Cop Killer Mumia Abu-Jamal's Lawyer To Top DOJ Post

Cop Killer Mumia Abu-Jamal's Lawyer To Top DOJ Post

Posted 01/09/2014 06:56 PM ET

 

Justice: The nominee to head the Department of Justice's civil rights division is a radical lawyer who fought to free from prison a cold-blooded killer of a Philadelphia cop.

On Dec. 9, 1981, Officer Danny Faulkner, 12 days from his 26th birthday, observed a car going the wrong way down a one-way street without its lights on.

He pulled over the vehicle, and the driver, one William Cook, got out of the car and began wrestling with Faulkner.

Moments later, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Cook's brother (aka Wesley Cook), showed up at the scene with a .38-caliber handgun and opened fire, hitting Faulkner, eyewitnesses said, in the back.

Faulkner returned fire, wounding his assailant, who got off several more shots, including the one that hit Faulkner in the face at point-blank range, killing him.

Police found Faulkner fatally wounded and Abu-Jamal with a bullet wound in his chest and his .38-caliber handgun and five spent shell casings. Four eyewitnesses testified at his trial. A jury sentenced him to death.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld his conviction in 1995, and in 1998 it refused to grant his request for a new trial. In 1999 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review Abu-Jamal's appeal.

In December 2001, a federal judge overturned his death sentence but upheld his conviction. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a second appeal in 2010.

The bullet in Abu-Jamal came from Faulkner's gun. The bullets in Faulkner came from Abu-Jamal's weapon, and the question of Abu-Jamal's guilt has never been a close call.

In a post on the Ventura County Star website, Faulkner's widow, Maureen, remembered Abu-Jamal, who, "when taken to a hospital after he slaughtered my husband, to remove a bullet shot in self-defense from my husband's gun, said in front of two witnesses, 'I shot the (blank), and I hope the (blank) dies.'"

His brother, William, has never testified to his brother's innocence though he was at the scene of the crime. Abu-Jamal himself chose not to testify in his own defense.

Nonetheless, Abu-Jamal soon became a poster child for Democrats and the liberal left as a symbol of the racial bias of the criminal justice system and of the death penalty.

One of Abu-Jamal's champions has been Debo Adegbile, President Obama's nominee to be assistant attorney general for the civil rights division at the Department of Justice (DOJ) to replace another radical, Tom Perez, who is now secretary of labor.

Perez, a leading La Raza advocate and opponent of Voter ID laws, was heavily involved in the dropping by DOJ of the voter intimidation case involving the New Black Panthers at a Philadelphia polling place in 2008.

Adegbile formerly held a leadership position at the Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF) of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

During Adegbile's leadership at the NAACP, Judicial Watch reports, he volunteered its services to represent Abu-Jamal, interestingly also a member of the Black Panthers.

Adegbile is a staunch supporter of affirmative action who opposes criminal-background checks by employers and advocates extreme racial-hiring quotas.

He has said he wants U.S. judges to ensure that "customary international law" is "the law of the land."
According to World Net Daily, he also was party to an effort funded by billionaire George Soros to push for a new, "progressive" U.S. Constitution.

Appearing Wednesday on Fox News' "The Kelly File," Maureen Faulkner said that Obama's nomination of such a person to a top position at the Justice Department "is like spitting on all our officers and our federal agents throughout America." Indeed it is.

Former DOJ official J. Christian Adams, who quit over the New Black Panther travesty, told Megyn Kelly Wednesday that "to defend a cop killer — by choice — should disqualify you from a position at the Justice Department."

Apparently not in the Justice Department of President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.