PRESS ADVISORY
April 22, 2016
CONTACT: Pam Africa – 267-760-7344; Joe Piette – 610-931-2615; Dr. Suzanne Ross – 917-584-2135
COMMUNITY DEMANDS HEPATITIS C MEDICINE FOR
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL AND THOUSANDS OF OTHER PRISONERS
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ISSUES OPEN LETTER TO GOV WOLF OVER HIS REFUSAL TO MEET
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PLANS UPCOMING WEEKEND OF HEP C & MUMIA EVENTS
Governor Wolf is refusing to meet with community representatives over the issue of the human right of 7,000-10,000 Pennsylvania prisoners to be given medicine that would cure their hepatitis C. In response, a coalition of organizations from as far away as France and Germany has made public an April 21 letter to the Governor.
The letter signed by fourteen organizations lists petitions and previous requests to meet with the governor, including one by a member of the European Parliament – all of which were ignored or just now turned down by the Governor’s Office.
The letter challenges the Governor’s excuse for delaying his response to activists. Wolf claims community contacts failed to heed his Office’s website instructions that require 6 to 8 weeks advance notice for requests. The community’s letter counters that those instructions apply only to requests concerning ceremonial events, and should not apply to requests for a meeting over such an urgent government policy and human rights issue as hep C treatment in Pennsylvania prisons.
The activists’ letter also places Abu-Jamal’s dire circumstances within the context of former President Bill Clinton’s passage of the 1994 crime bill. His wife’s presidential campaign remains haunted by that bill, which she also supported in numerous speeches before her husband signed it into law. The letter reminds Gov Wolf of this year’s April 7 protest in Philadelphia over Clinton’s crime bill, arguing that the 1994 bill “targeted poor communities of color, set lengthy prison sentences, flooded black neighborhoods with police officers, made many more crimes punishable by death, and allowed courts to try juveniles over the age of 13 as adults.”
The letter then adds another reason why Black voters should question the former president’s legacy. “Two years after the passage of the crime bill, congress also passed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (1996), which dramatically eroded the right of prisoners to file writs of habeas corpus and thereby eliminated the possibility that evidence of innocence in the Abu-Jamal case, would be reviewed by higher courts.”
The 1996 act made it possible for courts to ignore widespread police misconduct as a factor in Abu-Jamal’s conviction. By also forcing appellate judges to accept as ‘fact’ evidence presented in the lower courts by police, the act worked against untold thousands of other innocent prisoners who were prevented from presenting evidence to gain their freedom.
The letter argues that refusal to cure prisoners with hepatitis C amounts to “execution through medical neglect. Failure to respond immediately to this crisis contradicts your public position against the death penalty.”
In making a new round of requests to the Governor this week, the letter reminds Wolf that the 42nd Pennsylvania Governor, Robert Casey, not only met with Abu-Jamal’s supporters during his own term in office, but that Casey also then refused to sign a death warrant for the well-known political prisoner – this, despite the tough-on-crime frenzy that gripped the nation at that time.
The groups that we hoped would meet with Governor Wolf tomorrow are determined to participate in such a meeting at some point in the near future with either the Governor or his official representative. All the clergy, union leaders, elected officials, and health professionals who had planned to meet with Governor Wolf on Friday the 22nd, have instead committed themselves to come to Philadelphia or Harrisburg for a scheduled and serious in-person meeting.
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