Mumia again: Stephen Vittoria's 'Long Distance Revolutionary'

The byline in my Wikipedia entry used to read, "A strong supporter of cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal." The last time I looked, it had been edited slightly, but the message was still there. Unseen hands at work.

It's probably not how I would have summed up my life had I written my own biography. But, yes, I believe that Mumia, who is undoubtedly Philadelphia's most famous living citizen (there's a street named after him in a suburb of Paris), was wrongfully convicted in the 1981 street killing of Officer Daniel Faulkner, and that he does not belong in prison.

I also believe that he is a man of remarkable courage and resilience. His spirit wasn't broken by 30 years on death row in a 23-hour-a-day lockdown, and by all the other affronts to human dignity that attended his daily routine, a regimen designed to produce a person who goes willingly, if more slowly, to his death.

In the Nazi camps, they called such a person a Musselmann; on death row, they call him a "volunteer." But they've had no luck with Mumia. He has continued to speak and write from his cell, and to maintain a powerful presence in the world despite every effort to deny him access to it. You don't have to agree with everything Mumia says to admire how his voice has pierced the thickest walls injustice can devise.

Unabashed paean

Stephen Vittoria's new documentary, Long Distance Revolutionary, is an unabashed paean to Mumia's life and spirit. You can bet it will play better in Paris than in Philadelphia. Stephen Rea's Inquirer review and Karen Heller's column on the film's opening pretty much set the local tone: Not him again.

For the local establishment, Mumia keeps turning up like the bad penny in the city's conscience. Like MOVE, with which Mumia aligned himself after the 1978 Powelton Village shootout, he won't go away, and he keeps the volume up loud— morally speaking, because his resonant baritone is never raised in anger. Anger is something Mumia can't afford.

The film follows the standard documentary format: vintage footage and stills, including the Powelton MOVE shootout and the Osage Avenue MOVE bombing, with commentary by talking heads. Chief among them is the ubiquitous Princeton professor Cornel West, who provides the film's title by describing Mumia as a "long distance revolutionary," inferentially placing him beside such figures as Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela.

Which raises the question: Should Mumia be regarded as a political prisoner?

A non-political encounter

Director Vittoria obviously adopts this stance, but the film never really addresses a critical stumbling block. You can say that Mumia is in prison because he was a threat to the system, because Frank Rizzo targeted him, and so forth. But the legal ground of his incarceration is that he killed Daniel Faulkner during a street scuffle at 4 a.m. on the night of December 9, 1981, that he was found guilty by a jury of his peers the following July, and that that conviction has never been successfully challenged (although his death sentence was ultimately vacated). In other words, in the eyes of the law he is a cop-killer.

True, Malcolm X espoused revolutionary violence early in his career, and Nelson Mandela practiced it in the struggle with Apartheid South Africa. But there was nothing political about Mumia's encounter with Faulkner, except in the most exiguous sense. He came upon his brother, Billy Cook, being rousted. A tussle ensued. Mumia was shot. Faulkner was shot and killed.

Long Distance Revolutionary deals with this event in highly elliptical fashion. It notes that Faulkner was killed. It describes Mumia's savage beating as he was taken into custody. It cites the notorious alleged remark of his trial judge, Albert F. Sabo, that he was going to help the prosecution "fry the nigger."

Sidestepping the question

But the film does not suggest an alternative theory of the killing, even though one of its interviewees, Dave Lindorff, has made an exhaustive study of the case.

Given the film's presentation of Mumia as a hero in the struggle for social justice and a prisoner of conscience, it's understandable why it chose to sidestep the delicate question of whether Mumia fired the fatal shot. From Vittoria's perspective, the system set Mumia up, and meant to get him one way or another. Daniel Faulkner simply provided the opportunity.

For those reflexively disposed to adopt this point of view, nothing more need be said. But I think Mumia's guilt or innocence does matter, particularly for those who find much to admire in him, as I do. And I think the film errs in failing to confront the issue. This failure certainly makes it easier for Mumia's critics to dismiss it, and to reduce Mumia simply to the stereotype of a cop-killer.

Framed but guilty?

It's said in some circles that Mumia was "framed but guilty," meaning that he didn't receive a fair trial but was factually culpable. I trust that is not a sufficient standard for the law. Mumia's court process was a mockery of justice in every conceivable respect: the wrong venue; a stacked jury; a hanging judge who made no secret of the outcome he desired; coerced and perjured testimony; witness and evidence suppression; an absence of the most elementary forensic testing. The only thing the trial proved was that Mumia was present at the crime scene, the one element of the case not in doubt: He was lying there in a pool of his own blood.

The courts have refused to reverse Mumia's conviction for more than 30 years, despite the fact that the singular standard of "justice" applied to him has come to be known in legal circles as the Mumia Exception.

To take on all the ramifications of Mumia's trial would have required another film, but in glossing over it, Long Distance Revolutionary undermines its credibility for those not already of its persuasion. This is unfortunate, because it highlights the pervasive lawlessness of Philadelphia's police in the 1970s and 1980s, and the systemic injustice of its courts.

Rendell the lawgiver

My favorite moment occurs when a young Ed Rendell, then a rising district attorney, observes that the police would have been justified on the basis of Officer James Ramp's death in the Powelton Village shootout in storming the MOVE compound and killing every one of its 12 occupants. That's the fellow who represented the law in these parts back then, and went on to sign death warrants as governor.

Mumia Abu-Jamal has another perspective on the law. Writing from death row on the Rodney King beating case and the deadly riots it touched off in Los Angeles, Mumia argued that the four white policemen tried in King's beating should not have been subject to civil prosecution after having been acquitted of the same charges in criminal court, however dubiously. That, he pointed out, was double jeopardy, which violated a core legal principle.

That a black man on death row for killing a white policeman should rise to the defense of four cops accused of beating a black man is not the sort of thing one sees every day. None of us should rest until Mumia gets justice too.