The U.S. Third Court of Appeals has ordered a new sentencing phase trial in a long-running, controversial Philadelphia death penalty case. The opinion is here.
The AP dispatch is, "Court: Mumia Deserves New Hearing."
Former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal cannot be executed for murdering a Philadelphia police officer unless a new penalty hearing is held, a federal appeals court said Thursday.
The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Abu-Jamal's conviction but said he should get a new sentencing hearing because of flawed jury instructions. If prosecutors don't want to give him a new death penalty hearing, Abu-Jamal would be sentenced automatically to life in prison.
Prosecutors are weighing their options, Assistant District Attorney Hugh Burns Jr. said Thursday.
Abu-Jamal's lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, said he was glad the judges did not reinstate the death sentence but added that he wants the full court to hear the case and grant his client a new trial.
"I've never seen a case as permeated and riddled with racism as this one," Bryan said Thursday. "I want a new trial and I want him free. His conviction was a travesty of justice."
Abu-Jamal, 53, once a radio reporter, has attracted a legion of artists and activists to his cause during his quarter-century on death row. A Philadelphia jury convicted him in 1982 of killing Officer Daniel Faulkner, 25, after the patrolman pulled over Abu-Jamal's brother in an overnight traffic stop. Abu-Jamal is black; Faulkner was white.
Abu-Jamal had appealed, arguing that racism by the judge and prosecutors corrupted his conviction at the hands of a mostly white jury. Prosecutors, meanwhile, had appealed a federal judge's 2001 decision to grant Abu-Jamal a new sentencing hearing because of the jury instructions.
The Philadelphia Inquirer maintains an article of significant stories and commentary in the case, here. The Inquirer's initial report is, "No death for Mumia Abu-Jamal — at least for now."
The Third Circuit upheld, in all respects, the 2001 decision by U.S. District Judge William H. Yohn Jr., who rejected all but one of Abu-Jamal's legal claims, but threw out the jury's death sentence.
Yohn ruled that the jury in Abu-Jamal's 1982 trial may have mistakenly believed it had to agree unanimously on any "mitigating" circumstances -- factors that might have persuaded jurors to decide on a life sentence instead of death.
The appeals court affirmed that decision, and said that the state has six months to hold a new sentencing hearing for Abu-Jamal, or he must be sentenced to life in prison.
"The jury instructions and the verdict form created a reasonable likelihood that the jury believed it was precluded from finding a mitigating circumstance that had not been unanimously agreed upon," wrote Chief Judge Anthony J. Scirica in the 77-page opinion.
Judge Thomas L. Ambro wrote that he would have gone further than his two colleagues, and granted a hearing on Abu-Jamal's contention that the prosecution unfairly excluded blacks from his jury in violation of a 1986 U.S. Supreme Court case, Batson v. Kentucky.
"To move past the prima facie case is not to throw open the jailhouse doors and overturn Abu-Jamal's conviction," wrote Ambro. "It is merely to take the next step in deciding whether race was impermissibly considered during jury selection."
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