Mumia Abu-Jamal’s life is in imminent danger! In a naked display of racist contempt, the U.S. Supreme Court on April 6 summarily turned down without comment Mumia’s petition to overturn the frame-up conviction that led to a death sentence for this innocent man. While it took less than one business day for the Court to reject Mumia’s petition, which was based on the exclusion of eleven of 15 prospective black jurors from his 1982 trial, the racists in black robes have for weeks been considering the Philadelphia district attorney’s appeal to reinstate the death sentence, which was overturned by U.S. District Court Judge William Yohn in 2001. Make no mistake! The neo-segregationist high court of American capitalism could well be preparing the noose for Abu-Jamal’s legal lynching. What is necessary is the mobilization of the multiracial working class independent of and in opposition to the capitalist state and its political representatives, whether Democrat, Republican or Green. Free Mumia! Abolish the racist death penalty!

A former Black Panther Party spokesman, supporter of the Philadelphia MOVE organization and award-winning journalist, Mumia was framed up on charges of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner on 9 December 1981. For 27 years, the cops, prosecutors, bourgeois politicians and their media jackals have howled for Mumia’s blood because they see in Mumia a voice of defiant opposition to all forms of racist discrimination. Mountains of evidence, not least the confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner, have proven Mumia’s innocence. But court after court has refused to even consider the evidence. As Mumia put it in an April 6 interview, the Court’s decision shows that “law is politics by other means and that the Constitution means nothing, that a fair jury means nothing.” Mumia’s case demonstrates that there is no justice in the capitalist courts. The courts, prisons and police exist to maintain, through organized violence and terror, the rule of the capitalists over working people. (read more...)

Last December marked the 23rd annual Holiday Appeal, which raises funds for the Partisan Defense Committee’s program of sending monthly stipends and holiday gifts to class-war prisoners and their families. Held in New York, Chicago, the Bay Area, Los Angeles and Toronto, these benefits raised over $10,000 after expenses as a concrete expression of solidarity with class-war prisoners.

The 2008 Holiday Appeal benefits focused particularly on the struggle to free death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, an innocent man falsely convicted of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner on 9 December 1981. Also honored were 15 other men and women who were singled out by the state for standing up to racist capitalist oppression and exploitation. With this act of solidarity the PDC has revived and kept alive the tradition of class-struggle defense of those imprisoned for championing the rights of labor and all the oppressed. This tradition was begun by the International Labor Defense (ILD) under James P. Cannon, a founding leader of the Communist Party, the ILD’s first secretary (1925-28) and later the founder of American Trotskyism. As a resolution from the ILD’s first conference in 1925 declared: “The workers must not be allowed to forget those who lie in prison for them, but must be stirred into action in their defense.”

In building for these benefits, the PDC—a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—addressed trade-union locals in several cities, emphasizing that the working class must break with the capitalist Democratic Party in order to advance its own interests and those of the oppressed. This elicited much discussion and debate, especially in the wake of the election of Barack Obama. In the Bay Area, presentations were made at both the ILWU longshore Local 10 and AFSCME Local 444 unions’ November meetings. Amalgamated Transit Union locals 308 and 241 in Chicago and the New York chapter of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists contributed money for the class-war prisoners and Mumia Abu-Jamal’s defense. (read more...)

On January 14, the California Board of Parole denied Hugo Pinell parole for the ninth time—and declared that he will not have another parole board hearing for 15 years! Pinell, the last of the San Quentin Six still in prison, is 63 years old and has been in prison since he was 19. Despite having no disciplinary write-ups for 27 years, he has spent the last 39 years in solitary confinement, 19 of them in the notoriously brutal Security Housing Unit of the Pelican Bay dungeon, where he is subjected to high-tech sensory deprivation: 23 to 24 hours a day in a small cell, no windows, no natural light, no contact visits and prolonged isolation. The capitalist rulers have kept Pinell locked down because he remains true to his vision of a society finally rid of racist repression.

Pinell, who immigrated from Nicaragua at age 12, was locked up in 1965. In the late ’60s he became a leader of a developing movement in the California prisons against wretched conditions and racist abuse. He was a student and close comrade of George Jackson, the imprisoned Black Panther spokesman. The prisoners’ movement, which was met with heavy repression, reflected the intense struggles taking place outside the prison walls, from the “black power” movement to radical protests against the war in Vietnam. Pinell and five others—the San Quentin Six—were framed up on charges of conspiracy murder stemming from the killing of three prison guards in the protests that erupted after the assassination of Jackson in the San Quentin prison yard on 21 August 1971. Pinell represented himself at the 18-month-long trial and was convicted of two counts of assault. (read more...)

