Another Fraudulent Book On Cop Killer Mumia’s Innocence

Tony Allen takes apart the newest addition to the cop killer Mumia’s book shelf, The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal by J. Patrick O’ Conner (currently at 40,587 on the Amazon sales rank.)

A few other examples of O’Connor running roughshod over the facts are as follows:

• He claims that in 1978 that Police fired “10,000 rounds of ammunition into the MOVE house and that the nine MOVE members were convicted for the killing of Officer Ramp.” In another paragraph about MOVE, O’Connor claims that there was “no ballistics to prove that Officer Ramp was killed by a bullet from the compound”

The fact is that he pulled the “10,000 rounds fired out of the MOVE confrontation in 1985. MOVE members were not just convicted of killing Officer Ramp, but for the attempted murder of several other Police and Firefighters, some who were gravely wounded by MOVE gunfire, one of them disabled and forced into retirement.

Officer Ramp was shot by a gun taken from the MOVE compound. The bullet matched a MOVE weapon removed from the basement and was of the same type of gun MOVE members were observed with in the basement and purchased by a MOVE member. Ballistically speaking, you can’t get much more of a smoking gun than that.

• He claims that Mumia carried a gun because he had “been robbed at gunpoint”

Mumia purchased that gun two years and five months prior to him using it to kill Officer Faulkner. It was a gun he purchased well before he was a cab driver. I have also not ever heard of any police reports of Jamal being robbed. As a cab driver, working for any company, the policy would have demanded his reportage of such an event. Moreover, when the Police had secured Jamal’s gun, all of the rounds were reported to have been fired, a fact that neither Mumia nor his defense team have ever approached. Was he going to throw an empty gun at robbers? If he fired the weapon at a gun range, certainly staff would have recognized him and could vouch for him, just like the gun dealer had remembered the well-dressed, articulate, dread locked man, had from two years earlier.

• Although Billy Cook is mentioned numerous times in his book O’Connor omits a few key facts concerning Jamal’s brother

O’Connor leaves out the fact that Billy told arriving Officers that he “aint got nothing to do with it”, exonerating himself, but not his brother Mumia. He fails to mention Cook’s affidavit contradicts that of his brothers.

• Typical of all Jamal supporters, O’Connor thinks little of Jamal’s supposed “confession”.

Certainly, reasonable people need to ask just exactly why it took trained, Police Officers months to come forward with an allegation of a murder confession from a cop-killer. However, if you take the confession evidence in it’s entirety, it does gain a level of believability not so easily dismissed. For example, should Jamal get the new trial O’Connor and others think he deserve, he will have to deal with a whole new set of issues regarding the confession.

A problem for Jamal lay in the sheer number of “earwitnesses” who heard Jamal confess in one fashion or another. Priscilla Durham, Officer Alphonse Giordano, Officer Gary Bell, Officer Thomas Bray, Officer Gary Wakshul, Officer Tom Brady, and NBC Producer Kathleen Gerrow all made statements to the effect that Jamal confessed to killing Officer Faulkner.

Back in 1981, Kathleen Gerrow was a radio reporter when she went to the hospital to cover the story when she heard a very distinctive voice shouting, ‘I shot the mother f—-er, I shot the mother f—-er,” said Gerrow. That voice, Gerrow said, belonged to Abu-Jamal.

In total, that means that seven people who allegedly heard Jamal confess. Are they all lying?

• Chapter 32 of O’Connor’s book asks the question “Was Faulkner An FBI Informant”. Although he admits himself that this was “highly unlikely”, he follows crackpot, former Jamal attorney Rachel Wolkenstein right down the conspiratorial rabbit hole when he casually reprints her hearsay, alleged anecdotes, and un-named sources, that combined amount to nothing more than the desperation of a crack-pot attorney who was just lucky to be where she was at the time.

  To add insult to injury, O’Connor lists two Philadelphia Police Officers that he believes were killed “under circumstances suggesting a directed hit”.

In May of 1985, not long after the MOVE confrontation on Osage Avenue, Police Officer Thomas Trench was shot while sitting in his patrol car. To O’Connor this must have been a “hit” and further evidence that Officer Faulkner may have been done in the same way. There is a problem with this alleged “hit” scenario. The now twice convicted murderer of P.O. Trench, Willfredo Santiago was not out to silence an informant or a corrupt cop, but rather was out to settle a score with another police officer who had been driving the same patrol car — number 912 — just hours earlier, and that Santiago rode up on a bike and shot Trench in the face. It was a case of mistaken identity that has nothing at all to do with Officer Faulkner of Mumia.

The other Police Officer mentioned by O’Connor was Police Officer James Mason. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get much in the way of information in the media regarding Officer Mason. I did, however, manage to get in contact with a Police Officer who actually had worked in the same district as Officer Mason and was sadly familiar with the circumstances of Mason’s murder. He sent me the following statement on the matter:

“Officer James Mason and Officer Singletary were finished handling a “Disturbance House” radio call on 36th street. The house faced the Mantua Hall housing project. The building “was” 18 floors high and a juvenile was in his apartment window with a rifle. He has discovered the rifle under his mother’s bed and was playing with it and pointing it out the window. The juvenile was watching the police activity across the street and when the two Police Officers had returning to their police vehicle and were filling out paperwork. The juvenile fired the rifle and the bullet struck Officer Mason in the side of the head. He was pronounced dead on arrival at Presbyterian Hospital. The courts found the juvenile guilty of manslaughter and he was sent to a juvenile home until he was 19 years old. He was 15-16 years old at the time of the shooting.”

