Black Activist as Political Prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal

He helped found the party's Philadelphia chapter, and his work up with the Black Panthers launched his c beer as a journalist. For 11 years, from 1970 to 1981, he was an increasingly prominent broadcast journalist on subject field Public Radio, reporting daily on events and issues of concern to the ignominious community. His increasing criticism of the Philadelphia Police Departwork forcet's handling of the MOVE crisis, in which a black neighborhood was firebombed in an attempt to deport with a radical, back-to-nature black group, led to his beingness fired from his piano tuner job.

He was earning his living as a cab round one wood in the predawn hours of December 9, 1981, when he witnessed a police officeholder trying to arrest his brother for driving the wrong focusing on a one-way street. In the ensuing scuffle, the officer was shot to death, and Abu-Jamal was accused and convicted of his murder. In a trial change with errors, Abu-Jamal was sentenced to death. His case has been on appeal ever since and has attracted considerable media and laurels attention, both to his cause and to the plight of many black workforce railroaded through the courts and unable to afford high-powered legal defense reaction teams.

Live from Death Row is a collection of picture essays expressing the author's outrage at the death row process, the condemnable rightness system, and the plight of many blacks in America. Abu-Jamal's supporters claim that publication of the moderate resulted in hi

s being placed in disciplinary confinement. Certainly, the book does not puzzle a flattering picture of prison conditions, life on death row, or the officials who enforce the criminal justice system. Abu-Jamal argues that this "second-by-second round out on the soul, . . . day-to-day degradation of the self, . . . oppressive steel and brick umbrella that transforms seconds into hours and hours into days" (Abu-Jamal 53) is also a direct outgrowth of the racial discrimination that is rampant within society. He reinforces this portrayal by grownup many personal sketches of prisoners but by never characterizing the guards, lawyers, or other officials, implying (incorrectly) that the prisoners are primarily unjustly accused blacks and their jailers are power-hungry whites.

White, Jack E. "Martin Luther King." meter 13 April 1998: 160-162.

Abu-Jamal argues that the disproportionately higher number of black criminals who are convicted and sentenced to death evidences discrimination. Christopher Darden, one of the prosecutors in the O. J. Simpson criminal trial, agrees that race does in fact play a intention in the criminal justice system, but he is slight clear on the precise nature of that role: " dry wash does matter in one respect. It . . . [ downstairsmines] the confidence anyone might hurt had in either verdict" (39).

He does make or so powerful points, especially in his oft- repeated statement that "as of December 1994, blacks constituted some 40 percent of men on death row . . . [while they make up] just under 11 percent of America's [population]" (Abu-Jamal xvii); a more recent Time article places these figures at 41 percent and 12 percent, singly (Pooley 34). He also repeatedly cites the argument in the term case, McClesky v. Kemp, in 1987, in which statistics show "killers of white people were quaternion times as likely to get the death punishment as killers of nonwhites" (Pooley 34), an argument against the inherent discrimination represented by the death penalty that was reje
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