Mumia’s lawyer gives update on case

Robert R. Bryan

Robert R. Bryan, a San Francisco-based lawyer and lead counsel for death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, spoke before a packed auditorium at Ford ham University on March 21. Bryan presented a legal update on Abu-Jamal’s current appeals, which are before the U.S. Court of Appeals Third Circuit based in Phila delphia. (Go to www.millions4mumia.org to read a Jan. 24, 2006, summary.)

This appeals petition raises specific issues that are critical to Mumia’s struggle to ultimately gain his freedom, including the systematic, racist exclusion of Black jurors by the Philadelphia prosecution and racist comments made by the late Judge Albert Sabo against Abu-Jamal during the original trial in 1982. Sabo sat on the bench during the 1982 trial and the 1995-96 post-conviction relief hearing for Abu-Jamal.

A former Black Panther and award-winning journalist, Abu-Jamal was shot by police and then arrested on Dec. 9, 1981, for allegedly killing a white policeman in Philadelphia. A sham of a trial resulted in a first-degree murder conviction for Abu-Jamal on July 3, 1982. He has faced two death warrants, which were revoked due to mass pressure here and worldwide.

Bryan—along with Robert Meeropol, son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, communists who were executed by the U.S. government back in 1953—urged activists from diverse political persuasions to unite to strengthen the support movement to fight for Abu-Jamalfreedom.

Author and attorney Brian Glick gave a brief history of Abu-Jamal’s long-time revolutionary activism to illustrate that he is on death row for his political beliefs and not for the shooting. Mumia sent an audio-taped greeting to the meeting.

Deborah Small, a founder of Break the Chains: Communities of Color and also the War on Drugs organization, spoke on the relationship between the prison-industrial complex and U.S. drug laws that criminalize people of color and the poor.

The meeting was organized by the National Lawyers Guild’s Fordham Uni ver sity Law School chapter and its national chapters. An interview with Bryan by WBAI’s Ken Nash and Mimi Rosenberg can be heard at www. radio4all.net/ proginfo. php?id=17281.

—Story & photo by Monica Moorehead