MUMIA ABU-JAMAL HAS COVID-19
By Dave Lindorff, This Can't Be Happening.
February 28, 2021 | EDUCATE!
Above photo: From the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Internationally known U.S. political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal has reported
to friends and family on the outside that he has contracted Covid-19 in the
Pennsylvania prison where he is incarcerated, and says he is having
difficulty breathing. His life is in immediate danger and he is in urgent
need of hospital care.
This latest outrage was sadly predictable. Prisons across the U.S. have for
years been allowing serious illness to serve as a form of "silent execution"
of prisoners, many of them certainly innocent of the crimes they were
convicted of. Many prisoners in the system, guilty or not, are serving
unfairly punitive terms that keep them confined into an old age meaning they
are particularly vulnerable to potentially fatal illnesses, whether that is
flu, cancer, hepatitis, pneumonia or now Covid-19.
Noted journalist and political activist Abu-Jamal, now 66 years old and
entering his 40th year in prison, is serving a sentence of life in prison
without possibility of parole following his 1982 conviction of murder of a
white police officer.
As I have written in my book on his case, Killing Time, his conviction
followed a trial that featured coached and lying prosecution witnesses
(including police officers), prosecutorial misconduct, withheld exculpatory
evidence, racial bias in jury selection and a racist pro-prosecution judge
overheard saying at the start of the trial that he would "help fry the
nigger." His appeal process was just as badly corrupted. Significantly, it
was fatally tainted by the refusal of a former Philadelphia DA, Ron
Castille, who during his tenure oversaw the legal effort to defeat Mumia's
appeals, to recuse himself later when, as a state supreme court justice he
ruled on those same appeals he had overseen.
The entire legal process in Abu-Jamal's case has been an grotesque atrocity
and an epic scandal.
Already suffering from cirrhosis of the liver because, like virtually all
prisoners in American jails, Mumia was, until a federal court ordered it,
denied timely access to medication known to be 95% effective in treating the
Hepatitis C virus endemic in U.S. prisons. This was done by prison officials
who were well aware that the disease, if left untreated, usually leads
predictably to cirrhosis, then to liver cancer and eventually to death. In
Mumia's case, legal challenges by state attorneys for the prison system
intentionally delayed that court order until he his disease had already
advanced to cirrhosis of his liver.
Now Mumia has predictably caught Covid-19. I say predictably again because
U.S. prisons, overcrowded and impossible to maintain safe separation in, are
known to be breeding grounds for epidemic disease, and yet have not been
declared priority locations for early access to the vaccines that protect
against the spread of this deadly virus that has already killed half a
million Americans.
This denial of vaccination to a captive population of 2.3 million people is
nothing short of a crime against humanity. It is a crime made all the more
outrageous because, thanks to the excessive sentences so common in this
vindictive, racist, classist and deliberately cruel society, many U.S.
prison inmates are old. The Bureau of Prisons reports that 20% of its
prisoners, for example, are over 50. State prisons may be even worse, with
many of them routinely sentencing felons to as much as 40 years, or, in case
of rapes and murders, life without parole. Compare that to most civilized
nations which limit sentences to 10-12 years even for the most serious of
crimes.
Given the current pandemic medical crisis facing the U.S. and the world, the
U.S. and all 50 states should immediately order the release of all older
prisoners over the age of 50 unless a solid case can be made in individual
instances that some older prisoner poses a grave risk of committing a
violent act if released.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is not such a prisoner, having been a non-violent model
prisoner for his entire 39 years of incarceration.
Free Mumia and all older inmates in Pennsylvania's prisons immediately!
There is a virtual rally for Mumia's release set for March 6
Dave Lindorff is author of "Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death
Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal" (Common Courage Press, 2003)
COVID-19