In January, Leonard Peltier, a leader of the American Indian Movement who has been in prison for 33 years for a crime he did not commit, was outrageously put in solitary confinement after having been savagely attacked when he was transferred to the United States Penitentiary in Canaan, Pennsylvania. In a January 20 statement, Betty Peltier-Solano, Peltier’s sister, stated: “We feel that prison authorities at the prompting of the FBI orchestrated this attack and thus, we are greatly concerned about his safety.” We print below a January 22 protest letter from the Partisan Defense Committee to USP Canaan warden Ronnie R. Holt. The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League.

It has come to our attention that soon after his transfer to your prison, political prisoner Leonard Peltier was placed in solitary confinement and allowed only one meal a day. This is an outrage. Given this courageous man’s medical conditions, your actions put his life at risk.

Mr. Peltier had asked that he be transferred to a facility near his family and home in the Dakotas. Instead he was vindictively sent far away to USP Canaan. Shortly after his arrival he was set upon and brutally beaten, reportedly by prisoners he did not know. He sustained numerous bruises, a large lump on his head, discoloration and swelling to his hands as well as pain in his chest and ribcage. This incident is the supposed pretext for his being thrown into solitary. (read more...)

Tom Orloff
Alameda County District Attorney
1225 Fallon Street, Room 900
Oakland, CA 94612

Dear Mr. Orloff,

The Partisan Defense Committee vehemently protests the arrests of more than 105 demonstrators by the Oakland Police Department on the evening of January 7. Beaten, tear-gassed, shot with rubber bullets and arrested by an army of cops, the protesters now face charges of vandalism, unlawful assembly, rioting and assault on a police officer for expressing their justifiable outrage over the New Year’s killing of a young black man, Oscar Grant, by BART cop Johannes Mehserle. Over 20 of those arrested are juveniles. While many have been cited and released, others are being held at Santa Rita and Glenn Dyer County jails. We demand their immediate release and the dropping of all charges against the anti-police-terror protesters!

At least four cell-phone cameras held by passengers on the BART train idling next to the Fruitvale platform captured images of Oscar Grant lying face down when Mehserle pulled out his gun and shot him in the back. The images have been broadcast on local television and streamed online, evoking widespread rage and revulsion over the cold-blooded killing. (read more...)

On October 6, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Mumia Abu-Jamal’s appeal for a new trial based on evidence that critical witnesses lied under police coercion in his original frame-up trial. To the racists in black robes, a court of law is no place for evidence of the innocence of this fighter for the oppressed. Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther, MOVE supporter and eloquent journalist known as the “voice of the voiceless,” is an innocent man who has been on death row for 26 years, framed up for the killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981. This latest rejection comes after decades of Pennsylvania state and lower federal courts dismissing the mountains of evidence of his innocence and of his racist frame-up by the Philadelphia police and prosecution.

The appeal that was turned down was submitted on July 18 by Mumia’s attorney, Robert R. Bryan. That petition for a Writ of Certiorari on behalf of Mumia was a request for the Supreme Court to grant Mumia’s appeal of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision last February 19, which refused to let him present crucial evidence that key witnesses in his original frame-up trial had lied. The only witness claiming to have seen Mumia with a gun in hand was Cynthia White, a prostitute who was given favors and coerced by the cops to lie. Two months after Faulkner’s death, cops and prosecutors concocted a story that Mumia confessed to the killing as he bled nearly to death on the Jefferson Hospital Emergency Room floor after being shot and beaten by the cops.

The Partisan Defense Committee—a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—issued a February 21 press release following the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision, emphasizing that the evidence barred by that court cuts to the heart of the prosecution frame-up. Such evidence included a 28 January 2002 declaration by Yvette Williams, who was in jail with Cynthia White in December 1981, stating that “Cynthia White told me the police were making her lie and say she saw Mr. Jamal shoot Officer Faulkner when she really did not see who did it.” Also barred was the declaration of Kenneth Pate, stepbrother of Priscilla Durham, a Jefferson Hospital security guard who testified at Mumia’s trial to hearing the bogus confession. In his 18 April 2003 declaration, Kenneth Pate recalled that Durham told him of pressure by the cops to say Mumia confessed; she confided to him, “All I heard him say was: ‘Get off me, get off me, they’re trying to kill me’.” (The declarations by Williams and Pate are available in full on the Partisan Defense Committee’s Web site (www.partisandefense.org/pubs/innocent/yw.html and www.​partisandefense.org/​pubs/​innocent/​kp.html). (read more...)