http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2360
By Henry P. Wickham, Jr.
The engines of the “Free Mumia Abu-Jamel” movement continue to drone on. The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamel by J. Patrick O’Connor is the latest installment of the movement’s efforts to free the convicted murderer of Philadelphia police officer, Daniel Faulkner. While proclaiming the innocence of Abu-Jamal, O’Connor damns him with faint pleas.
This book and the movement that it supports are part of what has become a perverse American tradition. A person rabidly contemptuous of the values of this country commits a serious or even heinous crime against a person or symbol of American authority or prosperity. The crime itself generates an orgy of rationalization or even satisfaction from those sharing this contempt.
The perversities of the crime are then compounded as a campaign is waged to undermine justice and free the criminal. This campaign usually entails construction of elaborate conspiracies, the usual charges of police brutality and racism, the creation of a circus at trial, and the ridiculous exaggeration of the virtues of the victim of all this supposed oppression. To ponder the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal and this campaign to free him is to watch summer television reruns. The script is so familiar; the Hollywood faces so predictable; the angst so contrived. To know that we have seen this show before, one has only to recall the campaigns for Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Leonard Peltier, and Tookie Williams to name a few of our canonized criminals.
Nothing can be more exhilarating for the terminally alienated than for the criminal actually to prevail. One commits the crime and walks free, which simultaneously subverts the very concept of justice that sought a proper accounting. The scales remain unbalanced. As unrepentant American terrorist, Bill Ayers, once succinctly put it, “Guilty as sin: free as a bird.” And the Abu-Jamal re-runs play on; this time, J. Patrick O’Connor in charge of programming.
For those who do not know the basic facts, here is a brief synopsis. At roughly 3:50 a.m. on December 9, 1981, Officer Daniel Faulkner stopped the car of William Cook [corrected on a street in Philadelphia. Cook is the brother of Abu-Jamal. Coincidently, Abu-Jamal was parked nearby in a taxi he was driving. Upon seeing an altercation between Faulkner and Cook, Abu-Jamal ran across the street and shot Faulkner in the back. Faulkner was able to get a shot off at Abu-Jamal, seriously wounding him. With the wounded Faulkner on the ground, Abu-Jamal shot him in the head, killing him instantly.
At the time there were only three people in the immediate area of the crime: Faulkner, Abu-Jamal, and Cook. But others were nearby. Within minutes there were statements taken by separate police officers from several different witnesses who identified Abu-Jamal as the shooter. There were only two guns on the scene, Faulkner’s and Abu-Jamal’s. Ballistics show that the bullet in Abu-Jamal came from Faulkner’s gun, and that those in Faulkner came from a gun like Abu-Jamal’s.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/05/mumia_abujamal_still_guilty.html