WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2001 — Now that the death sentence against the extremely guilty convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal has been overturned, perhaps this small but nagging irritation will finally go away. Oh, sure, Philadelphia district attorney Lynne Abraham has said she will seek to have the sentence reinstated, and perhaps she’ll succeed. But it would be better for everyone — even Maureen Faulkner, the long-suffering widow of Abu-Jamal’s victim, Daniel Faulkner — if Abu-Jamal were denied martyrdom and simply disappeared into the Pennsylvania prison system.

Abu-Jamal has captured the consciousness of some elements of the left, both in this country and abroad, for depressingly predictable reasons. He’s dreadlocked, articulate, charismatic, radical, and black — the perfect victim, in other words, for muddle-headed idealists who just can’t believe (or perhaps don’t care about) the overwhelming evidence that he walked up to an injured Faulkner 20 years ago and shot him in cold blood, right in the face.

For those who doubt, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Buzz Bissinger wrote a devastating article for Vanity Fair more than two years ago in which he carefully debunks the so-called exculpatory evidence and — even more chilling — recounts a previously unreported jailhouse confession Abu-Jamal allegedly made in the early 1990s.

More recently, a dubious witness by the name of Arnold Beverly has come forward to assert that he killed Faulkner in the course of carrying out a mob hit. But as Salon reports today (sorry, no link; you’ve got to pay, don’t you know), Beverly’s story is so lame that Abu-Jamal himself initially decided not to pursue it for fear that his high-powered legal team would quit in disgust. Yet, just last week, the Philadelphia Weekly reports, several hundred Mumia supporters rioted, apparently driven into a frenzy after watching a video of Arnold’s "confession."

According to today's Philadelphia Inquirer, federal-district-court judge William Yohn considered 29 arguments from the defense as to why Abu-Jamal’s guilty verdict, death sentence, or both should be overturned. Yohn rejected 28 of those arguments, ruling that Abu-Jamal is indeed guilty, but that the death sentence was invalid because of a technicality involving the way the jury was charged. That’s good. Despite Abu-Jamal’s clear guilt, there have always been serious questions about the fairness of his trial. Moreover, the death penalty is discriminatory and unworthy of a civilized people. At a time when support for capital punishment is waning, why do we need to kill this particular celebrity murderer?

Besides, if Abu-Jamal’s sentence were commuted to life in prison, maybe his supporters would move on to another cause. The level of support for this cop-killer in recent years has become truly mind-boggling, as my former Phoenix colleague Jason Gay reported in these pages several years ago (see "Quiet Riot," News and Features, April 30, 1999).

In January 2000, veteran leftist journalist Marc Cooper wrote a piece for the New York Press in which he called for "a Mumia-free 2000," writing: "I’ve had it. If I go to one more lefty event and see one more Free Mumia poster, I might just have to switch sides on this one. What collective affliction has overcome my fellow pinkos? You haven’t had enough defeats and embarrassments these past two decades? Now you want to take the deathly serious issue of capital punishment and tie it to some flaky cult-member like Mumia Abu-Jamal?" Cooper’s reward was excoriation and condemnation by many of his allies — make that former allies — in the progressive movement.

The most sensible argument for commuting Abu-Jamal’s death sentence to life in prison is offered in today’s Philadelphia Daily News by columnist Jill Porter, who notes that such an action would separate the larger, more mainstream Abu-Jamal supporters who merely oppose the death penalty from the smaller, more radical fringe that actually thinks he’s innocent. Porter writes that "if Abu-Jamal is taken off death row, he can no longer be the cause célèbre for many of the well-meaning, if pathetically ill-informed, folks who have joined his crusade because they simply abhor capital punishment."

In fact, if anything good can come out of this sorry, sordid case, perhaps it is this. If we’re not going to execute as vicious and unremorseful a murderer as Mumia Abu-Jamal, then maybe we’ll finally realize that we shouldn’t execute anyone.