Mumia Abu-Jamal is probably the world’s best-known death row inmate, his sentence, handed down by a white jury, for the shooting in 1981 of Philadelphia policeman Daniel Faulkner, one of the most debated in history. In part, this is due to his extraordinary writings from his prison cell. This, his sixth book written behind bars, is far more than a chronicling of jailhouse lawyers and their remarkable trade. It is a clarion call to reform what Jamal calls the Prisonhouse of Nations from the bottom up. And there is nowhere lower in America than its prisons.
Jamal, a former journalist, has spent most of his adult life in jail. That he still cares enough to practice his self-taught lawyerly trade on behalf of his fellow inmates is tribute enough. That he does so with his humane wit intact is astonishing because, despite the grim chronicling of life on death row, this book is often hilarious. Or it would be if the failings of the American justice system related here were not all true.
An academic study into The Myth of Humane Imprisonment in 1991 found that jailhouse lawyers are the most badly-treated group of all prisoners. In second place were blacks. You can imagine, therefore, how grim the past 30 years have been for Jamal. Yet he has managed to produce a devastating critique of the political, racial and class prejudice that permeates justice in the United States.
Adam Smith, avatar of Western capitalism, concluded in the 1760s that: “Laws and governments may be considered in every case as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor and preserve to themselves the inequality of the goods which would otherwise be soon destroyed by the attacks of the poor who, if not hindered by the government, would soon reduce the others to an equality with themselves by open violence.”
For Jamal, and others like him, the inequality of the law is as real as steel and as hard as the bricks that hold them. Our guide to the law as practised in the US quotes extensively from legal precedents and personal experience to show that a “lawyer may be drunk, inattentive, stoned on coke, absent from trial or crazy as a loon” without being ruled legally ineffective when representing those reliant on their counsel. Little wonder, then, that jailhouse lawyers such as Jamal find their services in such demand, the victories, large or small, won in court on behalf of fellow prisoners illuminating the possible while shining a light on those corners the authorities would prefer to keep hidden. Jailhouse Lawyers asks the questions America would prefer to remain unasked. Like why it continues to jail so many of its poorest, uneducated and, yes, black citizens?
Since writing this remarkable testimony a federal appeals court has upheld Jamal’s conviction but agreed the death penalty instructions were potentially misleading and ordered a new sentencing hearing. Prosecutors in Philadelphia will have to decide whether to pursue a second death penalty sentence or accept a life sentence. For now, at least, Mumia Abu-Jamal is no longer on death row.
