On January 19, the U.S. Supreme Court took a clear step toward the legal lynching of Mumia Abu-Jamal. The Court vacated a 2001 decision by federal district court judge William Yohn overturning Mumia’s death sentence. Yohn’s decision had been previously upheld by the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals. The new ruling by the Supreme Court underscores our insistence that fighters for Mumia’s freedom must place no faith in the courts, which, at every level, have colluded with the police and prosecutors to see through the execution of this innocent man.

Mumia was targeted by the police and FBI in his teenage years as a Black Panther leader and later as a journalist and MOVE supporter renowned for his searing exposés of cop brutality and racist oppression. In a blatantly racist and political frame-up, Mumia was railroaded to death row in 1982 on false charges of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Without a shred of actual evidence against him, he was convicted on the basis of phony ballistics and other manufactured “evidence,” a “confession” concocted by cops and prosecutors, massive police intimidation of witnesses and racist jury rigging. His trial was overseen by “hanging judge” Albert Sabo, who was overheard saying he would help the prosecution “fry the n----r.” To secure the death sentence, prosecutors pointed to political statements issued by Mumia as a 16-year-old Panther. (read more...)

NEW YORK CITY—In a blow against the rights of the entire population, leftist attorney Lynne Stewart was hauled off to prison on November 19 on bogus charges of conspiracy to provide “material support” to terrorism and to “defraud” the U.S. government. An outspoken courtroom advocate for black activists and the poor, the 70-year-old Stewart was convicted in 2005 along with translator Mohamed Yousry and paralegal Ahmed Abdel Sattar on charges stemming from her ardent legal defense of Islamic fundamentalist Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who is serving a life sentence for an alleged plot to blow up NYC landmarks in the early 1990s. Reporting to prison two days after the Second Circuit Court of Appeals turned down the appeal of her conviction, Stewart told her supporters that the government was warning lawyers: “Don’t advocate for your clients in a vigorous, strong way or you will end up” like her, “disbarred and in jail.”

The victimization of Stewart, Yousry and Abdel Sattar has been a key cog in the government’s drive to eviscerate civil liberties in the domestic “war on terror.” From beginning to end, the Feds’ case was a fabrication. The government admitted that not a single act of violence resulted from the alleged “terror conspiracy.” Unable to get Stewart for breaking any law, the government invoked the spectre of “conspiracy” and nailed her for violating Special Administrative Measures that drastically restrict a prisoner’s right to communicate with the outside world. Stewart was “guilty” of conveying Abdel Rahman’s thoughts about a cease-fire between his Islamic Group and the Egyptian government to a Reuters journalist. The government declared this was tantamount to a terrorist “jailbreak.” (read more...)

Last month, former Ohio 7 political prisoner Ray Luc Levasseur was vindictively barred from speaking at an event at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, about the notorious 1989 sedition frame-up trial in which he was a defendant. The university library’s invitation to Levasseur was met with a vile slander campaign by the cops and bourgeois press, which tarred Levasseur as “bloodthirsty” and a “terrorist,” while the state senate passed a resolution “roundly condemning” that this opponent of U.S. imperialist terror had been invited to speak.

Bowing to pressure from Massachusetts Democratic governor Deval Patrick and the state Fraternal Order of Police, the university administration canceled Levasseur’s invitation. In response, the Social Thought and Political Economy Program and several academic departments took over sponsorship of the event and reinvited Levasseur. UMass president Jack Wilson admitted he had “no way of preventing a speaking appearance, based on free speech and free assembly rights” (Boston Herald, 11 November). But Levasseur’s parole officer did, denying him permission to leave Maine. Arnie Larson, president of the Massachusetts Fraternal Order of Police, boasted, “We reached out to people in the Justice Department and educated them about our passion here…and they followed through on it” (Boston Globe, 12 November). (read more...)

We reprint below a letter to the Southwark Crown Court by the Partisan Defence Committee, published in Workers Hammer No. 208 (Autumn 2009), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). The PDC is a class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the SL/B. Since the publication of this letter, Helen Goddard has been sentenced by a British court to 15 months in prison. She has also been banned from working with children and placed on the “Sex Offenders Register” for ten years. We demand her immediate freedom.

The Partisan Defence Committee demands the immediate dropping of all charges against 26-year-old music teacher Helen Goddard, a victim of the government’s anti-sex witch hunt. Goddard, nicknamed the “Jazz Lady” by her students, is due to be sentenced on 21 September in Southwark Crown Court under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 for the “crime” of having had sex with a 15-year-old female pupil. According to the Telegraph online, having admitted six counts of sex with the girl who is under the age of consent, Goddard now faces a possible sentence of up to 14 years in prison and has been ordered to sign the Sex Offenders Register.

