendetta.
During the original sham of a trial in 1982, ballistics
evidence proved that the gun used to kill Faulkner shot a
different caliber bullet than the gun Abu-Jamal owned. Sabo
dismissed this crucial ballistics evidence.
In 1995 and 1996, Sabo was illegally brought out of
retirement in order to preside over--and and ultimately throw
out all the new evidence and testimony presented
at--Abu-Jamal's Post Conviction Relief Act Hearing.
In August 2000, when Federal Court Judge William Yohn denied
four amicus curiae briefs, the world learned to what lengths
Sabo had gone during the 1982 trial to seek the death-penalty
conviction against Mumia Abu-Jamal, and how the capitalist
court system had given him the green light to do so and get
away with it.
A Chicana/Chicano Studies Foundation brief exposed the
conspiracy among Abu-Jamal's court-appointed defense attorney
Anthony Jackson, Sabo and prosecutor Joseph McGill to convict
him. The brief outlined their strategies for getting a
conviction that would be protected from appeal; this showed how
Abu-Jamal was a victim of the breach of attorney-client
confidentiality.
These legal violations, among many others, were all grounds
on which the original trial should have been thrown out and
Abu-Jamal freed.
And then there is the taped confession of Arnold Beverly,
who in 1999 admitted to being hired by the police-run mob to
kill Faulkner.
On Aug. 28, 2001, another bombshell was dropped, exposing
Sabo's racist venom. An affidavit was submitted to the state
appeals court by Terri Maurer-Carter, a court stenographer. She
said that in 1982 she overheard Judge Sabo say in reference to
Abu-Jamal, "Yeah, and I'm going to help them fry the
n----r."
Neither Sabo's racist and devious actions nor any single
agent of state-sanctioned terror has stopped the rising
momentum of the anti-death penalty movement in the United
States. With more and more people questioning the racist,
anti-poor death penalty, coupled with international pressure,
there have been significant breakthroughs in the struggle to
abolish the death penalty within the bourgeois political
arena.
Just last month, Ray Krone, originally from Pennsylvania,
was exonerated and released from Arizona's death row after DNA
tests revealed that he was innocent of a 1991 murder. On May 3,
death-row prisoner Thomas H. Kimbell Jr., who spent four years
on Pennsylvania's death row, became the 101st exonerated
death-row prisoner in the United States and the fourth person
to walk free from Pennsylvania's death row.
According to the anti-death-penalty group Pennsylvania
Abolitionists, in the past 26 months eight Pennsylvania
municipalities have called on the state government to impose a
moratorium on executions.
On May 9, one day after Sabo died, Maryland Gov. Parris
Glendening declared a moratorium on all executions in his state
pending the release of a study documenting the racist nature of
the death penalty. Glendening joins Illinois Gov. George Ryan
in instituting a moratorium on executions.
While there are no tears to shed for this racist bigot who
rained terror on the oppressed, as one Philadelphia activist
put it, "The people have been robbed of our opportunity to put
Sabo on trial and bring him to justice."
The writer is a co-founder of Rainbow Flags for
Mumia.
Reprinted from the May 23, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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