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Vol.63/No.38       November 1, 1999 
 
 
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!  
{editorial} 
 
 
Pickets, public speak outs, and workers' forums are what's needed right now to protest the latest moves by the state of Pennsylvania to execute Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Four years ago, Pennsylvania governor Thomas Ridge signed another death warrant for Abu-Jamal. Mobilizations and protests by thousands of people across the United States and internationally put a spotlight on his case and forced the state to back down at that time. Judge Albert Sabo, the infamous "hanging judge" who sent this Black worker to death row, himself had to sign the stay of execution.

Since then the bipartisan drive by the U.S. rulers to step up the pace of executions — part of broader moves to expand the powers of the cops and restrict democratic rights — has steamed ahead. Laws sharply limiting the right to appeal, like the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act signed by President William Clinton in 1996, spur the fast track to death. There are currently at least 3,570 prisoners on death row. More than 40 percent of them are Black — more than three times the percentage of Blacks in the U.S. population. And more than half of the human beings actually executed have been Black.

Eighty-two people on death row — one for every seven executed — have been exonerated since capital punishment was restored in 1976. This highlights the fact that under capitalism workers don't get a fair trial. Abu-Jamal's case was no exception — witnesses coerced, evidence withheld, inadequate legal representation, and a vicious cop campaign for conviction.

Abu-Jamal has become an emblem of the struggle for Black rights, for justice, and against the death penalty. He speaks out not only for himself and his case, but for the hundreds of thousands of other toilers who find themselves behind bars, exposing the brutal conditions in U.S. prison system.

Those fighting for Abu-Jamal's release and against the death penalty can win reinforcements today at picket lines, factory gates, mine portals, and farm communities, where the beginnings of a rise of a new proletarian movement is visible. This is where the forces will come from needed to stop the execution of Abu-Jamal and to push back the capitalist class's offensive against working people, including the death penalty.

The death penalty is a class weapon of the ruling rich against urban and rural workers. As a proletarian army —the initial cadres of which are already being forged today — emerges with an increasing will and confidence to confront the boss class for better living and working conditions, the government will escalate its use of force to smack down this resistance.

Every execution they can get away with, every frame-up or unanswered murder carried out by cops against working people, shapes the terrain for the big class battles that are coming. What supporters of democratic rights do today can alter that field of battle to the favor of the working class.

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!

Abolish the death penalty!  
 
 
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