Imprisoned writer Mumia Abu-Jamal seeks UN intervention after 44 years behind bars

The former Black Panther’s lawyers ask a UN panel to review his detention after US legal avenues were exhausted

As he approaches the 45th anniversary of his incarceration in December, the Black radical writer and prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal is taking his claim that he has been subjected to arbitrary imprisonment for a crime that he did not commit to a new tribunal: the United Nations in Geneva.

On Tuesday Abu-Jamal, 72, lodged a petition with the UN’s working group on arbitrary detention, a body within the Human Rights Council. It marks the latest attempt by the internationally-renowned prisoner and prolific author of 15 books to seek relief, having exhausted all domestic channels through state and federal courts.

In a telephone interview with the Guardian from Mahanoy correctional institution in Pennsylvania, where he is being held on a life sentence with no chance of parole, he said the appeal to the UN was part of his personal and legal efforts to keep hope alive.

“Hope is an element of struggle, is it not,” he said. “As we used to say in the old days, ‘La luta continua’.”

The hope that this former Black Panther might one day walk free from Mahanoy is slim. He is serving a life sentence without any possibility of parole. In Pennsylvania, life without parole means just that: there is no accounting for rehabilitation, age or health, and any prisoner serving it will die behind bars no matter his or her circumstances.

Abu-Jamal was convicted in 1982 of a crime for which he has always protested his innocence – the first degree murder of a police officer, Daniel Faulkner, in Philadelphia. Since then, he has become a lightning rod for both left and right.

For progressives, he is arguably the most celebrated political prisoner in America today. For the law and order crowd, led by the Fraternal Order of Police that has pushed relentlessly for his maximum punishment, he is nothing other than a cop killer.

Despite the long odds, Abu-Jamal is doing all he can to stay upbeat. “I’ve rarely, if ever, placed my hope in courts of law,” he said. “But I do trust in people, as people are the ones who build movements and make change.”

Tuesday’s newly-lodged petition calls on the UN to take a stance over what it says are the many injustices against Abu-Jamal during his original trial and in the decades of unsuccessful appeals that have followed. His legal team – led by Bret Grote of the Abolitionist Law Center, joined by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights – argues that he has endured multiple violations of international law.

The document describes how the prosecutor excluded almost all Black jurors from his 1982 trial. During jury selection the prosecutor scrawled in his notebook the letters “B” and “W” over jurors’ names, to denote Black and white.

He then threw out 71% of all potential Black jurors, and just 20% of all non-Black candidates. The result was a jury of 12 that had only two Black members – in a county that was almost 40% African American.

The trial judge, Albert Sabo, the petition goes on, was perhaps the most prolific death penalty judge in the country. He presided over 31 capital cases ending with death row, all but two of the defendants from minorities.

Shortly before trial he was overheard saying: “I’m going to help them fry the nigger.”

The UN’s rapporteur on arbitrary detention is also being asked to consider how new evidence only disclosed to Abu-Jamal’s defense team in 2018 raises serious doubts about the credibility of the state’s main eyewitness, Robert Chobert. Weeks after the trial concluded, Chobert wrote to the chief prosecutor inquiring about “the money own to me”.

One of the main thrusts of the petition is that Abu-Jamal’s current sentence, life without parole – is in itself a form of arbitrary detention in breach of international rules. The sentence has been dubbed “ death by incarceration ”, but Abu-Jamal thinks of it as “slow death row”.

He said: “It is death row without a specific date of execution. Or execution through time.”

He said he was struck by the contrast between America’s fondness for life sentences – more than 200,000 people are on them, about one in seven of all prisoners – and the approach of other advanced countries such as Norway. When Anders Breivik committed the deadliest mass shooting by a single person in modern times in Oslo in 2011, killing 77 people, he was sentenced to the country’s maximum penalty – 21 years, extendable on review every five years thereafter.

Breivik is unlikely ever to be released, but the system has not irrevocably slammed the door on him. “Such a response would be impossible, unthinkable in any of our 50 states,” Abu-Jamal said.

The UN working party has no direct enforcement powers within the US. But his legal team are calculating that a strong condemnation from the world body would support the push back home for a retrial or a commutation of his sentence.

At the very least, Abu-Jamal welcomes the chance to present the facts of his case to experts who have not come under the intense political pressure faced by elected judges (all Pennsylvania’s judges are elected). He remembers being “flabbergasted” in 1995 when he learnt that four out of the seven justices on the state supreme court had been endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police.

“Presenting my claims to the UN will be one of the first times that judges will be hearing them without a vested interest,” he said.

