Mumia’s Card
A victim of racial injustice?

r. Mumia Abu-Jamal is the Amarillo Slim of race-card players. Amarillo Slim Preston ranks only tenth among the world's top poker players — not in the same league with Johnny Chan (#3), Phil Hellmuth (#2), and T. J. Cloutier (#1). But, like Amarillo Slim, Mr. Abu-Jamal tells the best stories.

The decision by Federal District Court Judge William H. Yohn Jr. to overturn Mr. Abu-Jamal's death sentence is one of those extravagances of the American legal system that take one's breath away. Twenty years after the murder, 19 years after the conviction, Judge Yohn discerns a defect in the instructions that the trial judge gave to the jury before it weighed the appropriateness of the death penalty.

Judge Yohn must have exquisite legal insight to find this defect after Mr. Abu-Jamal's case had gone twice before the Pennsylvania supreme court and twice before the U.S. Supreme Court, neither of which discerned the problem. The real issue, of course, is not the validity of the verdict or the sentence, but Mr. Abu-Jamal's success in marketing himself to the Left as a victim of racial injustice. "Free Mumia!" has become a familiar slogan among fashionable American Leftists, and the Abu-Jamal brand of deriding the fairness of American justice has caught on abroad too.

Last year Paris made Mumia an honorary citizen. But then the French seem to have a strange affection for vintage American murderers. For years they harbored Ira Einhorn, the Leftist activist who murdered his Bryn Mawr girlfriend, Holly Maddux, in 1977 and stowed her body in a trunk in his apartment for 18 months. Einhorn was arrested in France in 1997, but not extradited to the U.S. until July 2001, because of French doubts about the probity of American justice. I, for one, feel chastened. The nation that gave us Robespierre's jurisprudence and the Dreyfus Affair — and that is now getting around (in the trial of 83-year-old retired General Paul Aussaresses) to investigating its routine use of torture and execution during the Algerian War in the 1950s — is worried about the purity of our procedures.

But it is not really that. The French admire Mumia's élan; I, in turn, admire their guillotine.

On December 9, 1981, Mr. Abu-Jamal shot Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner five times, including once in the back. There were witnesses; there was Mr. Abu-Jamal's gun with five-spent cartridges found on the scene; there was Officer Faulkner's bullet inside Mr. Abu-Jamal; and there was Mr. Abu-Jamal's admission that he was at the scene. The case for conviction was as airtight as a murder case can be, and in 1982 the jury agreed.

Judge Yohn agrees too. In his 272-page opinion, described by the New York Times's unnamed legal experts as "dispassionate and meticulous," he upholds the jury's finding of guilt. He is merely concerned that the trial judge did not sufficiently emphasize to the jury the possibility of mitigating circumstances.

What circumstances might these be? That Mumia didn't reload and fire five or six more bullets into Officer Faulkner? We will have to wait and see. The jury at the time cited as a mitigating factor Mumia's lack of a significant criminal record. But the Mumia industry has a thousand other mitigations in mind: Mumia was framed by bigoted cops and prosecutors; Office Faulkner was killed by the mob; the trial judge was pro-prosecution, etc., etc. When American Leftists put their minds to it, they can convince themselves that the Atlantic Ocean can't hold water. In their view, Mumia's innocence is an article of faith.

The interest in this case really lies not in the views of the loony Left or the reflexive anti-Americanism of some Europeans. Rather, the Mumia case is most interesting as a light onto the dark, hypocritical soul of the American cultural Left. But weeks ago, Vanity Fair hailed the courage of the ordinary men and women, especially the police officers and firemen, who rushed to the rescue at the World Trade Towers on September 11. The praise for the public servants who put their lives on the line without flinching has reverberated in the New York Times, National Public Radio, and all the forums where considered, responsible liberal thought is published.

Those statements, I suppose, are sincere. But they come from the same folks who have made Mr. Abu-Jamal respectable. An articulate, charismatic black man, a former Black Panther, is a lot more compelling than a dead white police officer with five bullets in his back. So much for the regular guy who risks his life to make ours more secure.

Mr. Abu-Jamal was the audiotaped speaker to Antioch's graduating class last year. National Public Radio signed him in 1994 to a regular spot as a commentator on All Things Considered and backed off only after a public outcry. Mumia's book, Live From Death Row, was a bestseller. He may yet talk his way out of prison.

Mumia plays his race card consummately well. He is a con artist who has mastered the role of stoic victim and bluffed his way though appeal after appeal on the unfounded premise that he was convicted and sentenced because of his racialized political activism. But a card player can get nowhere without others who are willing to ante up. In the larger sense, we owe Judge Yohn's decision to Antioch College, to NPR, and to all those well-meaning idiots who think it enlightened to doubt that a black man can get a fair trial in America.

In fact, anyone can get a fair trial in America, and ordinary American justice at the level of the police station and the trial court is among the best in the world. Elsewhere the chances of justice are often more erratic. The French, since they brought themselves into this story, might serve as a telling example. They are in the midst of a scandal involving the disappearance over a period of 30 years of 24 young women in northern Burgundy. The local prosecution repeatedly started and stopped its investigations between 1958 and 1982, then destroyed most of its records. A year ago, a bus driver admitted to killing seven of them, but he may never be tried because of the French statute of limitations. A prosecutor in Paris has appointed two magistrates to look into the lethargic actions of the prosecutors in Auxerre.

It is very hard, I think, to find an American parallel. We seek tirelessly to achieve justice, and even long dormant cases continue to tug at our sense of public responsibility. The arrest of a suspect on November 30 in the notorious Green River killings of the early 1980s speaks to that commitment, as do the flurry of cases that have been re-opened because of advances in our ability to decipher DNA evidence.

No, Mumia has not been the victim of injustice. He has been, to the contrary, the beneficiary of the most scrupulous legal system in the world. His race and his political views have been and continue to be irrelevant, except to the extent that he himself deploys them — and the American Left, for reasons of its own, plays along.