Mumia Dearest
Carlson, Tucker
Show Business Mumia Dearest By Tucker Carlson After 29 years as a patrolman with the Philadelphia police department, Jim McDevitt isn't easily shocked. But he sure seems surprised to learn that...
...But, he admits, "I haven't been privileged to go deeply into the stuff...
...Mumia Abu-Jamal is not one of them...
...I mean, there were a lot of black scholars, which to me was very important...
...Therefore Mumia Abu-Jamal did not shoot a policeman in 1981...
...Because I don't pretend to and don't have knowledge of the actual facts, I made very, very sure that [the ad] read in a way that would not be committing the signers to a particular view of the facts...
...According to Bob Stein, president of The Voyager Company, a CD ROM publisher, supporting Jamal has been an easy call for a lot of other people, too...
...Stein, who helped to recruit names for the Times ad, admits that apart from a few well-informed writers, like Styron and E.L...
...Actually, it's hard to see how the facts arrayed against him could be any stronger than they are: At least four other people were present when Jamal shot Officer Dan Faulkner...
...There are a number of advantages to using this line of argument, the main one being that it requires only feelings...
...Don't those who sign ads claiming "there is strong reason to believe . . . Mumia Abu-Jamal has been sentenced to death for his political beliefs" have an obligation to know what they're talking about...
...Several feet away, members of MOVE, the black nationalist cult best known for getting blown up by the Philly police in 1985, man a table crowded with Jamal-related trinkets: buttons, posters, cassettes, T-shirts...
...One hears the same refrain from Jamal's celebrity supporters: The judge-or the cops, or the press, or the country generally-was (or were, or are) racist...
...You know, you go through life signing things you think you should sign...
...Likewise, former M*A*S*H actor Mike Farrell, who recently appeared on Larry King Live to plead Jamal's case, admitted to People magazine, "I don't know if he's innocent...
...The ice cream guy...
...Actually, neither group has ever described Jamal as a political prisoner, nor has either taken a position on his guilt...
...Loudspeakers blare an address by Jamal...
...Gloria Steinem, another signer of the $56,000 ad, freely admits she knows little about the case, though she does say she saw William Styron "reading something about it on TV...
...I don't have the clips in front of me...
...I felt that even before I knew there was a movement or something...
...Over the past 14 years, pro-Jamal support groups, solidarity commissions, and emergency defense committees have formed in nearly every major American city and across Europe...
...As if the endorsement of Harvard's own Skip Gates weren't enough, Parks has other reasons to think Jamal got railroaded: "It's the reality of black people in America...
...In fact, Jamal's first public statement on the subject, yelled in front of two witnesses on the night he was arrested, hardly qualifies as exculpatory: "I shot that m-f-," he said, "and I hope he dies...
...I think I might have been at some conference and I saw something on a table...
...From an undisclosed location, Salman Rushdie faxed his signature...
...But that's not all...
...Well, for one thing, says Morton, "I was very moved by some of the people who had signed [the advertisement...
...Jamal's celebrity supporters may approach the case with a certain nonchalance, but to the true believers who congregate on the sidewalk outside of Philadelphia's City Hall each day, Jamal's innocence is a matter of religious conviction...
...Reached at a hotel on Martha's Vineyard, Ivins sounds like she's been spending her vacation thinking about the Jamal case...
...His trial was unjust," says Cohen flatly...
...he asks...
...You know, I cannot right now remember the circumstances...
...We're not taking a stand on his guilt," said David Goehring of Addison-Wesley, the publishing house that paid Jamal $30,000 for his stupendously banal memoirs, Live From, Death Row...
...I really don't know...
...But people feel like they know enough...
...A few years back, Steinem recalls, William Styron came to the defense of "some guy in Connecticut who killed his mother...
...I mean, Skip [Henry Louis] Gates I find a very heavy person...
...Indeed, with a book in print, regular public-radio commentaries, at least two Internet sites devoted to his case, and a CD-ROM of his reflections on questions of the day, Jamal has become more famous than many of the Big Names who have worked to get him off death row...
...Well, I don't really know...
...O'Neill is a long way from Hollywood, but his reasoning isn't...
...I'm convinced that he did not get a fair trial," she says without hesitating...
...Gloria Steinem has plenty of those...
...Someone has turned the amplifier up to full capacity, giving the words a re-education-camp sound...
...In a recent handwritten letter from prison, the incarcerated "journalist" expressed gratitude to his supporters, sending "thanks far and wide-on the winds, like a winged prayer of Love...
...His gun, from which five bullets had been fired, was found at the scene...
...But then, she isn't the only celebrity Jamal supporter who comes up a little light when asked about the specifics of the case...
...Doctorow (whose oped supporting Jamal was reprinted in the ad), many of the celebrities involved in the case know little about it...
...Not that such details would likely have much effect on Ben Cohen...