Abu-Jamal was 14 when he was literally booted into the Black liberation struggle. It was 1968 and he was at a protest in Philadelphia against the segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace when a Philadelphia police officer kicked him in the face.

A year later he co-founded the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther party and became a regular contributor to the party’s newspaper. From there he built a successful career as a writer and broadcaster, serving as president of Philadelphia’s Association of Black Journalists.

All that came crashing down when he was arrested in the early hours of 9 December 1981. He was supplementing his income by cab driving, and happened to be passing the corner of 13th and Locust Streets just when his brother William Cook was being detained in a traffic stop by police officer Faulkner.

A shootout ensued. Abu-Jamal was shot in the chest. Faulkner was struck multiple times and died in hospital hours later.

At trial, the state accused Abu-Jamal of murdering Faulkner. The prosecutor presented the jury with samples of his Black Panther writings to suggest an antipathy towards police, and on the back of that plus the questionable testimony of Chobert and other state witnesses he was convicted and sentenced to death.

He remained on death row for 28 years until 2011 when he was switched to life without parole after a court found his original capital sentence unconstitutional.

As has been the case throughout his incarceration, he did not discuss the specifics of the charges leveled against him with the Guardian. But he did talk about the toll that decades behind bars has had on him and on his family.

There has been the toll of distance, of separation, from his burgeoning family of four generations. How many great grandchildren does he have?

“I don’t even know, but it’s quite a few.”

Being Abu-Jamal, he puts the pain of forced isolation in a political context. “The state creates a system of solitary confinement for people on death row to dehumanize them to the people who love them. You cannot touch this person.”

In one of his best known books, Live From Death Row, he recounts the agonising prison visit from his young daughter Samiya early on in his incarceration. He recalls that moment again during our conversation, speaking in a voice that is at times so soft it is barely audible.

“She rushed in, her eyes lit up, and she looked at me, and she was confused because of the glass between us. She ran to the glass, this little girl, and began hitting it, shouting: ‘Break it! Break it!’ It tore my heart.”

Since then he has had time to develop strategies for overcoming the barriers to human contact. “What I learned, you know, over these long years, is how to make people kind of feel you without being able to touch you.”

“I just talk to people as earnestly and as deeply as I can, to make contact with them without making physical contact. It’s a way to defeat the dehumanization process.”

One thing that buoyed him up over the years was the avalanche of global support from people concerned about his plight. When he was facing execution, the New York Times reported that he was the “world’s best known death-row inmate”, and his cause was adopted by a slew of celebrities such as Maya Angelou, Spike Lee and Paul Newman.

He routinely received 50 or more letters from supporters each week. Now that number has dwindled, he said, to 10 or 12. He thinks the slump is partly because the prison mail system has become more restrictive.

But it’s also because the shift from the death penalty to life without parole has to some degree taken him out of the limelight. “Some people seem to believe that because I’m off death row, now I’m home. They don’t know. They don’t get it.”

Though his international profile may have receded, last month he was still made an honorary citizen of the Paris suburb Saint-Denis. A road there was named after him at the height of his death row ordeal in 2006.

Were he ever to be released, that would be one of his first ambitions. “I’d like to walk on my street in Saint-Denis. And I’d like to visit Ghana. And I’d like to teach somewhere,” he said.

After a pause, he added that he would also make a beeline to the graves of his mother Edith and wife Wadiya, both of whom have died during his time behind bars.

Books – reading and writing them – have been his prime survival tool throughout the near half century of his imprisonment. “Books have been my closest friends for decades,” he said. “Most of what I’ve done in prison is read, and you have to read in order to write – to cultivate ideas and produce works.”

Even that has now become a struggle. For most of last year he was functionally blind as a result of his eyesight deteriorating over the past eight years.

It is one facet of the immense physical toll that 28 years in solitary confinement on death row has extracted. He puts his fading sight down to a series of health crises that began with a severe skin rash, led to diabetes brought on by heavy steroids, and culminated in a diabetic coma.

At every step he has had to fight for even basic medical care. That included a two-year court battle to get medication for hepatitis C which was withheld on grounds that he was “not sick enough”.

It took him most of last year to wrestle the prison authorities into having his cataracts removed. During the two spells in which he was hospitalised for congestive heart failure, he was shackled for days to his medical bed.

Whatever you think of Abu-Jamal – whether you place him in the political prisoner or the cop killer category – his punishment does not include the annihilation of his health. Nor does it require the deprivation of the one activity in captivity that he holds most dear.

“When you cannot read, that is extremely painful,” he said.