umia Abu-Jamal's 27 years on Death Row for a murder he did not commit
would have turned almost anyone else into an embittered, defeated man.
Instead, he has remained what he always was, "the voice of the voiceless,"
as he demonstrates yet again in his most recent book,
Jailhouse
Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A. (City Lights
Books, 2009.)
Through hundreds of essays, radio commentaries and now six well-written,
meticulously researched books, he has defied the walls that encase him to
speak out against oppression. His voice his heard weekly throughout the
United States on Pacifica Radio and his writings are read and admired
throughout much of the world. From the bowels of Death Row, where 3,600
others languish in the United States, Abu-Jamal presses on for justice, day
after day, year after year.
Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A. opens
a tightly shut door into the operations of the U.S. penal system by
chronicling the exploits of dozens of jailhouse lawyers both men and women
who have fought the injustices the courts and the prisons have dealt them
and their fellow prisoners. Their accomplishments, against all odds, have
been incredible. Their story is a story never before told.
For the vast majority of the 2.3 million prisoners in the United States
and for Abu-Jamal himself, the overriding, inescapable reality about the
U.S. justice system is that the law is only what a judge says it is.
As Abu-Jamal has found out through his long and tortuous appeal process,
"What published opinions claim, in all their legal niceties, matters
little." Although he does not reference his own case in this or any other
book he has written, valid constitutional legal claims that have won others
new trials have done nothing for him. It did not matter to the Pennsylvania
Supreme Court, a federal district court, or a U.S. court of appeals that the
prosecutor at his 1982 violated his constitutional right to a fair trial by
using peremptory challenges to purge 10 otherwise qualified blacks from
sitting on his jury. It didn't matter even though the U.S. Supreme Court
ruled in Batson in 1986 that racial discrimination in jury selection
was grounds for a new trial. (Abu-Jamal currently has a request for a Writ
of Certiorari before the U.S. Supreme Court on his Batson claim, a
request that marks his final legal recourse. If Cert is denied, he will
remain in prison for life barring clemency by a future governor of
Pennsylvania.)
Abu-Jamal himself is a jailhouse lawyer, who wryly notes that it is "the
bane" of the vast majority of jailhouse lawyers "to be able to help
everybody but themselves." He references a Pennsylvania case where he and
another jailhouse lawyer won a new trial for an inmate sentenced to death.
Given this new chance, the inmate copped a plea and had his sentence reduced
to life, a reduction that got him off Death Row into the general prison
population.
Becoming a jailhouse lawyer has long been met with retaliation by prison
guards and prison administrators. Even to this day, jailhouse lawyers are
the most discriminated against and punished by prison authorities. Abu-Jamal
cites a 1991 nationwide study led by scholar Mark S. Hamm entitled "The Myth
of Humane Imprisonment" that "found that no segment of the modern prison
population not blacks nor gays nor AIDS patients nor gang members
outweighed jailhouse lawyers when it came to prisoners who were targeted by
the prison administration for punishment."
The report noted that guards and administrators "had a standard practice
of singling out jailhouse lawyers for discipline and retaliation for
challenging the status quo." Abu-Jamal finds it telling "that those who, for
the most part, are most apt to use pen and paper rather than, say, a 'lock
in a sock' to address and resolve grievances, are the most targeted of all
prison populations." To this day, in every "hole" in every prison, Abu-Jamal
writes, "you will find some jailhouse lawyers who are there on pretextual
and frequently false disciplinary reports," even though since 1969 the
U.S. Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional to discipline prisoners for
representing themselves or other prisoners.
In that case, Johnson v. Avery, the high court rejected
Tennessee's punishment against an inmate for assisting a fellow prisoner
with his legal work.
No nation in the world incarcerates as many of its citizens as does the
United States. Right now one in every 99 people in the country is behind
bars. More staggering is that one in every nine black men between the ages
of 20 and 34 is in prison. Because blacks are so overrepresented in U.S.
prisons, Abu-Jamal sees the prison system as nothing more than a modern day
extension of the Slave Codes that prevailed before the Civil War and the
Black Codes that took their place in the South right after it. For the newly
emancipated blacks living below the Mason-Dixon Line, the Black Codes
criminalized various behaviors for which only blacks could be "duly
convicted." Black Codes made crimes of vagrancy, breach of job contracts,
absence from work, the possession of firearms, and insulting gestures or
acts.
President Clinton, a former constitutional law professor, signed into law
in 1996 two draconian measures that undermined what little recourse
prisoners have to post-conviction justice. One was the Anti-Terrorism and
Effective Death Penalty Act that made it far more onerous and difficult for
prisoners to file wrongful convictions claims in Federal Courts; the other
was the Prison Litigation Reform Act which limited the number of suits
prisoners could file in federal courts and flat out barred suits against the
state for mental or emotional injury. No longer could a prisoner seek
redress or compensation for psychological damages inflicted by sociopathic
guards who make sport of demeaning prisoners. Ironically, the ringleader of
the Abu Ghraib guards in Iraq was a former guard at SCI-Greene in
Pennsylvania where Abu-Jamal is incarcerated. "Long before U.S. Army Reserve
Corporal Charles Graner brought pain, humiliation, and torture to Iraqi
people detailed in Abu-Ghraib outside Bagdad, he was giving the blues to
prisoners in Pennsylvania, where he was known as a brutal, sadistic, racist
guard," Abu-Jamal writes.
Under the Prison Litigation Reform Act, the acts of mental torture
committed at Abu Ghraib, if committed in U.S. prisons, would have no
standing.
"Is it surprising," Abu-Jamal asks, "that a nation that began its
existence with Slave Codes, then continued for a century with an equally
repressive set of Black Codes, would institute, by hook or crook, Prisoner
Codes?"
Despite the Prison Litigation Reform Act, Abu-Jamal estimates there are
tens of thousands jailhouse lawyers practicing pro se for themselves and
their fellow inmates. They do this out of need, particularly when it comes
to challenging unfair prison conditions, and because the great majority of
prisoners are not entitled to court-appointed counsel post-conviction. In
the first instance, real lawyers are banned from representing inmates in
suits against prisons and prison authorities in every state but Arizona. In
the second instance, court-appointed attorneys for a myriad of reason, but
mostly relating to money have failed miserably in representing the legal
and constitutional rights of indigent defendants at their original trials.
As Clarence Darrow stated over a hundred years ago, "
the courts are not
instruments of justice. When your case gets into court it will make little
difference whether you are guilty or innocent, but it's better if you have a
smart lawyer. And you cannot have a smart lawyer unless you have money.
First and last it's a question of money
We have no system for doing justice,
not the slightest in the world."
Darrow said that if the courts were organized to promote justice "the
people would elect somebody to defend all these criminals, somebody as smart
as the prosecutor and give him as many detectives and as many assistants
to help, and pay as much money to defend you as to prosecute you."
Because the justice system in the United States has become so politicized
around "law and order" and has erected an entire industry to house those
convicted, the United States which represents 5 percent of the world's
population now incarcerates 25 percent of the world's prison population.
That would go a long way in explaining why there are tens of thousands of
jailhouse lawyers working pro se for themselves and other inmates and why
Abu-Jamal's latest book is such an important one.
