Try him again

Justice for the widow of a dead police officer, cut down in the prime of his life, will not be served by executing a framed man, even if he's guilty.

By Debra Dickerson

Dec 29, 1999 | Probably the only thing the defense and the prosecution sides in the Mumia Abu-Jamal case would agree on is that the burden lies with the defense team to win him a retrial. Under the governing federal statute, the defense has to provide clear and convincing evidence that there was such endemic unfairness at the original trial that it was impossible for the defense to prove its case. "It's the 'no harm, no foul' approach," says Daniel Williams, one of two lead attorneys defending Abu-Jamal. "The presumption of innocence only applies before a conviction. Now we have the affirmative burden of creating a very real doubt that Mumia ever had a chance. We have to show not that the trial was unfair in technical terms, but rather that it was so qualitatively unfair overall that had the unfairness not occurred, there's a reasonable probability that the outcome would have been different." "They have to show that something was horribly wrong, so horribly unfair they couldn't prove whatever it was they were trying to prove," agrees Assistant District Attorney Hugh Burns, from his vantage on the prosecution team.

So,were there horrible wrongs in Abu-Jamal's first trial?

"No," prosecutor Burns answers, his voice angry but controlled. "The people who are supporting Jamal don't care what the facts are and don't care to know. Their claims are based on a fantasy world of what might have happened and what could have happened instead of what we know did happen." Abu-Jamal's death sentence is now on hold; his attorneys have filed a habeas corpus petition seeking a new trial, and Burns will file his reply by early February 2000.

Meanwhile, loyalists are politicized and mobilized on both sides of the issue. It's an election year. We've lived through Rodney King, O.J. Simpson, Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo. In Abu-Jamal's case, one man -- police officer Daniel Faulkner -- is dead and another stands on the edge of his own open grave. Could the stakes possibly be higher?

Online, the confrontation is bitterly waged between those supporting Abu-Jamal and those opposed.

Amidst a massive amount of international coverage, perhaps only one author, Stuart Taylor, has been able to rise above the din surrounding this case to produce a dispassionate legal analysis; in his 1995 article for American Lawyer magazine, Taylor firmly concluded that Abu-Jamal deserves a retrial. Taylor is hardly a squishy liberal. He is the reporter generally credited with single-handedly transforming the media view that Paula Jones' allegations were not credible into the belated realization that she in fact had a viable case. He therefore probably changed history, and helped set the nation on the path to last year's impeachment crisis. Yet, unlike his role in the Jones case, Taylor's pronouncement in 1995 that Abu-Jamal's trial had essentially been a sham met with a thundering silence from his colleagues in the mainstream press.

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