Guardian Interview With Mumia Abu-Jamal: Preparing for Life, Not Death

[JemChi]

'I spend my days preparing for life, not for death'

The former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal has spent 25 years on death row in
the United States - despite strong evidence that he is innocent. In his
first British interview, he talks to Laura Smith about life in solitary, how
he has remained politically active, and why the Panthers are still relevant
today

Laura Smith
Thursday October 25, 2007
Guardian

SCI Greene County Prison on the outskirts of Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, sits
low in the rural landscape so that it's easy from the restaurants and petrol
stations on the main road to miss the barbed wire coiled in endless circles.
Inside, the plush leather chairs that squat on shiny floors make it feel
more like a private hospital than a maximum security institution. But the
black men in prison jumpsuits cleaning the floor, eyes downcast, dispel any
such illusions. Signs spell out the rules: no hoods, no unauthorised
persons, only $20 in cash allowed.

Death row - or at least the visiting area - is a curiously ordinary place. A
central waiting room where a guard watches the goings-on. Institutional
doors opening on to small boxes, each furnished with a table and chair. But
then, inside the visiting room, there is the shock of a grown man in an
orange jumpsuit, his hands cuffed, the space small enough for him to reach
out and touch both walls. And between us a layer of thick, reinforced glass.

Mumia Abu-Jamal has lived at SCI Greene since January 1995. Convicted and
sentenced to death in 1982 for the murder of a police officer in his home
town, Philadelphia, he spends his days in solitary confinement, in a room he
has described as smaller than most people's bathroom. When I arrive, he puts
his fist to the glass in greeting. He is a tall, broad man with dreadlocked
hair, still dark, and a beard slightly greying at the edges. He has lively
eyes.

It is hard to know how to begin a conversation with Abu-Jamal, revered for
his activism around the world as much as he is reviled as a cop killer by
some in his home country. He is careful about who he agrees to see and
rarely talks to the mainstream media - this is the first time he has granted
an interview to a British newspaper. We start with the basics - the everyday
restrictions of prison life. Visits: one a week - though it is difficult for
his family to make the 660-mile, 11-hour round-trip from Philadelphia.
Money: a stipend of less than $20 (£10) per month. Phone calls: three a week
lasting 15 minutes each - but a quarter of an hour to Philadelphia costs
$5.69 (£2.77).

This being Abu-Jamal, a campaigning journalist who has written five books
about injustice while in prison, it is not long before we are on to the
bigger questions: why SCI Greene, which takes most of its 1,700 inmates from
Philadelphia, was built "the farthest you can be from Philly and still be in
the state of Pennsylvania". "I believe it is intentional," he says. "I could
count the times on my hand when I have seen this whole visiting area full."
And why Global Tel Net, the firm that provides the prison phone calls, is
allowed to charge so much of people who have so little. His conclusion is
characteristically pithy: "The poorest pay the most."

Abu-Jamal has eight children, the eldest of whom is 38, and several
grandchildren. How does he keep in touch? "Some grandchildren I have not
seen. That's difficult. You try to keep contact through the phone, you
write. I send cards that I draw and paint. To let them know the old man
still loves them." Abu-Jamal's father William died when he was nine; his
mother Edith died in February 1990 - eight years after he was imprisoned. He
goes very quiet telling me this, and there doesn't seem much point asking
how it felt not to be able to sit with her at the end.

Abu-Jamal has been locked up since he was 27. He is now 53. The story of how
he ended up here has been told often. As a teenager he had been active in
the Black Panther party but by 1981, with most of the party's leaders either
dead or in jail, he had become a well-respected radio reporter and president
of the Philadelphia chapter of the Association of Black Journalists. Radio
journalism was not well paid, however, and Abu-Jamal supplemented his income
by driving a taxi at night.

In the early hours of December 9 1981, he was out in his cab when he saw his
brother, Billy Cook, being stopped by a police officer, Daniel Faulkner. A
struggle ensued, during which Cook says Faulkner assaulted him. Abu-Jamal
got out of his cab. Minutes later, Faulkner had been shot dead and Abu-Jamal
was slumped nearby with a bullet wound to the chest, his own gun not far
away.

