Exclusive! New Test Shows Key Witnesses Lied at Abu-Jamal Trial;
Sidewalk Murder Scene Should Have Displayed Bullet Impacts
September
19, 2010
by: Dave Lindorff and Linn Washington
During the contentious 1982 murder trial of Philadelphia
radio-journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, a central argument of the
prosecution in making its case for the conviction and for imposition
of a death penalty was the trial testimony of two key eyewitnesses
who claimed to have actually seen Abu-Jamal fire his pistol
repeatedly, at virtually point-blank range, into the prone Officer
Daniel Faulkner.
This testimony about Abu-Jamal’s shooting at the defenseless
policeman execution-style solidified the prosecution’s portrayal of
Abu-Jamal as a cold-blooded assassin.
There was however, always the lingering question, never raised at
trial, or even during the subsequent nearly three-decades-long
appeals process, of why, if Abu-Jamal had fired four bullets
downward at Faulkner, only hitting him once with a bullet between
the eyes on the morning of December 9, 1981, there was no evidence
in the surface of the sidewalk around the officer’s body of the
bullets that missed.
Now two independent journalists have raised further questions
about that troubling lack of any evidence of missed shots by doing
something that neither defense nor prosecution ever bothered to do,
namely conducting a gun test using a similar gun and similar bullets
fired from a similar distance into a slab of old concrete sidewalk
similar to the sidewalk at the scene of the original shooting on the
south side of Locust Street just east of 13th Street in Center City,
Philadelphia.
Their test conclusively demonstrated it is impossible to fire such a
gun from a standing position into a sidewalk without the bullets
leaving prominent, unambiguous and clearly visible marks. Yet, the
prosecution’s case has Abu-Jamal performing that exact miracle,
missing the officer three times without leaving a trace of his bad
marksmanship. So where are the missing bullet marks? The police
crime-scene photos presented by the prosecution don’t show any, and
police investigators in their reports don’t mention any bullet marks
on the sidewalk around the slain officer’s body.
The results of this test fundamentally challenge the prosecution’s
entire case against Abu-Jamal since they contradict both eyewitness
testimony and physical evidence presented by the prosecution about
the 1981 murder of Officer Faulkner in a seedy section of downtown
Philadelphia.
Further, this test reignites questions about how police handled
and/or mishandled their investigation into the murder of Officer
Faulkner, quickly targeting Abu-Jamal as the killer.
For example, police failed to administer the routine gunpowder
residue test on Abu-Jamal’s hands to determine if he had recently
fired a gun. Such a test has long been standard procedure for crimes
involving gun shots. Oddly, police did perform this routine residue
test on at least two persons initially suspected of being at the
crime scene, including one man who fit the description of a man
numerous eyewitnesses told police had shot Faulkner and then fled
the scene. Police, finding a critically-wounded Abu-Jamal at the
crime scene, arrested him immediately, but never bothered to do a
test of his hands--or if they did, never reported the results.
While appellate courts – federal and state – have consistently
upheld Abu-Jamal’s conviction, no court has considered the
contradiction between prosecution claims of Abu-Jamal having fired
into the sidewalk and the complete lack of any evidence of bullet
impacts, or even of an explanation for the missing marks. Last week,
the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office curtly dismissed results
of this test, which shows such marks would have been impossible to
miss, as yet another instance of the “biases and misconceptions”
regularly presented by persons who have not “taken the time to
review the entirety of the record…”
For their experiment, veteran Philadelphia journalist Linn
Washington, who has investigated the Abu-Jamal case since December
1981, obtained a Smith & Wesson revolver with a 2-inch barrel,
similar to the 2-inch-barrel, .38-caliber Charter Arms revolver
licensed to Abu-Jamal which was marked as evidence at the trial as
being the weapon which was used to shoot and kill Officer Faulkner.
