DEATH PENALTY REVERSED FOR MUMIA ABU-JAMAL

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals, granted Mumia Abu-Jamal’s writ of habeas corpus in so far as it reversed the sentence of death for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner.

After exhausting his remedies in the Pennsylvania state courts famed journalist Abu-Jamal, for the murder of Faulkner, filed a writ of habeas corpus in Federal Court challenging his conviction and the death penalty. The District Court and the Third Circuit reversed the sentence of death but upheld the conviction. Both Abu-Jamal and the Pennsylvania attorney general appealed to the Supreme Court. Abu-Jamal argued that the jury instructions wrongly instructed the jury that before it could consider a mitigating circumstance it must unanimously find the circumstance to be true. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction but sent the reversal of the death penalty back to the Third Circuit ordering it to reconsider the reversal in light of the recent Supreme Court case, Smith v. Spisak.

During the penalty phase of a capital case the jury must look at the mitigating circumstances and determine if they outweigh the aggravating factors. But the jury in Abu-Jamal’s case was told that it could not consider all of the mitigating factors, it could only consider those mitigating factors that the jury unanimously found to be true. This violates Mills v. Maryland. In Spisak the jury was told that it must unanimously agree on whether the mitigating circumstances outweighed the aggravating circumstances, not that each mitigating circumstance must be unanimously found to be true. As a result the court found that Spisak is not relevant to the determination of whether Abu-Jamal’s death sentence is upheld and it reinstated it original grant of habeas corpus reversing the sentence of death. It remanded the case to the Pennsylvania courts with instructions either to grant a new sentencing hearing or to sentence Abu-Jamal to life in prison.