At his trial in 1982 it appeared an open and shut case. A former Black
Panther with a history of antipathy towards the police (although no criminal
record). A white police officer dead. A succession of eye-witnesses who
testified that Abu-Jamal was the killer. And the icing on the cake: a
confession made by Abu-Jamal himself at the hospital where he was taken for
treatment.

But some inconvenient facts were obscured: Abu-Jamal's gun was never tested
to see whether it had been fired; his hands were never swabbed to establish
whether he had fired it; and his gun's bullets were never solidly linked to
those that killed Faulkner. The crime scene was never secured.

Of the three witnesses, one has since admitted to lying under police
pressure, another has disappeared amid evidence that she too was under
duress, and the third initially told police that he had seen the killer run
away, but changed his story. Evidence from others who said they saw a third
man running away was played down.

Evidence of Abu-Jamal's confession was equally shaky. Although two witnesses
testified to hearing him shout, "I shot the motherfucker and I hope the
motherfucker dies", the doctors who treated him insist that his medical
condition made such a thing impossible. Neither of the two police officers
who claimed to have heard the confession reported it until more than two
months after the shooting - after Abu-Jamal had made allegations of being
abused by police during his arrest. On the contrary, one noted in his log at
the time that "the negro male made no comment" in hospital.

The trial judge, Albert Sabo, was a former member of the powerful police
union, the Fraternal Order of Police, known to favour prosecutors. He
overturned permission Abu-Jamal had obtained to represent himself, excluded
him from much of his own trial, and presided over jury selection in which
the majority of black candidates were removed. A court stenographer
overheard Sabo telling a colleague: "I'm going to help them fry the nigger."

There were other irregularities, so many that Amnesty International
concluded in 2000 that the trial was "in violation of minimum international
standards", adding, "the interests of justice would best be served by the
granting of a new trial to Mumia Abu-Jamal".

In the 25 years since, Abu-Jamal has appealed against his conviction many
times, and many times has had his pleas rejected. He has had two dates set
for his execution, only for them to be overturned by legal pressure. He is
now awaiting the outcome of his latest appeal; this time by the second
highest court in the US. His lead lawyer, Robert R Bryan, describes it as
"the first time in 25 years that Mumia has had a chance at a free and fair
trial". Abu-Jamal is more circumspect. "I have learned not to do
predictions," he says. "It's not helpful, psychologically. I don't sit and
fret about things."

Instead, he spends his days writing about prison life and social struggles
around the world. He takes reams of notes from books sent in by supporters,
so that he can refer to them when they are taken away (he is allowed only
seven in his cell). "I confess, I am a nerd," he says, laughing. He uses his
weekly phone calls to record radio commentaries that are broadcast around
the world.

Then there are the speeches he records - he spoke at the World Congress
Against the Death Penalty this year and the Million Man March in 1995 - the
cards he paints for his family, and his drawing. He is currently working on
his sixth book, Jailhouse Lawyers, about those prisoners who, like himself,
help prepare legal cases with other inmates. He uses a beaten-up typewriter;
he has never seen a computer. Asked about the work of which he is proudest,
he cites his 2004 book, We Want Freedom, a history of the Black Panther
party.

Abu-Jamal spends 22 hours a day alone in his cell - except at weekends, when
it's 24. For two hours between 7am and 9am every weekday he has the option
of going out into the yard - or "cage", as he prefers to call it. It is 60ft
square and fenced on all sides, including overhead. Because "air is
precious", he rarely refuses, but not everyone takes up the offer. "People
have different ways," he says. "I know some guys who play chess for hours
and hours, shouting the moves between cells. Some guys argue with other
guys. Some guys used to enjoy smut books, but they've stopped those now. A
lot of guys don't come out. I think it's depression. You get tired of seeing
the same old faces. The role of television is the illusion of company,
noise. I call it the fifth wall and the second window: the window of
illusion."

Many of the younger prisoners call him "papa" or "old head" and it is clear
that he is touched. "When you are out in the yard, it's dudes joshing," he
says. "Guys being guys, playing ball. You have this machismo." One of the
things that seems to keep him going are these relationships with other guys
in "the hole". Many of them have inspired me and taught me ... about how
things are on the street now, how young people are talking and walking."