Meanwhile, journalist Dave Lindorff, who spent two years
researching and writing Killing Time (Common Courage Press, 2003),
the definitive independent book about this case, procured the
concrete test slab, a 200-lb section of old sidewalk, about two feet
square, five inches thick and containing a mix of gravel and a
steel-reinforcing screen, that had recently been ripped up during
construction of a new high school in Upper Dublin, PA. He then
constructed a protective shield using a wooden frame and a section
of galvanized, corrugated-steel roofing material purchased from Home
Depot.
A small one-inch-diameter hole was drilled through the steel
sheet about 18 inches from ground level, to enable Washington to
point the pistol barrel through and fire at the concrete without
risk of being injured by flying shrapnel or concrete fragments.
Washington also wore shatter-proof military-surplus goggles for the
experiment, so he could safely aim through the hole. During the test
a total of seven bullets, including Plus-P high-velocity projectiles
similar to the spent cartridges police reported finding in
Abu-Jamal’s gun, were fired downward at the sidewalk slab from a
standing position, replicating the prosecution’s version of the
murder. (A Penn State history professor knowledgeable about firearms
and ballistics including the construction of bullets, observed the
experiment from start to finish.)
After each shot was fired into the concrete, the resulting impact
point was labeled with a felt-tipped pen. Still photographs were
taken showing all seven bullet impacts.
The entire experiment was also filmed using a
broadcast-quality video camera.
What is clear from this experiment is that the bullets fired at
close range into the sidewalk sample all left clearly visible marks.
The three bullets that had metal jackets produced significant divots
in the concrete, one of these about 1/8 of an inch deep, and two
shallower, but easily observed visually and easily felt with the
fingertip. The other four bullets, lead projectiles only, left
smaller indentations, as well as clearly visible gray circular
imprints, each over a half inch in diameter, where the lead from the
bullets appears to have melted on impact and then solidified on the
concrete. Police crime scene reports list investigators recovering
fragments of at least two jacketed bullets at the scene (Faulkner’s
police-issue Smith & Wesson revolver was firing non-jacketed
ammunition).
When a photo image of these seven prominent impact sites from
the bullets is compared to detailed police crime-scene photos, the
absence of similar such marks at the crime scene is obvious. Even
the higher-quality photos of the shooting scene that were taken by
Pedro Polokoff, a professional news photographer who arrived at the
shooting scene within 20 minutes of hearing about it on his police
radio scanner (well ahead of the police photographer and crime-scene
investigation technicians), show no bullet marks.
The bizarre lack of any sign of other bullets having been fired
down at Faulkner raises a grave question about the truthfulness of
the two key prosecution witnesses, prostitute Cynthia White and taxi
driver Robert Chobert. As recorded in the trial transcript,
Prosecutor Joseph McGill made a big point of having Chobert, a young
white man, describe during the June 1982 trial exactly what he
allegedly saw Abu-Jamal do in shooting Officer Faulkner. He asked,
“Now, when the Defendant was standing over the officer, could you
show me exactly what motion he was making or what you saw?”
Chobert replied, “I saw him point down and fire some more shots
into him.”
McGill asked, “Now you’re indicating, for the Record, a
movement of his right arm with his finger pointed toward the
direction of the ground and moving his wrist and hand up and down
approximately three, four times, is that right?”
Chobert replied, “Yes.”
Cynthia White, for her part, testified that Abu-Jamal “came over
and he came on top of the police officer and shot some more times.”
If there are no bullet marks around the spot where Faulkner was
lying when he was shot in the face, neither of these testimonies by
the two prosecution witnesses are remotely credible.
And there is another question. When the protective steel
sheet was checked after this gun test, there were deep dents in the
metal which were produced by either concrete fragments blown out of
the sidewalk or by bullet fragments. Such debris, large and small,
would have been embedded in Faulkner’s uniform and/or in exposed
skin, such as the sides of his head, or underneath his clothes, and
yet the coroner’s report and a report on the analysis of his police
jacket make no mention of concrete, rock or bullet fragments.
One can additionally speculate about why, if there were in fact
bullet marks in the sidewalk, police investigators at the scene
never identified and marked them off with chalk, and never
photographed them, as would be standard procedure in any shooting,
not to mention a shooting death of a policeman. Even more curious,
investigators did note, and even removed as possible evidence, a
bullet fragment found in a door jamb well behind Faulkner’s fallen
body, as well as gathering up three other minute bullet fragments.
