There's a saying in the criminal justice system: SOG (or SOP), which is an acronym for "some other guy." It's a catchall for anytime a defendant claims that he couldn't have committed the crime despite all evidence to the contrary. "I didn't shoot my wife--it was some other guy!"
Mumia's supporters have advanced this series of events: A black man matching Mumia's description but not Mumia entered the scene, after Officer Daniel Faulkner had stopped Mumia's brother in a traffic stop. He shot Faulkner, then he ran away, possibly leaving the gun behind. Somehow, Mumia got shot by Faulkner. Reading the Free Mumia movement's webpages, I am still confused as to how Mumia got accidentally shot.
There's a mental condition where a person believes that a loved one has been replaced by a replicate. It is called Capgras delusion. If possible, this is the case here, where everyone except the witnesses think someone else shot Faulkner, and the witnesses who did not confirm to Mumia's innocence were really witnessing a fake Mumia shooting Faulkner. The witnesses were thus wrong--or being coerced--into claiming the real Mumia murdered Faulkner. But no. It was the fake Mumia.
The police, seeing the downed cop and the wounded black man, decided the black man did the shooting. They proceeded to plant the same model gun (the model, a .38 caliber Charter Arms revolver, which Mumia also coincidentally owned) that the SOG had used, then they slid a shoulder holster on Mumia's body. To insure conviction, they told the witnesses what to say. He was tried by a racist kangaroo court. (It's biggest mistake, however, was probably allowing Mumia to defend himself. He was a political activist, not a lawyer. He delivered long-winded speeches and called character witnesses, but he could not dispute the evidence against him. He wanted to put the system on trial, but no sane judge would allow that; this was his trial.)
Why is Mumia such a cause celeb? Unlike most prisoners--whether white or black, regardless of era--Mumia is a well-spoken and literate man. A man of letters, and educated people can't possibly be "bad," academia teaches us. (Bad people speak incoherently and don't challenge conventional wisdom--wisdom like not inviting probable murderers to give speeches at your college.) The appearance of putting the Panthers or the Black Power movement on trial led to this backlash, even if it was necessary to establish a motive in the case. Philadelphia had notorious racial conflicts in this era, so it's easy to imagine that the judge and jury were trying to set up a heroic black man. Like Rodney King, Mumia came about at a time and place for Babyboomers to adopt him as a symbol of all that's wrong with policing and American racial relations, and the facts become irrelevant. Like all conspiracy theorists, his supporters first made up their minds about what happened, and worked backward to obtain evidence of their interpretation of events. Lack of evidence is evidence.
Mumia could never defend his innocence, so he has long positioned himself as a political prisoner. He is a martyr of American racism. Before he was about to be executed, he was prepared to die for America's sins. Give me a break! Of all the hundreds of thousands of blacks wrongfully convicted in our nation's 228 years, most of their crimes weren't as severe as murder--and most of them were factually innocent.
No comments:
Post a Comment