{"id":1200,"date":"2026-07-28T20:39:21","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T20:39:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/smartmovinghome.com\/?p=1200"},"modified":"2026-07-28T20:39:21","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T20:39:21","slug":"legal-team-of-political-prisoner-mumia-abu-jamal-appeals-to-the-un-for-support","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smartmovinghome.com\/?p=1200","title":{"rendered":"Legal Team of Political Prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal Appeals to the UN for Support"},"content":{"rendered":"
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World-renowned political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal is 72 years old, suffering multiple health problems, and may die in prison, say legal advocates in a that asks the United Nations to support his release. Abu-Jamal\u2019s legal team decided to appeal to the UN after having exhausted nearly every legal avenue for relief available in the United States.<\/p>\n

Abu-Jamal was a Black Panther and journalist when he was convicted of the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, and he has always maintained his innocence. His death sentence was overturned in 2001, and in 2011, Pennsylvania resentenced him to life without parole. Since then, \u201ceach attempt to secure Mr. Abu-Jamal a new and fair trial has been rejected,\u201d argues a submission his lawyer Bret Grote and others made on his behalf to the UN\u2019s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. <\/p>\n

Grote told Truthout<\/em> the filing, which UN rules limit to 20 pages, attempts to summarize nearly a half-century of the \u201cfailures of the criminal legal system\u201d in Abu-Jamal\u2019s case, including an \u201cunfair trial, a biased appellate process, decades of surveillance and censorship, and a death by incarceration sentence that has been recognized by the United Nations as violating international human rights standards.\u201d <\/p>\n

The UN determination of whether someone faces \u201carbitrary detention\u201d is interpreted \u201cmore broadly\u201d than simply being \u201cagainst the law.\u201d It also considers \u201celements of inappropriateness, injustice, lack of predictability and due process of law.\u201d <\/p>\n

Abu-Jamal\u2019s lawyers say he was in \u201ccontinuous solitary confinement\u201d from 1983 to 2011 on Pennsylvania\u2019s death row, before being transferred to the general population in a state prison called SCI Mahanoy, where Abu-Jamal\u2019s advocates say officials have denied him proper medical care. His legal team\u2019s submission to the UN notes he was diagnosed in 2012 with hepatitis C, which caused cirrhosis of the liver, and he later \u201cdeveloped a painful, severe rash covering most of his body, potentially caused or exacerbated\u201d by the disease, and then went into diabetic shock \u201cdue to untreated hyperglycemia\u201d caused by steroid treatment for his skin condition. It also cites UN human rights experts who raised concern when Abu-Jamal was shackled to his hospital bed in 2021 while awaiting long-delayed heart surgery.<\/p>\n

Abu-Jamal, a prolific writer who has authored 13 books, now risks losing his eyesight. <\/p>\n

\u201cI have been, for all intents and purposes, unable to read, unable to write, unable to see anything more than the masthead of a newspaper and not even its headlines; blurry television bursts of color,\u201d Abu-Jamal revealed in a 2025 Prison Radio commentary called \u201cMumia\u2019s Vision: A Message for the Movement.\u201d He explained he had \u201cbeen reluctant to talk about my eye problems\u201d because \u201cany sign of weakness is to be avoided at all costs\u201d in prison, since it \u201cbrings predation.\u201d<\/p>\n

His legal team\u2019s submission to the UN refers to medical records showing how in 2025 Abu-Jamal \u201cbegan experiencing a common and easily treated complication of cataract surgery\u201d that clouded his vision, and notes he continues to \u201csuffer from multiple complex ophthalmological conditions, including proliferative diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma, that pose a significant risk of permanent blindness.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cHe is old and he is sick,\u201d Samah Sisay, an international human rights lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told Truthout<\/em>. \u201cThis is someone who should not be incarcerated.\u201d <\/p>\n