These actions show that on the morning of the 1981 shooting
investigators were combing the crime scene looking for evidence of
bullets. Had there been impact marks in the vicinity of where
Faulkner’s body was lying, they would surely have noticed them and
marked them for evidence.
We provided our gun test result photo, as well as a crime-scene
photo showing the spot on the sidewalk where Faulkner’s body was
found, and where there should have been bullet marks in the
pavement, to Robert Nelson, a veteran photo analyst at NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California who is on the team
that enhances and analyzes the photos sent in from the Cassini
Saturn probe. Employing the same technology and skill that he uses
in working with those photos from deep space, Nelson subjected the
Polokoff photo to analysis and compared it to the gun test photo.
Nelson offered the following comment:
“When one shoots a bullet into solid concrete, the concrete
shatters at the impact point and creates a lot of scattering
surfaces. It contains many micro-cracks that scatter the light more
and make the impact area appear to be more reflective. This is
apparent in the white circular areas in the test image.
“When the police photograph image is brightness adjusted for
comparison with the test image, no obvious reflective zones
(shatter-zones) are detected in the concrete surrounding the
bloodspot. This result is inconsistent with the argument that
several gun shots were fired into the concrete at close range,
missing the body of the police officer and impacting the concrete.
There are no lighter-colored circular areas suggesting shattering in
the crime scene image.”
Dr. Michael Schiffmann, a University of Heidelberg professor and
author of Wettlauf gegen den Tod. Mumia Abu-Jamal: ein schwarzer
Revolutionär im weißen Amerika (Promedia, Vienna, 2006), a detailed
book about Abu-Jamal released in Europe, questioned a number of
experts about the missing bullet marks including the longtime head
of ballistics in the medical examiner’s office in Tübingen, Germany.
This medical examiner told Schiffmann that the notion that police
investigators might have somehow overlooked the bullet impact sites
around Faulkner’s body, or might have failed to recognize them as
bullet marks, is “absolute nonsense.” That medical examiner says the
marks would have been evident and identifiable as being caused by
bullet impacts even if Faulkner’s blood had flowed over them.
There are, moreover, other good reasons to doubt that White and
Chobert were telling the truth, or even that either one of them was
actually a witness to the shooting.
Chobert claimed at trial to have pulled his taxi up directly
behind Officer Faulkner’s squad car, which itself was parked
directly behind the Volkswagen Beetle owned by Abu-Jamal’s younger
brother William Cook, whom Faulkner had supposedly stopped for a
traffic violation. Though the trial judge, Albert Sabo, withheld
this information from the jury, Chobert at the time of the shooting
admitted to the court that he was driving his cab illegally on a
license that had been suspended following a DUI conviction. He was
also serving five year’s probation for the crime of felony arson of
an elementary school. Under such circumstances, one has to ask if
such a driver would have deliberately parked his cab behind a police
vehicle, where there was a risk he could have been questioned,
arrested by the officer, and possibly even jailed for violating
conditions of his probation.
In any event, there also are no crime-scene photos that depict a
taxi parked behind Faulkner’s squad car. Indeed, the official police
crime photos, as well as those taken even earlier by Polokoff, show
no taxi behind Faulkner’s car. Chobert’s cab’s absence from crime
scene photos raises an inescapable issue: either Chobert did not
park behind Faulkner’s patrol car as he claimed in sworn trial
testimony, or police removed his car less than 20 minutes after
arriving on the scene and before investigators and a department
photographer had gotten there...an action constituting illegal
tampering with the crime scene.
Further raising questions about whether Chobert was actually where
he claimed to have been during the shooting, a diagram of the crime
scene drawn by Cynthia White, plus a second one drawn by a police
artist following her instructions, show no taxi, though they do
show, in front of Cook’s VW, the extraneous detail of a Ford sedan
that played no role at all in the case. No other witness at the
trial except for White ever testified to having seen Chobert’s taxi.