Clearly, O’Connor, has not just shown himself to care nothing for facts, but also a callous disregard for the families of murder victims other than just the family of Officer Faulkner. His fatuous and disingenuous attempts to link the completely unrelated murders of James Mason and Thomas Trench with that of Daniel Faulkner make that much clear. More than just a poor writer and an inveterate liar, he has shown himself to be a pitiful researcher who has just cut and pasted enough pro-Mumia blather to cobble together a book. Victims, truth, reality be dammed

• O’Connor paints Jamal as a man of “peaceable nature” and notes how shocked Jamal’s friends were at the news that he was arrested and charged with murder.

…Jamal’s own animus towards the Police is hardly a secret and his youth wasn’t exactly the one of a perpetual, spiritual quest, and naive political acts. In his Black Panther days, 11 years before shooting Officer Faulkner, he was writing that he was feeling like “putting down the pen” and implored readers of a Black Panther Party publication to “write epitaphs for pigs”. In addition to idolizing MOVE members who killed cops, Mumia to this day, still adores Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton. The former black militant, turned crack addict, was gunned down in during a drug dispute in 1989, yet his luster has not been diminished in Mumia’s eyes. Like his MOVE heroes, Newton gunned down Police Officer John Frey, but after careful and very good legal maneuvering, Newton was able to walk out of jail after only three years. Incidentally, Newton’s account of the Police shooting was very similar to Jamal’s 2001 affidavit. Prior to his death, Newton would beat another murder rap, this one for the “alleged” killing of a 17 year old prostitute after two trials ended in deadlocked juries.

Even before Jamal’s days as a Panther and MOVE supporter, it appears he was enamored by violence and may have participated in gang violence. During his 1995 hearing, one of Jamal’s own witnesses, a man named Arnold Howard, blurted out that he and Mumia “used to gang war together”, so much for Mumia’s life of non-violence.

The fact of the matter is the Mumia morons have tried to come up with excuse after excuse on why Mumia is innocent. Take for example the lie that there were four eyewitnesses to the shooting who say someone else shot Officer Faulkner.

Other witnesses, whom the court-appointed attorney couldn’t produce during the trial, also reported seeing a man flee the scene after the shooting. In all, four witnesses situated in four separate locations on the street reported seeing the shooter flee, and all had him going in precisely the same direction. Nonetheless, no police investigation was made to locate or identify the fleeing suspect.

The witnesses? Deborah Kordansky, Robert Chobert, Veronica Jones and Desie Hightower.

Out of the four it was later found that only one, Robert Chobert, witnessed the shooting and he has consistently identified Mumia as the shooter. The other three have admitted they did not witness the shooting at all.

1. Debra Kordansky

Ms. Kordansky stated that she was in her bedroom watching TV when the shooting occurred. In her original statement to police she said that she “didn’t go to her window until drawn there by the flashing lights of the police cars that had already arrived on the scene”. She also stated while looking out her window, she saw “someone run.” While being questioned by Leonard Weinglass at the 1995 PCRA hearing, Kordansky specifically stated that this person “was not the shooter” and that “they ran after police had already arrived”. (N.T. 8/3/95, 248-249)

2. Desie Hightower

Mr. Hightower stated that he was down the street, behind a building in a parking lot, getting into a car when the shooting occurred. When asked by police at the scene if he could identify Jamal as the shooter Hightower told them, “I couldn’t say, because I didn’t see the officer actually shot.” (N.T. 6/28/82, 28.131)

3. Veronica Jones

Ms. Jones has always stated that she was over 2 blocks away, around a corner and behind a building, when Officer Faulkner was shot. In 1996 she testified that she “waited for a few minutes” before looking around the corner to see what happened and that she then saw two men approach Officer Faulkner’s body. She further stated, “I was not there, I did not see him [the shooter].” (N.T. 10/1/96, 24)

Another of the dozens of conspiracy theories floated by the free Mumia morons is that the hospital confession by Mumia, where he said “I shout the motherfucker and I hope he dies,” is a fabrication based on the fact that the two transporting officers didn’t report the confession until months later. Problem is that a hospital security guard also heard it and reported the incident to her supervisor the very next day.

The conspiracy is that the admission never occurred. But how bad of a conspiracy could it be if the officers never reported it for months? Wouldn’t they have conspired that day and wrote it in the report?

If there was a skillful conspiracy, why was it so badly handled that Bell and Wakshul forgot to report the confession? It must be remembered that these are the same Philadelphia Police that Leonard Weinglass regularly alleges were so “skilled at framing defendants,” that they organized five supposedly phony eyewitnesses, none of whom knew each other, at the crime scene. In less than 20 minutes, the clever police conspirators got all of these people (even Robert Harkins) to agree to tell the same made up story about the shooting, and they did such a good job that all of the eyewitness accounts meshed perfectly and stood up under hours of cross-examination months after the event. How could such skilled craftsmen of framing be so effective at the crime scene only to make such a glaring mistakes with the “phony” confession?

Now, if that report about the confession had only come from the officers months later then there would be questions. But the fact that the security guard, a black female named Priscilla Durham, heard it also and reported it hours later demolishes the conspiracy.

There is plenty more where that came from at the excellent site Justice for Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Also, if you have a chance visit this petition to deny the MOVE 9 members parole.

The MOVE 9 were convicted and sentenced to 30-100 year jail sentences in 1981 for the murder of police officer James Ramp and for the attempted murder of seven other police officers and firefighters during a MOVE instigated 1978 shoot-out in Philadelphia.

At sentencing, Judge Malmed said that he found the notion of rehabilitation for MOVE members to be “absurd” and that each must share equally the guilt for the killing and attempted murders.

Soon, the parole proceedings will begin for the surviving eight members of “MOVE 9″ (one member of the cult died in prison in 1998) and MOVE has been attempting to pressure the parole board into releasing these convicted murderers.

Since the petition went up three of the MOVE members had parole hearings….all denied!