Justice For Daniel Faulkner

Twenty five years after his murder, Danny Faulkner is still without justice. 

On December 9th, 1981, Danny Faulkner was a Philadelphia police officer who was murdered by Mumia Abu-Jamal.  In 1982 Mumia was afforded a trial by his peers which led to his conviction and the application of the death sentence.  In 1989 the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court upheld his conviction, which they also did in 1995, 1996, and 1997.  He was even given an opportunity to raise new evidence.  He then moved onto the Federal courts and in 2001 the judge upheld the conviction and rejected 28 of 29 defense arguments.

And the circus continues.  

On May 17th ANOTHER hearing was held in which Mumia’s lawyer argued that the jury was tainted due to the fact not enough blacks were on it, the single defense argument the earlier federal judge had not rejected:

A federal appeals court heard conflicting legal arguments this morning on whether Philadelphia’s most notorious death-row inmate received a fair trial in 1982 when he was convicted of killing police officer Daniel Faulkner.

The court proceeding marks a turning point in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former radio reporter and Black Panther who has been trying to escape the death penalty for 25 years.

If the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upholds the death sentence, Abu-Jamal would be more at risk of execution than at any point in the last 25 years.

Yup, he is playing his last hole card…..that being the race card.  Shocker, I know.

"… the judges suggested they needed to know the racial makeup of the approximately 150-person jury pool before they could determine whether the  selection had been biased.

No such record exists. "We’re a day late and a dollar short with that issue, unfortunately," Bryan said."

More then a few days….over 9200 days short actually.

Meanwhile the usual assortment of idiots showed up to the hearing.  Washed up stars who cry racism at every passing taxi, anarchists, marxists of every color and creed peddling their books against a capitalist system that allows them to make money off the very same books, REAL racist Farrakhan types shoving their fists in the air, and many others you can imagine. 

But lost in all this is the family of Daniel Faulkner. 

Stamps were 20 cents; Luke had finally married Laura on General Hospital; Olivia Newton-John’s "Physical" was atop the charts. President Reagan, nearing the end of his first year in office, was enabling an expansion by the CIA into domestic counterintelligence. And Danny Faulkner liked to spend his Sunday afternoons watching another "Dan" – Dan Fouts – throw touchdowns for the Chargers in San Diego.

In the intervening quarter-century, many Faulkner family members have passed without closure, due to a delay initiated by death-penalty opponents. Danny’s mother, Mary, was alive when he was killed and attended every day of the murder trial before passing a few years thereafter. (His father, Thomas, a trolley driver, died when Danny was a boy.) All Danny Faulkner’s siblings were still alive at the time of his tragic death, but today, only two are with us: Larry and Pat. Maureen Faulkner, Danny’s wife, is very much alive, but both of her parents, who agonizingly accompanied her to trial in 1982, have passed.

Meanwhile, the man who heaped tragedy upon everyone related to the Philly cop still lives, albeit behind bars. Abu-Jamal is now 53.

And Daniel’s wife Maureen still suffers:

"This process is obscene in the way it taints the survivors’ lives for so long. You can never move on. There’s never any closure: just endless rounds of hearings and motions made by new batches of crusading attorneys. This case has now even tainted the lives of Danny’s nieces and nephews, who were just little children when Jamal murdered Danny. It gets out that you are the niece or nephew of Danny Faulkner, and people treat you differently. Sometimes better, sometimes worse, but they can’t get away from it. And now some of them will be standing in the courtroom in place of their uncles, who have lived their lives and passed on. And Jamal is still alive on death row writing books and mugging for the camera. It’s all so wrong."

But this is the world we live in.  Murderers become celebrities and celebrities do everything they can to set them free while paying no attention to the victims and to the victims families.  Black power groups rush to the aid of the convicted murderer and make them their hero.  This is the world we live in….

It is rather shameful that Daniel Faulkner’s name will make appearances throughout this latest episode of absurdity only as a back-drop to the worship of Jamal. For Mumia loyalists Faulkner is more a prop than a human being. He is, depending upon who you talk to and when, either a decent cop who was about to lay down the hammer on a gang of corrupt Officers, or he was a racist, violent, maniac who got what was coming to him. It is as if he is just a name to be placed in whatever conspiracy theory is fashionable at the time. There seems to be no acceptance that this was a man who had dreams, hopes, aspirations, or value as a person.

It seems impossible for Mumia supporters to accept the fact that Faulkner was a human being who was doing a difficult job, in a difficult place, and who was murdered by a man who let his rage, or psychosis, or cult addiction, get the better of him. It is as if having Faulkner dead is not enough.

For Jamal supporters to be satisfied, he must be killed in various situations, under sorted circumstances again and again for the pleasure of Mr. Jamal and his revolving door of legal advisors.

I recall very clearly when I was with MOVE the mocking derision hurled at the Faulkner family in general, and Maureen Faulkner in particular. It was said often around MOVE that Danny Faulkner was a wife-beater and a ****-monger and that on the night Maureen was told of his death that she closed the blinds and celebrated.

As cruel and unabashedly tasteless is MOVE’s sense of entertainment, they have also cashed in on the whole "Free Mumia" phenomena with similar gusto. They will no doubt be attempting to squeeze any bit of cash that they can during this week’s hearings while pimping the idea that Jamal’s life is in so much danger, without mentioning that the only people executed in PA have been those who have abandoned their appeals.

Whatever one thinks of the death penalty, it is pretty obvious that Mumia is much more likely to die of a heart attack than he is to meet his end at the hands of an executioner.

And that, my friends, sucks…..

Please visit the Daniel Faulkner website for more information and also check out The Anti MOVE Blog.

Curt

See author page