Mumia Abu Jamal Takes His Fight for Freedom to the UN

FEATURING BRET GROTE - After nearly a half century spent battling the US criminal justice system, political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal is taking his fight for freedom to the United Nations.

The Abolitionist Law Center, Center for Constitutional Rights, ACLU, and other legal groups, are calling on the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to review the many miscarriages of justice involved in Abu Jamal’s 45-year journey through the US’s prison system. At age 72, Abu Jamal is among a growing prison population that has aged within a cruel incarceration system and remains behind bars.

Bret Grote is a founder and current legal director of Abolitionist Law Center. He is lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal and spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about this latest stage of Mumia's fight.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: Tell me first, and for our listeners, what they should know about Mumia Abu-Jamal. There is so much out there about him. There's documentaries, there's books, there's a lot. But if you were to distill the case for somebody who doesn't know why they should care about him and his quest for freedom, what would you say to them? 

Bret Grote: So, you had a couple of questions embedded there. Who is Mumia Abu-Jamal, and how to tell people about the case? And we certainly want to lead with who Mumia Abu-Jamal is. And we want to center that he is a father, he's a grandfather, and a great-grandfather. That he's a journalist. That he's an author, an intellectual, and a PhD candidate. 

He has also been one of the most principled, committed, prolific, and well-known opponents of injustice within the United States, a real public dissident for his entire adult life, and even as a child, when he joined the Black Panther Party as a co-founder at age 15. 

What people should know about the case is that he's been incarcerated since December 9th, 1981, when he survived a shooting by a Philadelphia police officer. The police officer, Daniel Faulkner, was killed that evening, and the city of Philadelphia, its prosecutors, district attorneys, and then the court systems in Pennsylvania and the federal courts, from that moment up until the present have bent, twisted, ignored, and not applied basic constitutional protections that are supposed to be afforded to everybody in order to ensure that he remains incarcerated.