Mumia was a prominent radio journalist who allowed the angry and anguished voices of the oppressed onto the air waves. In retaliation, he was framed up on a murder charge by the Philadelphia police.
In December of 1981, Mumia was shot by a Philadelphia cop and almost died when he came upon a scene where his own brother was was being beaten by that cop.
The police officer was also shot and killed, and witnesses saw two men run from the scene. Yet when police arrived, they beat Mumia before taking him to the hospital. When they discovered that they had a prominent critic of the police department, he was immediately charged with murder.
Mumias brother and witnesses at the scene were later harassed and driven out of town. No attempt was made to identify the men seen fleeing the scene. And the dead officer was holding the drivers license of yet another man. But it was only Mumia that the police wanted.
When people began to question the charging of Mumia, the police put forward the absurd story two months after the incident that Mumia had confessed in the hospital emergency room, and they had simply forgotten to mention it at the time or write it in their reports. The written reports and the emergency room doctor say this never happened.
Mumia was then barred from most of his own trial for protesting an incompetent court-appointed attorney who was later disbarred. Eleven preemptory challenges were used to knock almost all Blacks off the jury. Vital evidence was withheld from the defense, witnesses were intimidated, and the fatal bullet has disappeared from the police files.
The political motivation of the prosecution was made clear when the prosecutor argued for the death penalty by reading revolutionary quotes from Mumia's political writings.
In a recent hearing, a witness used against Mumia in the first trial came forward to say that she lied under police coercion. In retaliation, she was arrested in the courtroom as she stepped off the witness stand on an old warrant from another state that she knew nothing about.
All this takes place against a back drop of a massive police scandal in Philadelphia. Dozens of people have been released from jail because they were originally convicted on the basis of phony evidence fabricated by the police.