Goddard and the pupil at City of London School for Girls were involved in a close and sexual relationship, a perfectly natural thing that should be no business of either the school or the state. There is no suggestion from anyone, including the girl’s parents, that the sex was anything but consensual. Now Goddard’s promising career as a musician and teacher is in tatters, she has been thrown to the media wolves, both her and her partner’s personal lives violated. (read more...)

On September 22, football star Plaxico Burress was sentenced to two years in prison. Last month, Burress had pleaded guilty to “attempted weapons possession,” a lesser charge than the prosecution’s original indictment on trumped-up gun possession and related charges that could have landed Burress in prison for 15 years. Confronted by a storm of ridicule in the bourgeois press and a district attorney who vowed to make an example of him, Burress felt compelled to cop a plea.

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving last year, Burress decided to go to some clubs in Manhattan with a couple of his New York Giants teammates. As Burress explained, he carried his gun with him that night because earlier that week teammate Steve Smith had been robbed at gunpoint in the same area where Burress was going. Later that evening, as he was climbing the stairs in the Latin Quarter nightclub, the gun fell from the waistband of his pants. He tried to stop it from falling to the floor; it accidentally discharged, wounding him slightly in the thigh. (read more...)

We print below an article translated from Spartakist No. 179 (September 2009) published by the Spartakist-Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands.

Mumia Abu-Jamal, an innocent man, is a former Black Panther Party spokesman and a supporter of the Philadelphia MOVE organization. He was framed up, convicted and sentenced to death on false charges of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in December 1981. Mumia’s life is in increased danger. On April 6 the U.S. Supreme Court summarily turned down his petition to overturn the frame-up conviction. And the court has yet to rule on the Philadelphia district attorney’s appeal to reinstate the death sentence, which was overturned by U.S. District Court Judge William Yohn in 2001. Should the Supreme Court rule in favor of the D.A.’s appeal, it would place Mumia a big step closer to the death chamber.

Helping to soap the hangman’s noose is Der Spiegel, whose 24 August issue includes the article “The Fires of Hell,” a piece of smear job journalism aimed at preparing European “public opinion” for a death sentence. The article was promptly applauded by right-wing Philadelphia radio broadcaster Michael Smerconish as a potential “turning point” for the campaign to kill Mumia: “After almost three decades, Abu-Jamal is finally in danger of exhausting his time in the U.S. courts. Here’s hoping a usually captive European audience has finished accommodating a police officer’s murderer as well” (www.philly.com, 27 August). (read more...)

Early this summer, the frame-up prosecutions of the San Francisco 8 (SF8) utterly unraveled. Rounded up in January 2007 by cops in California, New York and Florida, these eight former members of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and Black Liberation Army (BLA) faced bogus charges of killing a San Francisco police officer in 1971. On July 6, the state abandoned its prosecution of Ray Boudreaux, Richard Brown, Hank Jones and Harold Taylor, confessing it had “insufficient,” i.e., no evidence to proceed. The case against Richard O’Neal was dropped last year. Despite lack of evidence, the state vendetta against Francisco Torres persists; the next pre-trial hearing is set for October 9.

The victory for five of the SF8 is a genuine blow against the rulers and their state. It strikes back against murderous state attacks on fighters for black rights and opponents of U.S. imperialism and the government’s attempts to smear opponents with the “domestic terrorist” label, to legitimize torture as a legally sanctioned “investigative tool.” For close to 40 years, police tried to pin the killing of police officer John Young on these eight men. Torture, concealment, destruction of evidence and coerced testimony were at the core of the government’s case, a vendetta concocted as part of the FBI’s deadly Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) of disruption, frame-up, terror and outright murder of Black Panthers and other leftists. (read more...)

On August 21, the U.S. Parole Commission again turned down the parole request of Leonard Peltier, a prominent member of the American Indian Movement who was framed up on charges of killing two FBI agents during the federal assault on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975. The commission coldbloodedly declared Peltier would not be considered for parole for another 15 years! For the 64-year-old Peltier, who suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure, partial blindness and a heart condition, this is a declaration by the racist rulers that this courageous man will die in prison.

Grotesquely, U.S. Attorney Drew Wrigley gloated, “Leonard Peltier is exactly where he belongs—federal prison, serving two life sentences.” Wrigley added the claim that Peltier “has neither accepted responsibility for the murders nor shown any remorse,” a standard ruse for denying parole to those imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. As the PDC pointed out in a June 29 letter to the Parole Commission demanding freedom for Peltier (see WV No. 940, 31 July): (read more...)