JOHANNA FERNÁNDEZ

 

 

 

Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal

2010

 

About the Film:

Mumia Abu-Jamal is the most recognized death row prisoner in the world. In 1982, Abu Jamal was tried and wrongly convicted of the murder of Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Since then, the Abu-Jamal trial proceedings have come under scrutiny and the case is one of the most contested legal cases in modern American history. A veteran Black Panther, renowned author, and social critic his books and writings in venues as diverse as the Yale Law Review, Forbes, The Nation and street-papers for the houseless, have led many to hail him the Voice of the Voiceless. Justice on Trial navigates the tempest of the Abu-Jamal trial by reviewing the known facts of the case and offers competing views of who and what Mumia is and represents. Justice on Trial shows that the major violations in the Abu-Jamal case – judicial bias, prosecutorial misconduct, racial discrimination in jury selection, police corruption and tampering with evidence to obtain a conviction– are not special to this case. Instead, they are commonly practiced within the U.S. criminal punishment system and account for the disproportionate incarceration of Black Americans and Latinxs in the United States. in the post - Sixties era. The case of Mumia Abu-Jamal is a microcosm of greater problems in the criminal justice system and beyond. The attention that its many violations have received make the Abu-Jamal case one of the most important civil rights and black freedom cases of our time.

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Johanna Fernández is the executive producer and writer of the film “Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal