Forum Post: Re: Mumia

Is the justice system in this country fully functional? Absolutely not. There are serious issues ranging from the manner in which bail is set to the development of "assembly-line justice" in which plea bargains (which innocent men who are ill-equipped to win a trial may in fact take rather than risk a harsher sentence) to the woeful deficiency in competent public defenders (too few of them means caseloads that are so high that few cases actually go to trial) to the fact that you're actually more likely to find innocent men on Death Row than in the general prison population to the fact that the war on drugs almost exclusively targets young inner city males.

All of that is true. The fact of the matter remains that like it or not Mumia shot a cop and was in fact proud of it. Given the fact that the cop in question may well have been beating the shit out of somebody else there were extenuating circumstances, but even if that was the case the cop should have been hauled up on charges of assault, or at the very least disciplined for use of excessive force, not shot by a random passerby. The idea that what this man did is acceptable is not something we want to be promoting, intentionally or otherwise.

Accepting this man's endorsement to the point of putting it on our main page makes it appear that one of two things is true: either we're a bunch of lovey-dovey idiots who don't believe that there should be consequences meted out for committing crimes (which is not only patently false but really not going to sell well with ordinary people) or that we don't consider Mumia a criminal because we accept as morally just the shooting of police officers (which is even more false and makes for an even more inflammatory accusation).

Given the trouble we're already having with our image, embracing the endorsement of a convicted cop killer is a fast way to blacken ourselves even further in the eyes of mainstream America for no good reason. The letter needs to come off the site and Mumia needs to be told thanks but no thanks.