Mumia Abu-Jamal and the US Criminal Injustice System.

• Author: Bloom, Steve
• Position: Statistical Data Included

Sometimes it seems to some--even very well-meaning people (I leave aside those who raise such questions cynically)--as if the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal is overblown. True, there is certainly an injustice here. But is it a greater injustice than has been committed against hundreds, even thousands of others imprisoned and/or executed after only sham trials and minimal "due process?" And doesn't so much energy and time devoted to one individual case make it harder to build the kind of movement we need to overcome the massive reality of racist and class-biased injustice in the USA today?

Mumia' s case does deserve the kind of movement which has developed around it, and participating in such a movement can be a useful springboard to help create an even broader effort around issues such as the death penalty, police brutality, basic human rights for all prisoners, etc. Often a single individual case of injustice or human tragedy can capture the essence of such a reality, and therefore the public imagination, far more effectively than pages filled with statistics. So one answer to the dilemma posed above is, simply, that we should focus on Mumia' s case because it has managed to capture public attention in a way that no other case has.

But that there is something else which makes Mumia's case special, and therefore worth focusing on. We can enumerate a list of specific issues raised by our broad concern about the US criminal injustice system:

* racism;

* capital punishment;

* police brutality;

* the use of prosecution and incarceration to muzzle political dissent and intimidate activists (with Black militants a particular target);

* a general disrespect for justice for the poor in our class-divided society; and

* the inhumanity and brutality of the prison system itself.

Mumia' s case is the only one I know of which reflects every single one of these factors. Mumia's prosecution was pursued so vigorously because of his political views, and these were used in particular to get the jury to vote for a death sentence. He was brutalized by the police, had a jury from which Blacks were excluded because they were Black, frame-up evidence manufactured and used in his trial, and an incompetent attorney forced upon him. And he has suffered for almost two decades under the most brutal conditions of incarceration.

So there are many other cases, some of which even gain national publicity. We can think about Geronimo Pratt, for example, who spent 25 years in jail...