Mumia Abu-Jamal Hospitalized Right Before Trial on the ‘Silence Mumia Law’
The world famous, or infamous, (if you are a police brutality apologist), activist Mumia Abu Jamal, has just been hospitalized. The former death row inmate has been hospitalized, but for unknown reasons, according to his lawyer.
Attorney Bret Grote said Monday that Mumia is being held in the critical care unit of Pottsville, Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill Medical Center .
Mumia is best known for his journalistic coverage of the MOVE organization in the 1980s, as well as his activism as a Black Panther, before working to get the word out about police brutality and other issues as a journalism.
Since 1981, Mumia has been serving a life sentence for supposedly killing Philadelphia police Officer Daniel Faulkner.
After years of appeals, his conviction has been upheld in spite of a preponderance of evidence against that conviction. Mumia claims that he was convicted because the system itself is racist and presumed his guilt before the trial against him ever began.
Mumia’s attorney, Bret Grote says that neither he nor Abu-Jamal’s brother, Keith Cook, have been given access to see him yet. Serve The People Philly writes the following:
This abduction coincides with the date set for a trial, in Harrisburg, Pa., to overturn the recent law passed by the state of Pennsylvania muzzling the free speech of the state’s prisoners. Comrades and civil rights activists in Pennsylvania call the new law the “Silence Mumia Law,” as the state and the bourgeois press explicitly used the symbolic opportunity to silence Mumia Abu-Jamal, following his Goddard commencement address, as the rationale behind such a flagrant attack on all 51,000 prisoners in captivity across the state of Pennsylvania.
A spokesman for Pottsville’s Schuylkill Medical Center says he had no information about Abu-Jamal. A spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections declined to comment on the report. “We never discuss an inmate’s medical condition,” said deputy press secretary Susan Bensinger in an e-mail.
Activists are now calling on readers to call SCI Mahonoy Superintendent John Kerestes (570-773-2158) and DEMAND that Mumia Abu-Jamal’s family be able to see him!
(Article by Reagan Ali)