JUDGE LUCRETIA CLEMONS IS WRONG WHEN IT COMES TO MUMIA ABU JAMAL
©Wendell Griffen On March 31, 2023, Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Lucretia Clemons issued a 39-page ruling that denied Mumia Abu Jamal’s latest attempt to obtain a fair evidentiary hearing related to his 1982 conviction for murder in the 1981 death of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Judge Clemons ruled that Abu Jamal’s accusation that the District Attorney used peremptory challenges to strike Black persons from the jury in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the federal constitution and contrary to the 1986 decision by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) in Batson v. Kentucky is time-barred, meaning that it was raised too late for consideration and relief. Judge Clemons also ruled that even if she were to grant Abu-Jamal’s contention that the District Attorney’s office violated his Fourteenth Amendment right to due process by failing – for thirty-six years – to disclose exculpatory...
How many unarmed black and brown people have been killed and abused by law enforcement officers since President Kennedy's 1962 statement?
ReplyDeleteHow many calls have been made, peacefully yet firmly, to eradicate the culture of violence within law enforcement agencies and reform and remedy those agencies?
How many times have protesters been told to remain calm, be patient, and trust the process that inevitably results in no arrests, charges, or even dismissal of officers who kill and maim unarmed people?
Now recall President Kennedy's statement. The violent and tragic responses to abusive and homicidal police actions now are the inevitable and deplorable results of institutional failures within law enforcement agencies and the local, state, and federal governments that are supposed to regulate them.
But those violent results, however deplorable, are by no means comparable to the decades of vicious and tragic abusive and homicidal police behaviors.