Aviva Chomsky is professor of history and Latin American Studies at Salem State College in Massachusetts. She is also a founder of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee, which has been working since 2002 with Colombian labor and popular movements, especially those affected by the foreign-owned mining sector.
Twenty five years ago black death-row prisoner and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal was arrested for the murder of white Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and later convicted in a 1982 trial that Amnesty International has declared a "violation of minimum international standards that govern fair trial procedures and the use of the death penalty."
"The history of the criminal case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, which is by now almost 25 years old, has been characterized by bias right from the start: against a black man whom the court denied a jury of his peers, against a member of the economic underclass who did not have a real claim to a qualified defense, and against a radical, whose allegedly dangerous militancy obliged the state to eliminate him from the ranks of society."
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019