Read "Witness for the Prosecution: NPR Slants the Case Against Mumia Abu-Jamal"

Interview with Leonard Weinglass, Mumia Abu-Jamal's Lead Attorney

On December 9th, ABC aired a long-awaited segment on the case of death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal. The day after the broadcast, CounterSpin interviewed Leonard Weinglass, Mumia Abu-Jamal's lead attorney. What follows is a transcript of that conversation.

CS: The case of Pennsylvania death row inmate and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal may have an international following, but Jamal gets virtually no help from his journalistic colleagues in the mainstream media. So on December 9th, when ABC's 20/20 aired a four-month investigation into the facts of the case, many viewers were getting their first real look at the story. But what was missing from the broadcast?

Those familiar with the case point to a number of key problems with Jamal's trial. They say there's strong evidence that witnesses were coerced, testimony was fabricated and tampered with, ballistics testing was inconclusive or not done at all, the judge was prejudiced and mishandled the case, and at any rate, Jamal wasn't given the time or the resources to mount a serious defense. Any of these charges, if true, they say, should result in another trial. So you'd expect that 20/20 would have thoroughly examined these charges, right?

With us to discuss the ABC broadcast is Leonard Weinglass, Jamal's lead attorney and someone who played a prominent role in the 20/20 segment. Welcome to CounterSpin, Leonard Weinglass.

LW: Well, thanks for having me on.

CS: Could you begin by telling us what you thought of 20/20's segment on Mumia Abu-Jamal?

LW: Well, I thought this was a gross distortion, and very unfortunate. We had indications right from the beginning that ABC had a theme they wanted to run, and the theme was a poor widow, understandably distraught, up against celebrities who don't know what they're talking about, and using the rest of us as filler.

CS: The poor widow would be Maureen Faulkner, the widow of the officer who was alledgedly murdered by Mumia.

LW: That's right. And, as a matter of fact, we found out only recently that when ABC first contacted the Department of Corrections in Pennsylvania seeking an interview of Mumia, the did say in their letter, and I have it right in front of me, 'We are currently working in conjunction with Maureen Faulkner and the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of the Police,' which is a very interesting introductory letter. Because we had no idea they were working actively with these two sources. But in any event, we had suspected that they had this theme they wanted to run and they in fact did run it. They would not accept anything I said in over one hour of an on-camera interview, and instead just took snippets here and there and interspersed them with refutations from the prosecution and from prosecutor representatives and police officers.

I can't believe, after watching this program, how we have any opportunity in this country to get a fair and objective reporting on almost any issue. This was just mind boggling.

CS: Mr. Weinglass, I know when you did a previous interview on this case for KGO-TV in San Francisco, you actually taped the interview from your side so that you would have a record of the content you provided, and you'd be able to tell what kind of editing went on. What kind of stuff didn't get through in this broadcast that people might want to know about?

LW: Well, almost everything. To begin with, one whole part was omitted, and that was the part on the trial process. I went through every aspect that's virtually unrefuted—that the prosecutor removed eleven qualified African-American jurors, that Mumia's defense attorney testified under oath that he hadn't interviewed a single witness. That the jury was given wrongfully a copy of a newspaper clipping indicating that Mumia, 12 years earlier, when he was 16 years old, was a member of the Black Panther Party and used a quote from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, which they paraded before the jury.

All of this… I could go on and on. Mumia didn't have an investigator during the trial. He quit the case before the trial began because he wasn't paid. He didn't have an expert witness in pathology which he needed, or an expert witness in firearms which he needed. And I thought Sam Donaldson was convinced that in the 1990s that you do not execute a man on the basis of this kind of process, all of which is very clear in the record and unrefuted. And yet they didn't run one single line of this exposition.

CS: On the day of the broadcast, an interview with Sam Donaldson was run in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which sort of, I think, gave up the game. Donaldson declared Mumia guilty, called for his execution and said his supporters were ignorant. Was there any evidence that Sam Donaldson and 20/20 presented that shook your case?

LW: No, There was absolutely nothing new in the material that he presented. As a matter of fact it was only in portions and small excerpts of what was very old, and what was very old in the trial was completely discredited in 1995 when we put on witnesses. We put on witness Veronica Jones, who said she testified falsely against Mumia at his trial. And she did it because the police had pressured her. We put on witness William Singletary, who said he didn't testify at all in Mumia's trial because the police had threatened him, tore up his statements in which he said Mumia was not the shooter and ultimately drove him out of town.

