PHILADELPHIA — Prosecutors on Wednesday abandoned their 30-year push to execute convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther whose claim that he was the victim of a racist legal system made him a global cause celèbre. Abu-Jamal, 58, will spend the rest of his life in prison.
Standing with police officer Daniel Faulkner’s widow, Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams announced his decision two days short of the 30th anniversary of the white patrolman’s killing. He said that continuing to seek the death penalty could lead to “an unknowable number of years” of appeals and that some witnesses have died or are unavailable after three decades.
“There’s never been any doubt in my mind that Mumia Abu-Jamal shot and killed Officer Faulkner. I believe that the appropriate sentence was handed down by a jury of his peers in 1982,” said Williams, the city’s first black DA.
Abu-Jamal, who said another man had confessed to the crime, originally was sentenced to death. His murder conviction was upheld through years of appeals. But in 2008, a federal appeals court ordered a new sentencing hearing on the grounds that the instructions given to the jury were potentially misleading. After the U.S. Supreme Court declined to weigh in two months ago, prosecutors had to decide whether to pursue the death penalty again. The Associated Press