...Jamal himself thinks they do...
...I consider him a very serious scholar of the black scene-and as a black man, the black scene from the inside...
...Morton may come off as a little confused, but he's a beacon of clarity compared to Ben Cohen, the ice cream mogul, whose mind is also made up on the Jamal case...
...And when did he first come to this conclusion...
...I have a responsibility to convince myself," he says, with the sound of someone who has done just that...
...As an indictment of a corrupt legal system, Steinem's comments aren't exactly J'accuse...
...Are you kidding...
...As the New York Times put it, "The case for his innocence is not unimpeachable...
...John the Divine in New York, doesn't have the "actual facts" at his fingertips, either, but like other signers of the Jamal ad, he doesn't let that slow him down...
...But, says Cohen, "The biggest influencer was that both Amnesty [International] and Human Rights Watch consider him to be a political prisoner, and his trial was unjust...
...Even if someone thought he was guilty," says O'Neill in an intense, unblinking manner, "just what the judge is doing shows that Mumia is innocent...
...Neither he, nor his brother, who was present at the murder, has ever testified on the matter...
...Asked if he feels a responsibility to know something about the case before lending his name to Jamal's defense, the maker of Peace Pops pauses...
...As an example he cites "the way we're moving nationally, I mean the strong forces against, uh-oh, I can't even think of its name...
...There is still a huge reality of institutional racism that determines the way a whole lot of people act...
...But," she says hopefully, "I think anybody who remembered them would reach the same conclusion...
...And if it seems unlikely that the inventor of Chunky Monkey ice cream would be weighing in on matters of Life, Death, and American Justice, consider this: Casey Kasem signed the ad, too...
...there were other epiphanies as well: "I think I saw something about how he and his lawyer didn't get along...
...Wasn't there some question about his brother...
...Several weekly fanzines and a 20-page quarterly tabloid keep enthusiasts up to date on the case, while providing plenty of head shots of the dreadlocked hero, smiling toothily at the camera, or looking pensive and revolutionary...
...And if Jamal has always maintained his innocence, he has never explained it...
...But he sure seems surprised to learn that Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's ice cream is one of the 110 actors, writers, and intellectuals who signed an August ad in the New York Times calling for a new trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal, the black death row inmate convicted of shooting a white Philadelphia cop in 1981...
...How does somebody who hasn't gone "deeply into the stuff" end up making a judgment about something as complex as a murder trial...
...Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose last regular job was driving a cab, is now a bona fide celebrity...
...So did Alec Baldwin, Oliver Stone, and Sting...
...Not one to let lack of knowledge dampen her moral outrage, Steinem remains adamantly convinced something went wrong at the trial...
...It's hard to hear, but O'Neill presses on, oblivious...
...Did she sign an advertisement in that case...
...three of them testified against him at trial...
...It sounds like the man is innocent, from what I've seen," Morton says with clerical gravity...
...One of those 110 names on the New York Times ad belongs to political columnist Molly Ivins...
...The non-committal language is not accidental...
...And I think I might have been, you know, maybe at some festival and, you know, signed a petition...
...Even those to whom he should offer his most ardent thanks on the winds seldom claim Jamal is innocent...
...She cites herself as an example: "I'm very, very careful about this myself...
...This is ground zero in the Jamal defense, and Sean O'Neill, a 38-year-old salesman from South Jersey who is passing out flyers on his lunch break, clearly has been affected by the blast...
...And that's okay: "If you asked them about the particulars of the case, they might not know enough about them to feel comfortable speaking about it...
...During the day I come out to do what I can to save Mumia, an innocent man," he says...
...From time to time, death row inmates make claims of innocence that sound plausible, or at least deserving of another look...
...And what, specifically, was so outrageous about the trial...
...I think the way that's moving is a racist direction...
...What's the phrase, the doctrine of giving people, you know, a special chance...
...Not really, says Nadine Strossen, president of the ACLU...
...Jamal is saying something about the System and the "Jewish intelligentsia...
...The Reverend James Parks Morton, dean of the Episcopal Cathedral of St...
...Affirmative action...
...Actually, there were several...
...Yeah...
...And weren't there no witnesses...
...Not since Jean Harris, the ill-tempered headmistress of the Madeira School for girls, emptied her 32 into diet guru Herman Tarnower have so many well-known people worked so hard on behalf of an imprisoned killer...
...I thought the circumstances of the trial were so outrageous that it really had to be spoken out about...
...Even Norman Mailer chimed in, back in the trenches for yet another convicted murderer...
...Nope...
...Movie critic Roger Ebert says he didn't even try to learn much about it before giving the case against Jamal a public thumbs down: "Basically, my position is, I'm opposed to capital punishment, so it was a real easy call for me because I didn't even have to think about the merits of the evidence...
Vol. 1 • September 1995 • No. 1
