Just another nerd.
For Father’s Day my wife ordered something that didn’t arrive in time, and she refused to divulge exactly what the gift was. For me this is the ultimate torture — I absolutely despise any sort of surprises (when I buy gifts for people I usually end up giving them early before the birthday or whatever since I simply can’t stand the suspense.)
Anyway, it finally arrived last week and was better than even I had hoped for — the complete Star Wars Pez collection:
Executing Justice: An Inside Account of the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal
By Daniel Williams
The controversy over the Mumia Abu-Jamal case has always puzzled me. Sometime around 4 a.m. on Dec. 9, 1981, somebody puts a bullet through the head of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, who dies instantaneously. Abu-Jamal is found nearby holding a .38 caliber gun. When the bullet is removed from the cop’s body and analyzed, not only is it a .38, but its rifling characteristics are a close match to Abu-Jamal’s gun. Add to that Abu-Jamal’s well known anger at police over Philadelphia’s disastrous treatment of the MOVE movement and the fact that Faulkner was in the process of arresting Abu-Jamal’s brother, Billy Cook, and it seems like a relatively straightforward case.
In Executing Justice Dan Williams maintains that it is anything but a simple case, but for the most part his defense of Abu-Jamal rings hollow and is complicated by parts of the book which bring Williams’ judgment into doubt.
Of course, Executing Justice became part of the latest twist and turns in the Abu-Jamal case. Although he gave Williams permission to write the book, when he read an advanced copy of it Abu-Jamal was incensed and fired not only Williams but Leonard Weinglass and the rest of his legal team. Weinglass himself was very critical of the book. After reading the book it is easy to understand the reaction of both individuals.
For, Abu-Jamal his case has always been as much about radical politics winning a new trial. Williams, on the other hand, describes himself as uninterested in activist politics (though he is definitely left leaning) and throughout the book tries to distance himself from legal decisions made by others on the team, at Abu-Jamal’s behest, that may have played well politically but turned out disastrously from a legal standpoint.
The book is probably far more damaging to Weinglass, however. A reader who cares to take the time to compare Weinglass’s public comments and interviews on aspects of the case and compare them to Williams’ account in Executing Justice can conclude only one thing — at best Weinglass is often extremely deceptive when pitching Abu-Jamal’s case to the Left wing support groups. At worst, he’s an outright liar.
Williams does not focus on this aspect of the case, but on the other he hand he doesn’t hesitate to debunk common myths about the case such as the absurd claim that Faulkner was shot with a .44 caliber bullet (though he does rightly argue that Abu-Jamal’s original trial attorney was incompetent for not even investigating the autopsy notation that led to the creation of this myth).
But it is in the description of the internal disagreement over which witnesses to call where Weinglass really comes across as a liar.
Consider, for example, an interview that Weinglass gave to CounterSpin . CounterSpin asked Weinglass about an ABC News piece that argued Jamal was guilty. Weinglass told CounterSpin,
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.
The statement about Jones testimony is correct, though both Williams and Weinglass exaggerate her impact. But as far as Williams is concerned, Singletary’s and Jenkins’ testimonies were outright disasters for Abu-Jamal because their respective testimonies were obviously untruthful.
Singletary testified that he heard a passenger in Cook’s cab cursing police and making comments about an arson at a local newsstand that many in Philadelphia believed had been burned down by police. The only problem is that the newsstand arson occurred four days after the shooting of Officer Faulkner. In addition, Singletary testified that after Faulkner was shot, the officer turned to him and said, “‘Get Maureen’ or ‘get the children’ or something like that.” This too was impossible. Faulkner was killed almost instantaneously, and the gunshot did such severe damage there is no way Faulkner would have been able to speak.
Jenkins’ testimony was even worse for the defense, and Williams writes that he lobbied hard to keep Jenkins from testifying. She testified that she had been dating a police officer in 1981 who told her that police had framed Mumia, and that she had seen witness Cynthia White at the beginning of 1997 hanging out with this same police officer. The best way to describe this testimony is that it was absolute fantasy.
