>>> Note: By posting this information, The Memory Hole is not implying anything about the guilt or innocence of Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted of the 1981 killing of a police officer and sentenced to death. Frankly, I just don't know whether or not he's guilty. Miscarriages of justice happen on a daily basis, so it's very much within the realm of possibility that he was wrongfully convicted. Still, this a complex case, with evidence pointing in various directions.

One thing is clear, though: Abu-Jamal did not receive a fair trial. The bombshell revelation below makes this even more painfully clear.

he's innocent sites | he's guilty sites | Abu-Jamal's writings

X-Envelope-To: russ@mindpollen.com
Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2002 06:19:55 -0500
From: Common Courage Press <gbates@commoncouragepress.com>
Reply-to: postmaster@commoncouragepress.com
Subject: Blistering new evidence in Mumia Abu-Jamal Trial

Excerpt 1 from Dave Lindorff's explosive new book, Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal [Common Couarge Press, 2002].

Way back in June 1982, just as the Abu-Jamal trial was getting underway in Courtroom 253 in Philadelphia’s City Hall, there was a chance meeting by two pairs of people in an unusual setting. Here is how the scene was described in a declaration taken by Abu-Jamal’s defense attorneys on August 1, 2001:

“In 1982, a few months after I started working at the Court of Common Pleas, I was sent to a courtroom different than that I usually worked in because the judge I was assigned to was going to be doing 'VOP' [Violation of Probation] and post-verdict motion hearings there that day. I went through the anteroom on my way to that courtroom where Judge [Albert] Sabo and another person were engaged in conversation. Judge Sabo was discussing the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. During the course of that conversation, I heard Judge Sabo say, 'Yeah, and I’m going to help them fry the nigger.' There were three people present when Judge Sabo made that remark, including myself.”

The defense obtained this damning accusation against the presiding judge of the Abu-Jamal trial from a courtroom stenographer, Terri Maurer-Carter.

… Judge Sabo, contacted by the Philadelphia Inquirer about Maurer-Carter’s allegation, denied even saying what Maurer-Carter has alleged he said.

With this being just a case of a court stenographer’s word against a retired judge’s word, this story would likely not amount to much, particularly now that Sabo, who died on May 9, 2002, cannot be put on the stand and questioned under oath.

But there is more to this story.

Next: The judge who heard it all--but keeps quiet...

X-Envelope-To: russ@mindpollen.com
Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 05:42:10 -0500
From: Common Courage Press <gbates@commoncouragepress.com>
Reply-to: postmaster@commoncouragepress.com
Subject: Explosive new evidence in Mumia Abu-Jamal trial

The Judge who heard it all but sits in silence

In the last excerpt of Dave Lindorff's Killing Time: An Investigation into the Deathrow Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal [Common Courage Press, 2002], we heard evidence that the judge who tried and sentenced Mumia Abu-Jamal to death--Albert Sabo--said before the trial that "I’m going to help them fry the nigger." He was overheard by a stenographer, Terri Maurer-Carter.

Unknown to the Abu-Jamal defense team at the time they were presenting Maurer-Carter’s affidavit to [Common Pleas] Judge [Patricia] Dembe [who ended up rejecting the claim], a far more significant person had also heard Judge Sabo’s outrageous remark. In a series of interviews with Maurer-Carter, I managed to deduce the identity of the unidentified third person with her when the two pairs of people passed in the robing room of Courtroom 253. It was Judge Richard Klein, the jurist for whom she was at the time working as a stenographer. She explained that she had merely referred in her affidavit to three people being in the room with Sabo, leaving Klein’s identity anonymous, because she did not want to subject the judge to embarrassment.

In fact, there was a logical reason for Maurer-Carter and Klein to have bumped into Judge Sabo and his court clerk back in mid-1982; at a time when Judge Klein was working as a civil court judge, he and a number of his colleagues were asked to help the criminal courts clear away a growing backlog of violation of parole (VOP) cases. These involved convicted criminals charged with violating the terms of their parole and who therefore were facing possible reincarceration. Many VOP defendants are potentially violent or prone to escape. Because the civil court building did not have any holding cells or security systems, the hearings had to take place in the criminal courtrooms, which at that time were located in Philadelphia’s ornate but decidedly dilapidated City Hall. On a late afternoon in mid-June, 1982, Klein was assigned to Courtroom 253, the courtroom of Common Pleas Judge Albert Sabo, who at that time was just beginning the high-profile murder trial of Mumia Abu-Jamal. As Judge Klein and his court stenographer, Maurer-Carter, were walking into the robing room of Sabo’s courtroom, Sabo was just leaving for the day.

Judge Klein is a bit of a character among Philadelphia judges. A reasonably talented jazz drummer, his band members have included some of the very people he has sent to prison. He is also a scion of a local Republican family and is a second-generation judge. Klein, who was elected in November 2001 to the Pennsylvania Superior Court, is respected among local attorneys for his integrity. He stands out in a jurisdiction where too many of the judges—all elected and subject to periodic reelection contests—are little better than political hacks and patronage beneficiaries who, with donations to the local ward leaders, bought their seats on the bench.

In contrast to all this judicial mediocrity, Klein takes his work seriously. One time, after he had sentenced someone and gone home, he called his court stenographer and asked that a portion of the trial be read back to him. Asked why, since the trial was already over, he reportedly said, “I don’t know. The defendant seemed so stunned when he was pronounced guilty that I’m wondering whether maybe we made a mistake.”

In September 2001, I confronted Klein over the phone at his office with Maurer-Carter’s account of the incident, including her information that he had been present. He issued no denial. After I asked about it, he remained silent on the telephone for nearly half a minute—so long a time I began to worry that I had been cut off. Finally he said, “I won’t say it did happen, and I won’t say it didn’t. That was a long time ago.” He acknowledged having handled some VOP cases around 1982, but said he had no recollection what time of year it had been. A second attempt to talk with him two months later in November, right after his election to Superior Court, was rebuffed, and with good reason. His assistant said Klein couldn’t talk, “because he may be subpoenaed in this case.” (It is interesting to note that the judge himself raised the possibility that me might end up being subpoenaed to testify. The defense has to date not contacted him, as Maurer-Carter did not include him in her official account of the incident. This alone would seem to suggest Maurer-Carter is telling the truth about who was there when Sabo spoke.)

A prominent defense attorney who has tried cases before Klein, and who therefore has an interest in remaining anonymous, says of the judge’s initial response, “That’s a confirmation in my mind. I think Judge Klein is too honest to lie and say it never happened, and that’s why he’s saying it that way.”

The significance of Klein’s having been present during Sabo’s alleged comment to his clerk is enormous. Like Maurer-Carter, his account of the incident would be classified as hearsay, but it would be the hearsay of a sitting Superior Court judge. No one but Judge Klein himself knows what he would say if put on the stand under oath. But if he were to give the same account of the incident that Maurer-Carter has given, his words could be expected to carry some weight with any judge considering the matter, and could even lead to the calling of a mistrial. As American Lawyer writer Stuart Taylor, who watched Sabo at work during Abu-Jamal’s post-conviction hearing, says after learning about the judge’s alleged comment, “I have always (since I researched the case in 1995), thought of Sabo as a rabidly biased, pro-prosecution judge. But if he made that comment, he was even worse than I thought.”

But will Judge Klein ever be put on the stand to testify? At this point, unless the case is ordered back for a new trial, or for a new sentencing trial, the answer is almost certainly no.

That is a scandal.

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