Demand parole board free Move 9
By
Betsey Piette
Philadelphia
Published Mar 15, 2008 10:28 AM
Unjustly incarcerated for nearly 30 years, the eight remaining MOVE 9 prisoners
are eligible for parole this year. In early April seven of them will be
interviewed by the Pennsylvania Parole Board. With their hearing just weeks
away, MOVE is asking for support. MOVE member Merle Africa died in prison under
suspicious circumstances in March 1998. Chuck Africa’s hearing is
scheduled for October.
The case of the MOVE 9 stems from a confrontation on Aug. 8, 1978, when 600
heavily armed Philadelphia police stormed their house in the Powellton Village
section of Philadelphia after a yearlong siege. During the ensuing shootout,
Officer James Ramp was shot and died.
The bullet entered his body and traveled downward. The MOVE members were in the
basement of their house, attempting to protect the group’s children from
the police barrage, which included water cannons. In court, they argued that
they could not have fired the lethal shot, which witnesses said originated from
across the street. Nevertheless, nine men and women were convicted of
Ramp’s death and given 30-to-100-year prison terms.
In a recent interview with independent journalist Hans Bennett, veteran
journalist Linn Washington Jr. of the Philadelphia Tribune cites sources in the
police department as telling him that Officer Ramp was actually shot by police
gunfire and not by MOVE. (nyc.indymedia.org)
Washington says that Ramp was allegedly shot and killed by a bullet from a .223
caliber weapon. Initially police claimed none of the officers present that day
carried this kind of weapon. Yet three weeks after the preliminary proceedings,
the police department began to admit that some officers there were using
Mini-14s that fired .223 rounds.
He also notes that MOVE members were firing from a flooded basement facing up
toward police, yet the round that killed Ramp came at a downward trajectory
from behind the slain officer. “A .223 bullet is a very small,
lightweight bullet that would likely break up if it hit a brick wall, not
ricochet back and forth a couple of times,” Washington pointed out.
“Unless this was a bullet like the one that Arlen Specter, when he worked
for the Warren Commission, said killed Kennedy.”
Within 24 hours of the shooting, MOVE’s house in West Philadelphia was
razed to the ground, destroying any evidence that could have been used by the
defense. No fingerprints of any MOVE members were found on the weapons Mayor
Frank Rizzo displayed at a press conference after the attack. A video showing
the police commissioner handling weapons as they were passed through a basement
window to other police officers was not allowed as evidence in a pretrial
hearing.
Strong media bias against the MOVE 9 made it impossible for them to receive a
fair trial and continues to this day. A recent article on their upcoming
hearing repeats without question the prosecution’s contention that
“There was no doubt the fatal shot came from inside the MOVE
house.” (Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 28)
Washington, who covered the hearings, told how presiding Judge Edwin S. Malmed
allowed the prosecutor to change the medical examiner’s report as he was
entering it into evidence. When the prosecutor noticed the report contradicted
testimony that the medical examiner had just given, he pulled out a pencil and
changed the report right in the courtroom. MOVE defendants, objecting to the
judge’s obvious bias, were removed from the court and from then on tried
in absentia.
MOVE was founded in 1972—the same year that Rizzo became mayor with a
promise to “clamp down on rebellious elements in the Black
community.” Rizzo was already infamous as head of the vicious and racist
police department that raided the Black Panther Party headquarters in 1970 and
attempted to humiliate the Panthers by lining them up against a wall and
photographing them naked.
MOVE, a back-to-nature collective, practiced composting in their yard. A biased
media described this waste-recycling practice as “throwing their trash in
their yard.” MOVE was gaining community support for neighborhood marches
against police brutality.
Authorities began a campaign to destroy the MOVE organization. Between 1974 and
1976, there were over 400 arrests of MOVE members, as well as multiple brutal
attacks on pregnant MOVE women by police. At least two resulted in
miscarriages. In March 1976, a 20-day-old child of MOVE member Janine Africa
died as a result of one such police attack.
Fearing that police would attack their house and kill those inside in an
operation similar to the type of government terrorism used against the Black
Panthers, MOVE fortified the house and refused to back down, even after the
city shut off water and stopped food deliveries.
The MOVE members had ample reason to adopt self-defense, as witnessed by the
murderous police attack on another MOVE house in Philadelphia nearly a decade
later, when a police helicopter dropped a bomb on the roof and let the
resulting fire burn unchecked, killing 11 men, women and children.
At this urgent time, MOVE is asking for calls of support to 717-787-5699 and
signatures on a petition at www.ipetitions.com/petition/move9parole.
They will be delivered to the Parole Board later this month.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
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