Recently a number of defendants in capital cases have been freed or given new trials because their original convictions were the result of police frame-ups. Their cases help us to understand how Mumia Abu-Jamal was framed.
Wilfredo Santiago
Wilfredo Santiago spent six years in prison after he was convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer. The police and prosecutor misconduct in his case was so blatant that in 1991 he was granted a new trial and released on bail. Then in 1992 a second judge found that prosecutors had concealed from the defense both evidence and witnesses that could have helped acquit Santiago, and he ordered the charges against Santiago to be dismissed. Furious at this exposure of their methods, the D.A.'s office appealed and got a higher court to order a retrial of Santiago.
Raymond Carter
In December, 1996, Raymond Carter walked out of prison after ten years behind bars. A Philadelphia judge ruled that Carter's murder conviction had been obtained by paying a prostitute $500 to testify against him. Carter is one of at least 137 people released so far in Philadelphia's continuing police scandal. The judge ruled that Carter probably would have been acquitted if key information about the prostitute witness had not been withheld by police and prosecutors.
The testimony that sent Carter to prison was arranged by the notorious Officer Thomas Ryan who is himself in prison now. Ryan, who was "dating" the prostitute at the time, paid her $500 to give the "evidence."
Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez
In DuPage County, Illinois, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez are now free and three prosecutors and four sheriff's deputies are under indictment for fabricating evidence and framing them. Cruz and Hernandez spent years on death row in Illinois after they were convicted of the rape and murder of a 10-year-old girl. Their conviction was obtained when prosecutors and sheriff's deputies concocted a phony confession story.
In this case, the deputies falsely testified that Cruz had told them about a dream he had about the killing of the child, which the deputies said contained details about the crime that only the killer could have known. This whole story was a lie that finally came to light when one of the deputies revealed the plot at Cruz's third trial. Cruz and Hernandez are now free and the crooked prosecutors who framed them are under indictment. But it took years of appeals and three trials to bring this out.
Doesn't All This Sound Familiar?
In the case of Wilfredo Santiago, the prosecution withheld vital evidence. In the case of Raymond Carter, the police obtained a prostitute to provide the damning testimony. In the case of Cruz and Hernandez, the prosecution fabricated a phony confession. But in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal they did all three!
In Mumia's 1995 hearing for a new trial, we learned the prosecution withheld evidence concerning favors given to witnesses, the coercion of witnesses, the hiding of witnesses from the defense, and undisclosed polygraph tests of witnesses who gave evidence favorable to Mumia.
Veronica Jones told police she saw two men run from the shooting scene, and signed a written statement. But at Mumia's 1982 trial, she denied this. Now she has come forward to affirm her original account, and tell how police offered deals to prostitutes for false testimony.
And nobody believes the story that police officers who were at the scene suddenly "remembered" two months later that Mumia had "confessed" and that they simply forgot to write it in their reports.
Yet today Mumia remains on death row, framed by the police for his work as a radio journalist and his refusal to abandon his revolutionary politics.
SOURCES: New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and court papers.
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