Furthermore, if Chobert had witnessed the shooting while sitting at
the wheel of his cab behind Faulkner’s squad car, as he testified,
his view of the shooting, which took place on the sidewalk on the
driver’s side of the parked cars, would have been blocked by both
Faulkner’s and Cook’s parked vehicles. Making his alleged view even
more problematic, it was dark at the time, Faulkner’s tail lights
were on, and his glare-producing dome lights were flashing brightly.
As for Cynthia White, though she claimed to have been standing
on the sidewalk by the intersection of 13th and Locust, just feet
from the shooting, no witness at the trial, including Chobert,
claimed to have seen her there. Furthermore, White’s story about the
shooting changed dramatically over time, as she was repeatedly
picked up for prostitution, and each time, was brought down to the
Philadelphia Police Homicide Unit, where she was questioned again
and again about what she had seen. In her first interview with
detectives, she said she saw Abu-Jamal shoot the officer several
times before Faulkner fell to the ground. A week later, she said it
had been one or two shots that were fired before the officer fell to
the ground. A month later, in January, 1982, she was talking about
only one shot being fired before Faulkner was on the ground--the
version of her account that she eventually presented at trial.
Given the already problematic nature of both Chobert’s and
White’s sworn testimony, this new gun test evidence demonstrating
that there certainly should have been obvious bullet marks located
around Faulkner’s body if, as both these “eye-witnesses” testified
under oath, he had been fired at repeatedly at point blank range by
a shooter straddling Faulkner’s prone body, the whole prosecution
story of an execution-style slaying of the officer by Abu-Jamal
would appear to be a prosecution fabrication, complete with coached,
perjured witnesses, undermining the integrity and fairness of the
entire trial, as well as the subsequent death sentence.
Told about the results of the their gun test, and asked four
questions to explain the lack of photographic evidence or testimony
about bullet impact marks in the sidewalk around Faulkner’s body,
the Philadelphia DA’s office offered only a non-response, saying,
“The murderer has been represented over the past twenty plus years
by a multitude of lawyers, many of whom have closely reviewed the
evidence for the sole purpose of finding some basis to overturn the
conviction. As you know, none has succeeded, and Mr. Abu-Jamal
remains what the evidence proved - a murderer.”
Robert R. Bryan, lead attorney for Abu-Jamal, informed of the
results of the gun test, and shown a copy of the resulting marks on
the concrete, said, "Wow. This is extraordinarily important new
evidence that establishes clearly that the prosecutor and the
Philadelphia Police Department were engaged in presenting knowingly
false testimony to a jury in a case involving the life of my
client. The evidence not only demonstrates the falsity of the
prosecution's story about how the shooting occurred, and of the
effort to portray the shooting to the jury as an execution-style
slaying. It raises serious questions as to whether either of the two
key witnesses actually were witnesses to the shooting."
Courts – federal and state – have over the years rejected all
evidentiary challenges and all but one procedural error in the
Abu-Jamal case, despite granting legal relief on the same issues as
those raised by Abu-Jamal in dozens of other Pennsylvania murder
cases--including a few cases involving the murder of police
officers.
In contrast to these consistent court rulings declaring Abu-Jamal’s
trial to have been fair, the respected organization Amnesty
International and other entities and legal experts contend Abu-Jamal
did not receive a fair trial in part due to improprieties by police
and prosecutors. AI’s seminal February 2000 investigative report on
this case stated, “The politicization of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case may
not only have prejudiced his right to a fair trial, but may now be
undermining his right to fair and impartial treatment in the appeal
courts.”
The Abu-Jamal case, which has garnered international attention, is
currently back before the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals
after a remand order by the US Supreme Court to re-examine an
earlier ruling eliminating Abu-Jamal’s death penalty. It is also
back in the news with two new documentary films being premiered this
Tuesday (9/21) in Philadelphia--one, “The Barrel of a Gun,” which
concludes Abu-Jamal is guilty, and another “Justice on Trial: The
Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal”, which argues his innocence.
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