Published December 8 - 14, 1999
- Village Voice
by Maureen Faulkner,
widow of Mumia Abu Jamal murder victim, Daniel Faulkner
Of all the one-sided, useless articles written over the
years about my husband's murder, Peter Noel's "The Fleeing Man"
[November 16] will be filed near the top. Mr. Noel obviously did no research
whatsoever. Not being a regular reader of The Village Voice, I can only
hope that his article is not representative of your paper. Regurgitating the
unfounded, disproved, and fictional allegations of phantom shooters, along
with the charges of rampant police and prosecutorial misconduct presented to
the court by Mumia Abu-Jamal's attorneys, without doing a critical review of
the facts is not journalism. It's propaganda. Had Mr. Noel looked at my Web
site (www.justice4danielfaulkner.com),
he would have realized that his "Fleeing Man" theory is easily
exposed for the fraud that it is with the witnesses' own testimony.
Let's start with William Singletary. Mr. Noel suggests that
Singletary is a credible eyewitness who saw a man other than Abu-Jamal shoot
my husband and flee the scene. Yet Abu-Jamal's current attorney, Leonard
Weinglass, had this to say about Mr. Singletary and his story at the 1995
Post-Conviction Relief Act appeals hearing: "This is a witness . . .
whose recollection of what happened on the night in question we believe to be
not entirely accurate. We believe his recollection today is not entirely
accurate. We believe his recollection which was given in a sworn statement in
1990 was not entirely accurate."
It's not difficult to see why Mr. Weinglass feels Mr.
Singletary's version of events is not accurate. Singletary claims that he
spoke to my husband and then saw him shoot Abu-Jamal in the chest—after my
husband had been shot point-blank between the eyes. According to medical
experts, my husband's death was instantaneous. Singletary also saw a police
helicopter hovering overhead. Big problem. The Philadelphia Police Department
had no helicopter in 1981 and nobody else among the dozens of other people at
the crime scene saw a helicopter. Additionally, Mr. Singletary admitted to a
highway patrol officer at the scene— who Singletary characterized as a
"personal friend"—that he was not a witness to the shooting.
Singletary stated: "I heard the shots, but I didn't see what
happened." Finally, Singletary never told anyone about the alleged
intimidation and abuse he now claims he suffered at the hands of the police
until nearly 10 years after the 1982 trial. Like several other defense
"witnesses," Singletary suddenly remembered this police intimidation
after he first met with Abu-Jamal's current attorneys in the early 1990s. But
to substantiate the "Fleeing Man" fairy tale, Mr. Noel accepts Mr.
Singletary as credible—despite the fact that no less than a dozen appellate
court judges and Abu-Jamal's own attorney have found him not to be.
Next, Mr. Noel suggests that Deborah Kordansky, a woman
living in a hotel nearby, saw the real killer run from the scene. However, at
the 1995 appeals hearing, when Ms. Kordansky was asked by Mr. Weinglass if the
man she had seen running was the killer, she stated that he was not. She
explained that after hearing the shots while she was watching TV, she didn't
go to the window to see what was happening until she was drawn there by the
flashing lights of police cars because she had thought that the shots were
simply "firecrackers." Then, "after police and news crews had
arrived," she looked down on the crime scene and saw "several people
running." She specifically stated that they were not running away but
were running as part of the chaotic scene. She stated: "I saw someone
running. . . . I didn't say away." She stated further: "There was a
man killed, there's panic. Someone was running, maybe two people are running.
Maybe three people are running, you know. There's police, there's news crews,
etc." But Mr. Noel is content to print the defense's twisted,
self-serving version of Ms. Kordansky's testimony without reviewing it for
himself.
Regarding Dessie Hightower, also invoked by Noel, much has
been made about his failed polygraph. However, the real issue with Hightower
is his original statement to police and his 1982 testimony. Hightower
admittedly was over 150 feet from the shooting in a parking lot behind a
building, getting into a car with his friend Robert Pigford when he heard what
he at first thought were firecrackers. He waited "for several minutes,
until the last shot was fired," and then he and Pigford ran around the
corner to see what had happened. When asked by police at the crime scene to
physically identify Abu-Jamal as the shooter, Hightower said: "I couldn't
say, because I didn't see the officer actually shot." Hightower did say
that "for a second or two" he saw a person run in the opposite
direction from him. He said that the person he saw—obviously a different
person than Kordansky saw—was "wearing a red-and-black striped sweater,
with dreadlocks . . . maybe 5'9" or 5'10"." Several
eyewitnesses to my husband's murder said that Mumia Abu-Jamal ran a few feet
after he shot my husband in the head (in what would have been the opposite
direction of the position in which Mr. Hightower was standing) and that
Abu-Jamal then fell to the ground, where he was apprehended by police. Guess
what the dreadlocked, 5'10" Abu-Jamal was wearing that morning? A
red-and-black striped jacket. Dessie Hightower did see the shooter run. The
shooter's name was Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Conspicuously absent from Noel's list of witnesses
presented by the defense in 1995 was Robert Harkins—who undoubtedly was an
eyewitness to the murder. In fact, Mr. Weinglass places him "closest to
the shooting." Though Harkins filed a witness statement the morning of
the shooting, he was not called by either side to testify in 1982. For 15
years, Harkins refused to speak to either side. Then, in 1995, the defense put
Harkins on the stand under the guise of asking him about photos of suspects
the police had allegedly shown him. Dan Williams, one of Abu-Jamal's
attorneys, asked Harkins what had happened. Harkins said the shooter stood
over my husband as he lay wounded, unarmed, and helpless on the sidewalk, shot
him point-blank in the face, and then "walked and sat down on the
curb." The stunned Mr. Williams asked Harkins: "The guy that done
the shooting walked and sat down on the curb?" Harkins replied:
"Yes, on the pavement." Harkins's testimony corroborates the
testimony of the four prosecution eyewitnesses (including Cynthia White,
mentioned by Noel, who allegedly was coerced by police), and completely
destroys Mr. Noel's "Fleeing Man" theory. But not a word of Harkins
in Noel's article.
Finally, in 1998, after reviewing the actual facts of my
husband's murder for more than three years, the nine-member Supreme Court of
Pennsylvania unanimously agreed that there was no credible evidence or
testimony pointing to Abu-Jamal's innocence. It also unanimously confirmed the
fairness of the trial proceedings and the appropriateness of Judge Albert
Sabo's conduct when he tried to maintain order in his courtroom during the
relentless and contemptuous temper tantrums and disruptions by Abu-Jamal. In
its decision, the Supreme Court also chastised Abu-Jamal's attorneys no less
than half a dozen times, stating that "Appellant's recitation of the
trial evidence was distorted or incomplete." The Supreme Court called the
defense's corruption and coercion evidence "absurd."
Apparently, none of this is important to Mr. Noel.
Maureen Faulkner
Los Angeles, California
visits since 12/12/99