The officer she claimed to be having an affair with in 1981 was not even on the force at the time. If Jenkins talked to White in 1997 that must have been an extraordinary meeting since White died in September 1992 (after allowing the defense to call and examine Jenkins, the prosecution produced White’s death certificate — an enormous embarrassment that undercut the defense’s credibility).
And yet without missing a beat, Weinglass tells CounterSpin that ABC News was faulty for not presenting the claims made by these two witnesses who he thinks exonerate Abu-Jamal!
Of course Williams still ultimately believes that Abu-Jamal deserves a new trial and seems to have a very high level of respect for his client. On the other hand you have to wonder whether Williams is a good judge of character.
A group of Trotskyist lawyers who had Abu-Jamal’s ear pushed to have Singletary and Jenkins testify despite Williams’ objections. The conflict between these ideologically motivated lawyers and the rest of the legal team came to a head when the Trotskyists wanted to call a witness who claimed Faulkner was murdered by a hit man hired by police to cover up widespread corruption in the Philadelphia police department. Williams strenuously objected to these witnesses, as did others on the legal team, and eventually the Trotskyist lawyers were forced aside. Williams writes about this incident,
In retrospect, I feel somewhat ashamed for even thinking that Mumia would opt to pin his hopes for a new trial on such an absurd account. An innocent man on death row might grab at anything to get justice; but I should have had faith that Mumia would never get that desperate.
Remarkably, as I reflect on this particular episode, it actually deepened my commitment to this case and heightened my already enormous respect for my client. It became apparent to me that Mumia is far too honorable to propagate a lie upon which to build a case for his freedom.
Of course after firing Williams and Weinglass, Abu-Jamal immediately brought back the Trotskyist lawyers and has decided on an all-or-nothing strategy that alleges Faulkner was killed by a hitman hired by Philadelphia cops — the strategy referred to by Williams outright as a “lie.” For the first time in the 20 year history of this case, Abu-Jamal has even gone so far as to provide a deposition partially describing his actions on Dec. 9, 1981 that is clearly tailored to suit the hit man conspiracy theory.
It would be interesting to hear what Williams thinks of Mumia’s honor now, given events that happened after publication of Executing Justice. Still, Williams’ book does transcend the debate over Abu-Jamal’s guilt and is a is a fascinating look inside the legal team behind one of the most high profile capital punishment cases of the last decade.
Jack Lessenberry, the Ombudsman for the Toledo Blade, wrote a fascinating profile of Michigan animal rights activist Gary Yourofsky for that newspaper. After reading some of the quotes from Yourofsky, its scary that anyone takes him seriously (but people do).
Yourofsky has spent quite a bit of time in jail for various animal liberation acts, including two months in a Canadian prison for releasing mink from a Canadian farm. Yourofsky tells Lessenberry that he is $30,000 in debt and lives mostly off of donations. “[I’m] an activist 24/7,” Yourofsky said. “This is what I do.”
It gets better. According to Lessenberry, Yourofsky supports a large tattoo of himself wearing a hood and “displaying the symbols of the ALF, the Animal Liberation Front” on one of his arms. In addition Yourofsky has an exaggerated sense of self-importance, telling Lessenberry that he doubts he will live to see the animal rights movement succeed because, “I really think I will be assassinated.”
Not that Yourofsky particularly thinks violence is a bad thing. “…we must be willing to do whatever it takes to gain their [animals] freedom and stop their torture,” Yourofsky said.
Would it be okay if an activist killed an “animal abuser”? “I would unequivocally support that, too,” Yourofsky said.
All in order to achieve Yourofsky’s ideal. “What we must do is start viewing every cow, pig, chicken, monkey, rabbit, mouse, and pigeon as our family members.”
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals loves Yourofsky — they gave him $10,000 for an anti-fur ad which aired in the Detroit area dozens of times.
