Final chapter
The long saga is over. And just like a book with an unsatisfactory ending, the case of cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal comes to a close without real closure. Not for Maureen Faulkner, wife of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner who Abu-Jamal murdered 30 years ago today.
On Dec. 9, 1981 Abu-Jamal shot the newly-married Faulkner during a traffic stop involving Abu-Jamal’s brother. He then stood over the wounded police officer and shot him again — between the eyes.
Abu-Jamal was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. But a federal appeals judge overturned the sentence, ruling that the trial judge had erred in his sentencing instructions to the jury.
Maureen Faulkner has spent three decades since in and out of courtrooms as her husband’s killer successfully dodged the hangman with the assistance of a parade of federal appeals judges. “Dishonest cowards,” Maureen Faulkner called them, who imposed their personal opposition to the death penalty on the public.
But they weren’t the cop killer’s only allies. An outspoken Black Panther and former radio reporter, Abu-Jamal used his jail cell as a de facto stage to campaign for support. He earned the sympathies of witless Hollywood stars with time and money on their hands, and they helped turn Abu-Jamal into an international cause celebre. The money rolled into Abu-Jamal’s defense fund, bankrolling his ceaseless appeals — a frustratingly long and costly process abetted by a legal system that seemingly protects the rights of criminals at the expense of the people they have victimized.
The end of the process for Abu-Jamal comes with Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams’ decision not to seek a new death-penalty hearing for the convicted killer. The decision came in response to this week’s federal court ruling — apparently, the last in a 30-year procession — ordering a new hearing. Williams had 180 days to make a decision. With Maureen Faulkner’s agreement, he made the right one.
Even if another sentencing hearing yielded another death penalty, the reality is that the case would go on — tortuously — for decades more. With the case now closed, there is at least some satisfaction for Faulkner, her and her dead husband’s family, and their many supporters. Officially off death row with his sentence commuted to life in prison with no possibility of parole, Abu-Jamal will leave the relative safety of solitary confinement and be admitted to the general prison population.
“I am heartened by the thought that he will finally be taken from the protected cloister he has been living in all these years and begin living among his own kind — the thugs and common criminals that infest our prisons,” Faulkner said. She vowed that she “will now fight with every ounce of energy I have to see to it that Mumia Abu-Jamal receives absolutely no special treatment…”
If only that had been the case from the beginning. Instead, Maureen Faulkner has spent most of her life tortured by her husband’s murderer, his misinformed supporters and a babbling batch of heartless allies on the federal bench.