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The Center for Constitutional Rights and the Abolitionist Law Center, where Abu-Jamal\u2019s lawyer Grote is legal director, have a track record of success in filing submissions before the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. In 2023, they also asked the body to review whether the U.S. was complying with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which prompted it to call for \u201ca moratorium on the imposition of sentences to life imprisonment without parole,\u201d which opponents often call \u201cdeath by incarceration\u201d because of the lack of opportunity for review and release. <\/p>\n

Grote acknowledged that the UN body lacks enforcement powers but said, \u201cWe are asking for a ruling because we think the truth of what has been done to Mumia in his case needs to be exposed in the light of day.\u201d <\/p>\n

In 2022, the Abolitionist Law Center and the Center for Constitutional Rights had asked the same UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to review the case of Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier, saying he \u2014 like Abu-Jamal \u2014 faced health problems after nearly 50 years of incarceration. It responded by calling on the U.S. government to \u201cimmediately\u201d release Peltier after concluding the \u201ccumulative effect of the procedural deficiencies\u201d he \u201csuffered in parole proceedings are overwhelming, rendering his continued detention arbitrary.\u201d In January 2025, President Joe Biden commuted the rest of Peltier\u2019s life sentence to home confinement. <\/p>\n

Unlike Peltier, whose conviction was in a federal court, Mumia has a state-level conviction, so Sisay says officials like the governor could ask the state for more information to address accusations made in the legal team\u2019s submission to the UN. She notes how \u201cinternational pressure, regardless of whether the U.S. claims to recognize international law, has always been crucial to movements for social justice.\u201d For example, the U.S. has been slow to change its policies on extreme sentencing, but Sisay says \u201ca lot of the work\u201d that went into abolishing the juvenile death penalty or juvenile life without parole \u201chappened through international advocacy as well as at the domestic state and federal level.\u201d <\/p>\n

Compassionate release for terminally ill prisoners is another path home, but \u201cthankfully Mumia does not have a terminal diagnosis at this point,\u201d Grote told Truthout<\/em>. <\/p>\n

In 2021, Pennsylvania granted compassionate release to Russell \u201cMaroon\u201d Shoatz, another former Black Panther Party member who was convicted of killing a police officer and spent decades in solitary confinement. But he lived just 52 days after release before he died from cancer at the age of 78, surrounded by his family. Despite his weakened state, a judge had argued months earlier Shoatz presented \u201can undue risk of escape or danger to the community.\u201d<\/p>\n

Laura Whitehorn, a former political prisoner who was incarcerated more than 14 years and co-founded the group Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP), told Truthout<\/em>, \u201cMumia\u2019s case fits squarely into why I started RAPP with three people who served long sentences and saw the damage, and were outraged at the lack of reasoning behind long sentences for older people.\u201d She contrasted the U.S. approach to a landmark ruling earlier this month by India\u2019s Supreme Court, which gives states three months to create a policy for the early release of more than 5,000 prisoners who are elderly or terminally ill. <\/p>\n

Pennsylvania is not one of the 25 states that have enacted \u201csecond look\u201d policies to allow judges to review a person\u2019s sentence, so Abu-Jamal\u2019s paths to release in the state seem limited to a request for an unlikely commutation given the politicized nature of his case, or an appeal \u201cif new evidence justifies it,\u201d Grote told Truthout<\/em>, noting Abu Jamal\u2019s case is 44 years old and \u201ceven more of a challenge would be finding evidence that courts would treat fairly.\u201d Grote says the UN has a chance to recognize how Abu-Jamal\u2019s \u201ccontinuing incarceration is in violation of international human rights norms\u201d and \u201coffer a catalyst to the campaign to bring him home to his family and community.\u201d <\/p>\n

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Lawyers are appealing to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which had urged the release of Leonard Peltier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1199,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"yoast_head":"\nLegal Team of Political Prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal Appeals to the UN for Support - Smart Moving Home<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/smartmovinghome.com\/?p=1200\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Legal Team of Political Prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal Appeals to the UN for Support - 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