As I mentioned at the beginning, the scary part is that Yourofsky is taken seriously, especially in some of the public schools here in Michigan. As Lessenberry notes, “he is increasing demands on the classroom and lecture circuit.”
Source:
Activist devotes life to animal rights. Jack Lessenberry, Toldeo Blade, June 24, 2001.
Freelance writer Viktor Frolke has conducted several interviews with people associated with the animal rights movement for Salon.Com in which he throws softball questions and generally fawns over those he’s interviewing. Even with such a friendly audience, however, Peter Singer simply digs himself further into a whole with bizarre statements.
Before discussing Singer, though, its important to note the animal rights advocacy that Frolke slips into the introduction of the interview. Describing Singer’s views, Frolke writes,
His central argument is elegant and simple; a child might have come up with it. Humans are animals, therefore animals are in the same league as humans, and should be treated as such. By attacking what he calls “speciesism,” racism based on species instead of skin color, Singer raises the status of animals. (He is generally considered to be the founding father of the animal liberation movement and has turned quite a few meat eaters into vegetarians.) But, and this is the more controversial part, in raising the status of animals — or nonhuman animals, as he calls them — he effectively lowers the status of human beings, just as Charles Darwin did when he showed that all living things are biologically related.
I won’t dispute at all the contention that Singer’s philosophical views often seem like they were conceived by a child or perhaps a rebellious adolescent. But to compare Singer’s philosophy to Darwin’s theory of natural selection is an absurd claim. The claim that natural selection implies that human beings and animals are morally equivalent is just as spurious as the Social Darwinist views of the early 20th century that led to mandatory sterilization of retarded people and cast the poor and other as “unfit” from an evolutionary standpoint.
Animal rights activists would like to pretend that natural selection implies there are no substantive moral differences between species, but in fact evolution provides the converse — it offers an elegant explanation of why I value human beings I have never met far more than animals (such as my cat) who are an important part of my family.
Anyway, on to Singer. Singer is angry that people refer to him as a Nazi (Singer lost three of his grandparents to the Holocaust). The philosopher complains that there is an intolerance of dissenting views in the United States, and besides, they misunderstand his views on things like infanticide. But then Singer turns around and reinforces the worst aspects of his philosophy. For example, consider this exchange between Folke and Singer,
Frolke: Most proponents of the right to die would agree with your ideas about euthanasia. But you lose them when you suggest that it’s OK to kill a baby before it’s 28 days old, because until that time, it is not self-aware and “doesn’t have the same right to life as others.”
Singer: I wrote that in 1995. I have changed my position. Now I believe you should look at every individual case.
Frolke simply lets that go without a serious follow-up question. Shifting from a position that says its okay to kill any child before its 28 days old to saying that, after further consideration, such killings should be considered on a case by case basis, is hardly much of an improvement.
And again, Singer starts out by implying that he’s only concerned about preventing extreme cases, such as preventing massive medical intervention to keep alive an infant born without a brain, but then he turns around and endorses infanticide for what are trivial reasons.
Frolke: Maybe you’re not saying that the lives of disabled people are not worth living, but on a scale they’re closer to that point than you are.
Singer: There are so many more factors important to the quality of life. Maybe the life of a disabled person is much more worth living than mine. All I’m saying is that at birth you can’t tell that. It’s reasonable to say that a life with a serious disability has the expectation of turning out less well than a life without disabilities. And I’m not talking about intellectual disabilities. I can imagine that parents of a newborn that is paralyzed, that’s always going to be in a wheelchair, might decide that they don’t want that child and that they are going to have another one. That’s a decision I can understand.
This, of course, is why his critics accuse Singer of being a proto-Nazi. To say that its reasonable to consider killing an infant who is simply paralyzed and will require a wheelchair is abominable. It is incredible that a man with such a barbaric view is incredible.
Source:
“Professor Death”. Viktor Frolke, Salon.Com, June 25, 2001.