Mumia Abu-Jamal Loses Latest Appeal for New Trial

Philadelphia, Jul 24 (RHC).- A U.S. federal appeals court has refused to reconsider the decision denying a new trial for Black activist and political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. In a two-page decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit denied Mumia's request for a rehearing of his appeal in the 1981 case. Mumia Abu-Jamal has been unjustly incarcerated now for 27 years. His lawyer, Robert R. Bryan of San Francisco, said he planned to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the case.

In March, a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit left intact Mumia's conviction but said a new jury should decide whether he deserved death or should be sentenced to life behind bars.
Deputy District Attorney Ronald Eisenberg said no decision had been made on whether his office would ask the high court to reinstate the death sentence.

Mumia Abu-Jamal and his lawyers believe that the panel should have ordered a hearing on their contention that prosecutors intentionally excluded Blacks from his jury in violation of a later 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision. They noted that one of the panel members, Judge Thomas Ambro, wanted a hearing held on that issue, though he was in the minority on that issue.

All three members of the panel, which also included Chief Judge Anthony J. Scirica and Judge Robert E. Cowen, affirmed the December 2001 decision by U.S. District Judge William H. Yohn Jr., who threw out the death sentence.

Yohn concluded that the jury might have been confused by the trial judge's instructions and wording on the verdict form filled out when the jury decided on death. He found that the jury might have mistakenly believed it had to agree unanimously on any mitigating circumstances -- factors that might have persuaded the jury to decide on a life sentence, rather than death.

The 54-year-old African-American political prisoner has been on death row since his 1982 conviction. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld his conviction and death sentence in 1989, and also rejected three other appeals.

Unless the U.S. Supreme Court agrees to hear the case, Mumia Abu-Jamal most likely would face a new Philadelphia jury to decide only whether the penalty should be life or death.