Scrapbook
Scrapbook Selective Indignation in Our Time Arco Arena in Sacramento is one noisy place, as anyone who has ever watched a Sacramento Kings game can attest. So it had to be unpleasant for...
...Yohn determined that the jury was not instructed about potential "mitigating" circumstances of Faulkner's murder...
...And all Greta can think to ask is, "Do you want this to be fair...
...For instance, if Osama bin Laden's "words are suppressed [by the Bush administration], should we then censor the words of anyone who might oppose the administration or disagrees with a United States policy...
...There should be no place for such suppression of speech on college campuses or anywhere else in a free society such as ours...
...Well it depends on how you define polite society...
...He delivered the address by tape...
...This has only encouraged the Free Mumia network, which immediately staged rallies at Philadelphia City Hall...
...Obviously not...
...Perhaps not surprisingly, given the forward march of time, the original judge in 1982 was not able to order the jury to consider a 1997 interpretation of a 1988 Supreme Court ruling, which found that jurors need not unanimously agree on any "mitigating circumstances" in order to consider them...
...Maureen Faulkner, the widow of the 25-year-old policeman Abu-Jamal gunned down, appeared on CNN's The Point with Greta Van Susteren, the evening Yohn's decision came down...
...15 and heckled and hooted her off the stage...
...We have built a worldwide movement out of Mumia...
...they attacked innocent Israelis...
...Mumia Dearest Mumia Abu-Jamal, Scrapbook readers will recall, was convicted in 1982 of murdering Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, and subsequently sentenced to death...
...But surely polite society must be losing patience with a movement organized around race-baiting cop hatred, right...
...Free Mumia," they cry...
...Minutes later, as Sommers was forced by a hostile crowd to defend her claim that scientific studies ought to be used to help evaluate the effectiveness of government drug-prevention programs, Professor Jay Wade, of Fordham University's department of psychology—an expert on 'listening skills'—ordered Sommers to 'shut the f— up, bitch,' to the laughter of the others in attendance...
...We're sure it's just an oversight...
...This is every bit as outrageous as the behavior of the commencement guests in Sacramento...
...In saying so we're sure we will be joined by the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Modesto Bee, the Orange County Register, the Scripps Howard News Service, the Associated Press, Gannett News Service, the Houston Chronicle, USA Today, the Miami Herald, National Review, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and others...
...Which, we suppose, goes to show that you can build a worldwide movement out of just about anything...
...So it had to be unpleasant for Sacramento Bee publisher Janis Besler Heaphy when the families and friends of California State University grads brought their basketball manners to her commencement speech on Dec...
...it's too bad their guests couldn't do the same...
...Four eyewitnesses testified against Abu-Jamal...
...What people don't realize," she explained, "is our family when we go into the courtroom, we are screamed at...
...In saying this, we link arms with the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Modesto Bee, the Orange County Register, the Scripps Howard News Service, the Associated Press, Gannett News Service, the Houston Chronicle, USA Today, the Miami Herald, National Review, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and a few others we probably omitted...
...No matter that the original sentencing has in the past two decades been reviewed exhaustively: twice by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and twice by the U.S...
...By the same token, Heaphy should have been allowed to speak...
...She described a painful twenty years spent in and out of the courtroom, waiting for Abu-Jamal finally to be executed...
...District Court Judge William Yohn found—in a 272-page decision—a novel reason to throw out the death sentence, leaving Abu-Jamal with life imprisonment...
...Supreme Court...
...Abu-Jamal, watching the scene from his taxicab across the street, fired five shots at Officer Daniel Faulkner—hitting him first in the back, then in the chest, and finally, from point blank range, between the eyes...
...Upon hearing this, van Susteren, an inexplicable holdover from CNN's preWalter Isaacson days, badgered Faulkner about fairness: "Maureen, if indeed—I mean, this decision by this judge today can be reviewed by a federal court of appeals...
...16 Fox News Sunday interview: "Hamas, a terrorist organization, started killing innocent civilians with car bombs in Jerusalem, Haifa, and elsewhere...
...Since then, the dreadlocked Mumia has become a poster boy for American oppression among campus radicals, latte leftists, and Euro-weenies—all determined never to let the facts obscure their fight for "justice...
...Even more fundamentally and troubling...
...9, 1981, and resisted arrest...
...screamed Pam Africa, a Free Mumia activist, at Philly's City Hall...
...But in the event a federal court of appeals agrees with this trial court judge that the sentencing process—not the verdict but the sentencing process—was unfair, do you want the system—do you want this to be fair, even though obviously this is terribly tragic for you...
...Twenty years, a lengthy trial, numerous reviews, a media maelstrom, insults from wackos, and lest we forget, a dead husband...
...National Public Radio considered hiring him to phone in dispatches from death row...
...Here's Colin Powell's answer, from a Dec...
...When the police captured Abu-Jamal, his gun held five spent cartridges, and in his chest was a bullet from Faulkner's gun...
...With the sole exception of National Review, which broke the story, and Fox News's Bill O'Reilly, who interviewed Sommers last week, the legions of First Amendment paladins haven't breathed a word about the silencing of Sommers...
...So it was only a mixed blessing for them when last week U.S...
...And they attacked this process...
...As reported by Stanley Kurtz two weeks ago in National Review Online, Sommers suffered a double indignity...
...But Yohn is more creative than most...
...True, Heaphy's speech was one long, tedious recitation of Anthony Lewis clichés about the threat to civil liberties in America in wartime...
...And mind you, it's not because a newspaper publisher was shouted down that we're all upset...
...It's the principle of the thing...
...government conference organized by the Department of Health and Human Services and attended by HHS officials, and grantees of the department's Center for Substance Abuse and Prevention...
...The Paris city council even made him an honorary citizen last year, the first person to have received that distinction since Pablo Picasso, in 1971...
...Funny thing, though...
...The same goes for the famous critic of feminism, Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who was recently invited to address a U.S...
...None of those jurisprudential amateurs—many of them heroes of the left—was able to find fault with the sentencing...
...Really...
...To be fair to the students, they had learned after four years to sit through inanity with their mouths shut...
...So Yohn has ordered a new sentencing hearing for Abu-Jamal within 180 days, or, the judge wrote, the cop-killer will remain in prison for life...
...Antioch College honored Abu-Jamal by choosing him as the school's commencement speaker last spring...
...The brief version of the crime goes like this: Abu-Jamal's brother was stopped by Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner on Dec...
...But even more fundamentally and troubling, they attacked Yasser Arafat and his authority to lead the Palestinian people toward a cease-fire and a process of peace...
...What Did Hamas Do Wrong...
...First, "CSAP official Linda Bass summarily interrupted, and commanded Sommers to end her talk...
Vol. 7 • December 2001 • No. 16
