Mumia Abu-Jamal petitions UN panel for review of life sentence

Imprisoned writer Mumia Abu-Jamal takes case to UN after 44 years behind bars

Abu-Jamal, 72, is serving a life sentence with no chance of parole at Mahanoy correctional institution in Pennsylvania for the December 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. He was convicted in 1982 and spent 28 years on death row before a federal court ruled his original capital sentence unconstitutional in 2011, switching his sentence to life without parole.

The petition filed Tuesday calls on the UN’s working group on arbitrary detention, a body within the Human Rights Council, to review what his legal team describes as multiple violations of international law during his original trial and subsequent appeals. The UN panel lacks direct enforcement powers in the United States, but Abu-Jamal’s lawyers said they hope a strong condemnation from the world body would support efforts for a retrial or commutation of his sentence.

In a telephone interview with The Guardian, Abu-Jamal said the appeal was part of his personal and legal efforts to keep hope alive. “Hope is an element of struggle, is it not,” he said. “As we used to say in the old days, ‘La luta continua.’”

The petition’s allegations center on jury selection, where it states the prosecutor wrote the letters “B” and “W” over jurors’ names — to denote Black and white — in his notebook before striking 71% of potential Black jurors and just 20% of non-Black candidates. The result, according to the petition, was a jury of 12 with only two Black members in Philadelphia, a county that was nearly 40% African American at the time.

The trial judge, Albert Sabo, was described by the petition as a judge who presided over 31 capital cases that ended with death sentences, all but two involving defendants from minority groups. The petition said Sabo was overheard shortly before trial saying, “I’m going to help them fry the nigger.”

The petition also asks the UN to consider new evidence disclosed to Abu-Jamal’s defense team in 2018, which his lawyers argue raises doubts about the credibility of the state’s main eyewitness, Robert Chobert. Weeks after the trial concluded, according to the petition, Chobert wrote to the chief prosecutor inquiring about “the money own to me.”

One of the petition’s main arguments, Abu-Jamal said, is that his current sentence of life without parole is itself a form of arbitrary detention, which he called “slow death row.” He compared the U.S. system, where more than 200,000 people are serving life sentences, to Norway, where Anders Breivik — who killed 77 people in 2011 — received a maximum sentence of 21 years, extendable on review. “Such a response would be impossible, unthinkable in any of our 50 states,” Abu-Jamal said.

Abu-Jamal said he welcomed the chance to present his case before experts who have not faced the political pressure that elected judges in Pennsylvania operate under. He recalled being “flabbergasted” in 1995 when he learned that four of the seven justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had been endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police.

“Presenting my claims to the UN will be one of the first times that judges will be hearing them without a vested interest,” he said.

Abu-Jamal was 14 when he was kicked in the face by a Philadelphia police officer during a 1968 protest against segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace. A year later, he co-founded the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party and became a regular contributor to its newspaper, later building a career as a writer and broadcaster and serving as president of Philadelphia’s Association of Black Journalists.

He was arrested on December 9, 1981, after a shootout that left Officer Faulkner dead and Abu-Jamal shot in the chest. At trial, the state presented samples of his Black Panther writings to suggest antipathy toward police, and he was convicted and sentenced to death.

Throughout his decades of incarceration, Abu-Jamal said books have been his primary survival tool. “Books have been my closest friends for decades,” he said. “Most of what I’ve done in prison is read, and you have to read in order to write — to cultivate ideas and produce works.”

He described a series of health crises, including a diabetic coma, and a years-long battle to obtain basic medical care, including a two-year court fight to receive hepatitis C medication that was initially withheld on grounds he was “not sick enough.” For most of 2025, he said, he was functionally blind due to deteriorating eyesight, a condition he attributed to a series of health problems exacerbated by 28 years in solitary confinement on death row. It took him most of last year to get prison authorities to remove his cataracts, he said.

Abu-Jamal said he is determined to finish his latest book, a PhD submission exploring the writings of Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon. “I must finish it,” he said. “I am determined to finish it. And I am closing in.”