We put on witness Pamela Jenkins, who said that she knew that the chief witness against Mumia, Cynthia White, was actually a police informant.

None of this was revealed in the trial. And they just acted as if 1995 hadn't happened, that we didn't have a three-week hearing before Judge Sabo, and that the trial evidence was essentially unrefuted.

CS: Leonard Weinglass, one of the most striking aspects of the trial was the discrepancy between the amount of money that Mumia Abu-Jamal was offered to conduct his defense with, and the amount of money that a commission in New York state said should be allotted to defendants in capital cases. Can you describe that discrepancy for our audience?

LW: Yes. Mumia was allocated and given a total, one year after the trial ended, of $14,000. That was for his entire legal fee, and that was for the cost of the investigation, such as it was, the cost of having a photographer take some pictures and a few very other minor costs. Pennsylvania seems to be very satisfied, in fact, that that is sufficient funds to allocate to someone who faces death.

When New York state enacted the death penalty statute, they asked the commission to examine how much money ought to be set aside for each death row case. And the figure that the commission came up with was $600,000, which is probably much closer to what's needed. I mean, justice in the United States, like any commodity, is something that must be purchased. O.J. Simpson, whether he's guilty or innocent I don't know, but he committed $5 million of his fortune to that defense and he got $5 million worth of justice. Mumia got about $14,000 worth.

CS: I have another question, and this is one didn't come up and doesn't come up often in a lot of media discussions. It's about the term 'cold blood,' that's actually what's used to describe this case pretty often. What I want to ask you, even if all of the evidence that the prosecution, that their case relies on, even if all of that was solid and correct, was this a cold-blooded murder, as the media would like to call it, and should Mumia Jamal be facing execution for it?

LW: A very good question, and I'll tell you why, and I did tell Donaldson this. When that jury heard this case, which was undefended, Mumia had no lawyer who talked to witnesses, no investigator. He didn't have expert witnesses he needed. Witnesses testified and now admitted they lied against him. Even with that, even with a jury that was wrongfully selected after the prosecution purged practically all of the African-American jurors who could have sat and left two elderly African-American jurors on, with 10 white jurors.

Even after all that, when the jury went out, what did the jury do? They deliberated for a while and they came back and they asked Judge Sabo to re-instruct them on the law of manslaughter. Manslaughter. Mumia would have been out 10 years ago. Why did they do that? Because, even with an undefended case and even assuming that Mumia did the shooting, they realized that what happened here was that his brother was being beaten by an officer, that he ran to the scene, gunfire erupted, Mumia was shot, the officer was shot. Difficult to tell who shot who first, but even assuming if Mumia shot the officer, there was no premeditation here. And in the eyes of even that jury, it was nothing more than manslaughter.

CS: Leonard Weinglass, can you tell us where you're going from here?

LW: Well, in the case itself, we have exhausted all of our appeals in the Commonwealth Courts of Pennsylvania. On November 25, the Supreme Court rejected our request that they reconsider their decision, denying him the new trial. So we are now approaching the Federal courts and we will apparently go one of two ways, depending on what happens with Governor Ridge's anticipated move to sign a death warrant.

If he signs a death warrant, setting an execution date within 30 days, we will have to immediately go into the Federal District Court of Philadelphia with a habeus corpus petition, start the Federal litigation reviewing Mumia's case.

If the governor does not sign a warrant, we have 90 days to go and petition the United States Supreme Court, asking them to review the action of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. That is a petition, it's a request. Over 90% of the cases the Court refuses to do that review at this particular point, telling us to go back to the Federal district court and start our habeus corpus litigation that way.

So we're going to be in Federal court. We'll either be petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court or we'll be in the Federal District Court of Philadelphia under habeus corpus, depending on what action the Governor takes or doesn't take.

CS: I'm afraid that's all we have time for. By the way, if you watched the 20/20 segment we've been discussing and would like to give your comments to them, CounterSpin encourages you to contact them directly at the e-mail address 2020@abcnews.com, or by phone at (212) 456-4000. Let them know how you feel.