I ask how prison has changed him. "In ways I could not have imagined," he
says. "It has made me immensely patient. I was not before. It has given me
an introspection that I hadn't had before, and even a kind of compassion I
hadn't had before."

In Abu-Jamal's company, it is easy to forget that you are inside prison
walls. As he talks, one is pulled into a world of urgent work that needs
doing, of debates to be thrashed out, of injustices to be tackled. With
characteristic eloquence, he calls Hurricane Katrina "a rude awakening from
an illusion", watching television "a profoundly ignorising experience" and
observes that much commercial hip-hop contains "no distinction, except in
beat and tone, to a Chrysler advert". "If the message is, I am cool because
I am rich, and if you get rich, you can be cool like me, that's a pretty
fucked-up message." On American politics, he is damning. "You would think
that a country that goes to war allegedly to spread democracy would practice
it in its own country."

Born Wesley Cook in the Philadelphia projects, he adopted the name Mumia as
a 14-year-old (later adding Abu-Jamal - "father of Jamal" in Arabic - when
his first son was born). The following year, aged just 15, he helped found
the Philadelphia branch of the Black Panther party after being handed a copy
of their newspaper in the street. "I was like, whoah," he says. "It just
thrilled me. I was like, this is heaven. This is great. Everything. It was
the truth. Uncut, unalloyed. It was everything. It fit me."

He spent long days helping with party activities, which included free
children's breakfast programmes and the monitoring of police, whose
corruption at that time has since become notorious (at least a third of the
officers involved in Abu-Jamal's investigations have since been found to
have engaged in corrupt activities, including the fabrication of evidence to
frame suspects).

Mostly, as the party's lieutenant of information, he wrote, gathering
stories for The Black Panther, the party's newsletter. "It was great fun,"
he remembers now. "You worked six and seven days a week and 18 hours a day
for no pay ... When I tell young people that now they are like, what was
that last part? Are you crazy, man? But because we were socialists we didn't
want pay. We wanted to serve our people, free our people, stop the homicide
and make revolution. We thought about the party morning, noon and night. It
was a very busy but fulfilling life for thousands of people across the
country. We were serving our people and what could be better than that?"

Subject to relentless disruption by the FBI's Counter Intelligence
Programme, which targeted radical and progressive organisations, and riven
by internal disagreements, the Black Panthers imploded in the early 1970s.
For Abu-Jamal it was a personal tragedy. "Despair," he says when asked how
it felt. "A profound despair."

He is adamant that the party's message is still relevant today. "Millions of
black people are more isolated in economic, social and political terms than
they were 30 years ago," he says. "I remember a photograph of an elderly
black woman (after Katrina) who had wrapped herself in the American flag and
I remember looking at it and being so struck by it. Maybe she wasn't
thinking visually, she was probably very cold and hungry, but I couldn't
help thinking, what does citizenship mean? Are you a citizen if in the
wealthiest country on earth you are left to starve, to sink or swim, to
drown at the time of the flood?"

If Abu-Jamal's latest appeal is successful he could be a granted a retrial
or have the death penalty overturned. If it is not, his execution could
quickly follow. He does not sound afraid. "I spend my days preparing for
life, not preparing for death," he says. "They haven't stopped me from doing
what I want every day. I believe in life, I believe in freedom, so my mind
is not consumed with death. It's with love, life and those things. In many
ways, on many days, only my body is here, because I am thinking about what's
happening around the world."

As we leave, people emerge from other visiting rooms into the central area.
There's a family with teenage children; a young mother whose little daughter
has spent much of our interview peeking through the door - to Abu-Jamal's
delight; a grandfather being pushed in a wheelchair. A mother says to her
children with a forced cheeriness: "That was a nice visit, wasn't it? I'm
sure glad we came."

We step outside into a perfect summer day. All I can think of is my last
view after saying goodbye to Abu-Jamal: a row of men, all black, standing
behind glass. Their hands cuffed, their faces smiling goodbye to their
families, their voices shouting greetings to each other. In a couple of
minutes, each man will trek back to a cell no bigger than your bathroom,
with no company but their own. But for now, just for now, there is the sight
of life. And they're drinking it in.