It is clear that the last question by Alva refers to Abu-Jamal and not to either Cook or Faulkner. Alva had posed the question whether they were in the street or on the sidewalk long before in order to bring out contradictions between Scanlan’s an White’s testimony, and indeed Scanlan had stated unequivocally60 that the Cook/Faulkner altercation had taken place in the street, not on the sidewalk as White had claimed.
With the “still at an angle” bit obviously also referring to Abu-Jamal, we get the following description of the beginning of the shooting sketched in the photo on p. 10: (1) After being stopped by P.O. Faulkner, Cook was spread-eagled by the officer on the hood of his VW; (2) he decided to blindly strike at the officer by trying a backward swing; (3) the officer pulled out some club-like instrument – actually a flashlight, see footnote 57 – and started to beat Cook; and (4) Abu-Jamal approached the scene from the parking lot and shot at the officer, but decided to do so not in the most direct and natural way, but once again – paralleling White’s account – by first getting in the back of the officer, which required somehow getting behind Faulkner in the narrow space left by Billy Cook and Officer Faulkner in between Cook’s VW and the Ford parked in front of it!
But the rest of Scanlan’s account of how Officer Faulkner got killed is just as strange. Even though according to him the officer was in the street when he was shot, he next
fell down on the sidewalk, and was laying there when the gentleman walked over with the pistol, and fired two times, striking the officer. I noticed he hit the officer with the – I noticed the bullet hit the officer, because his body jerked.61
The jerking body was, however, not the only detail Scanlan claimed to have been able to observe from behind his windshield, in the middle of the night, and from a distance of about 30 yards.62 Specifically denying that the police vehicle and the VW might have blocked his view, Scanlan insisted that he “had a direct view of where the Officer fell. I could see him from head to toe. He fell on the sidewalk.63 During direct examination, Scanlan was even positive that he saw Officer Faulkner being struck in the face “between the temple and the cheekbone on the right side.”64
Scanlan’s claim that he could see exactly where in his face Faulkner was struck hardly deserves discussion. But more importantly, given Scanlan’s position, a triangle covering almost half of the sidewalk area stretching from the back of Faulkner’s police car to the location where Faulkner’s head finally came to lie65 would have been in a blind angle – and all available facts indicate that Faulkner was found inside, not outside that blind angle.66
Furthermore, no discussion of what Scanlan might have been able to see would be complete without mentioning an alleged eyewitness who did not figure at all in the Billy Cook trial, namely, the second most important prosecution witness Robert Chobert. This witness claimed to have been parked with his cab right behind Officer Faulkner’s police car and to have observed from there how Abu-Jamal literally executed Faulkner.67
While a conclusive – as opposed to only likely – demonstration of the fact that Scanlan’s view toward the prone Faulkner was blocked by Cook’s VW and Faulkner’s police car has to await a professional crime scene investigation (CSI), replaying the events with the actual cars and precisely the actual distances and whatever, future tasks either in the context of a new trial or in case Abu-Jamal is denied this venue of legal redress, no such thing is even necessary with regard to Robert Chobert’s taxicab. Had Chobert’s cab been where he later was to claim it was, Scanlan for one thing most likely wouldn’t have been able to see anything of whatever happened on the sidewalk – but surely nothing that happened on the ground, with P.O. Faulkner “jerking,” or being hit, wherever, in the face.
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