Protest

Mumia in Weymouth

by Ben Geman

Posting fliers for yard sales on the telephone poles lining Route 3A in Weymouth might draw customers. Posting fliers hyping a rally for Mumia Abu-Jamal might get you arrested.

That's what Weymouth's Nick Giannone and two high-school students learned last September 13. That night Weymouth police arrested them, under the state's "tagging" law, for posting fliers announcing a school walkout for Abu-Jamal that was to be staged two weeks later. Abu-Jamal's 1982 conviction for killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner has long been labeled a frame-up by activists who call the jailed radical journalist a political prisoner.

In a case with free-speech overtones, Giannone faces a February 8 pre-trial conference in Quincy District Court on the tagging charges. Giannone has been at the center of Mumia activism in Weymouth, and even before the arrest, the dreadlocked and blue-eyed 24-year-old was known to police.

In 1988, MBTA police arrested Giannone on disorderly-conduct charges at the Quincy MBTA station during what he calls a police-brutality protest. The case was continued without a finding. Giannone's record also includes a 1996 disorderly-conduct charge and a 1994 arrest for being a minor transporting alcohol and for possessing two joints. Those charges were continued without a finding and later dismissed, court records show. After his tagging arrest in September, he was arrested for trespassing and disturbing a school during the walkout hyped in the fliers.

Giannone works with New York-based activist group Refuse and Resist, which has long supported Abu-Jamal. And he says Abu-Jamal's case, not the need to keep Weymouth poster-free, is what's at stake here. "I think it has to do with the message more than anything, the message that youth in this town support a new trial for someone framed for killing a police officer," says Giannone.

Adds Giannone's court-appointed attorney, Damon Borrelli: "The issues that Mr. Giannone is raising are obviously issues of freedom of speech . . . and necessarily those are First Amendment issues that come into play."

Not true, say police. "I don't think the content of the fliers had anything to do with the arrests," says Captain Jim Thomas, the department's spokesman. (Police say fliers were also glued to a bus shelter, which was hard to clean. Giannone denies the shelter part.) Charges against the two teenagers, one from Weymouth and one from Quincy, will be dropped if they finish high school and avoid further arrests through June, court records show.

Giannone is older than the students he's active with, and he worries the mother of one youth arrested for tagging. "I believe he has another agenda, and the influence he has on these kids is scary," says the woman, who requested anonymity (and who, it should be noted, believes the tagging arrests were unwarranted).

But Giannone defends his organizing. "I think Refuse and Resist is positive," he says. "It's a suburb, but cops still hassle every kid they see. They [the kids] already have a problem with local authority.

"The attitude is there," he adds. "I just give them something to work with."