Here, a defense attempt to get information about the jurors in the pool out of which the eventual jurors would be selected, including information about race, was blocked by Judge Sabo even before the jury selection itself, even though a questionnaire, which the defense offered to pay for out of its own all but empty pockets, would likely have saved a lot of time in jury selection – and having a speedy trial was one of Judge Sabo’s purported main concerns.
This is the natural point to hop on to some important points about Sabo’s posture during Mumia Abu-Jamal’s 1995-97 post-conviction hearings, where the need for speedy proceedings was time and again an argument Sabo used to try to throw the defense in disarray, a practice by the presiding judge that ran like a thread through the nine weeks of the hearings:
· After the Governor of Pennsylvania, later Homeland Security Czar Thomas Ridge, had preempted the defense’s filing of its PCRA petition by signing an execution order against Abu-Jamal for August 17 on June 1, 1995, Judge Sabo, in a rare display of judicial sadism, refused to stay the execution until August 7, when the proceedings were already well under way. That meant that the prisoner moved into the so-called “phase 2,” which in turn meant that Abu-Jamal was stripped of almost all personal belongings, placed under permanent 24 hour supervision, and stripped of the right to use the prison legal library resources at a time when he needed them most.
· Judge Sabo used Abu-Jamal’s execution date repeatedly as an excuse to quash subpoenas of important witnesses, to deny supplemental petitions, to interrupt defense attorneys’ arguments, and even to fine and in one case throw them in jail. When he finally granted a stay of the execution ten days before the set date, he gleefully told the defendant and his understandably jubilant supporters: “Calm down, don’t be too happy because that’s only for this one.”
· In a stunning display of bias, Judge Sabo himself disrupted what is called “courtroom decorum” by allowing off-duty police officers to carry their guns with them into the courtroom. After repeated representations by the defense concerning this, at the hearing on July 31, 1995 he said: “They are in here for my protection. […] Any police officer that is in here is authorized to carry a gun, as far as I am concerned, 24 hours a day.” When defense attorney Wolkenstein protested “An off-duty police officer, in our opinion, should be treated the same as any other citizen who comes into this Courtroom,” he responded: “No, no, it’s all together different. […] I will make the decision who can carry a gun in this Courtroom and who can’t.”
· When on August 2, 1995 the defense tried to subpoena clerks from the Administrative Office of the Pennsylvania Courts as well as the Jury Commissioner of the County of Philadelphia as part of their PCRA petition argument that jury pools were not drawn “from a fair cross section of the community,” Sabo silenced attorney Wolkenstein and had her locked up in a jail cell instead. All subpoenas were quashed, leading attorney Jonathan Piper to state during the defense’s closing argument on September 11, 1995: “We have been precluded from presenting any evidence with respect to the racially-biased manner in which jury pools were selected in Philadelphia in 1982.” This is particularly stupefying since
· Twelve and a half years later, the 3rd Circuit Court of appeals (1) denies Abu-Jamal relief on the question of racism in jury selection because of an alleged lack of defense data on the racial composition of the jury pool, the very question Wolkenstein tried to address when Sabo locked her up, and (2) declares that whatever Judge Sabo did during the PCRA hearings can no longer be part of any federal review, including his move to block the defense from getting hold of the data that the court now demands.
· During the same day of the 1995 PCRA hearings, August 2, Sabo blocked attorney Williams from completing his examination of a potentially important eyewitness of the events on December 9, 1981, cab driver Robert Harkins, who described the shooting of P.O. Faulkner in a way that flatly contradicted the prosecution’s eyewitness’ testimony at the 1982 trial. When Harkins, apparently under intense police/prosecution pressure in the days before his PCRA testimony, for the first time ever claimed to have seen the shooter slump down exactly where the police claimed to have found Abu-Jamal, Sabo prevented any further examination of this witness by the defense. In the meantime, this has emboldened those for whom Abu-Jamal’s guilt is an article of faith to claim Harkins as a “fifth” prosecution eyewitness, whereas in fact everything else that Harkins ever testified totally contradicts the prosecution’s story of the shooting.
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