Police Power Out of Control

The Senate rejected President Obama's nomination of Debo Adegbile to lead the civil rights division of the Justice Department.

By linking Adegbile with the killing of a police officer, for which Mumia Abu-Jamal was convicted three decades earlier, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) steamrolled over the constitutional right to counsel.

The FOP demonized Abu-Jamal with inflammatory and racially-coded language like "thug" and "notorious cop-killer." In the end, seven Democratic senators from predominantly white states voted against Adegbile to avoid being associated with Abu-Jamal's case in the upcoming elections.

The profuse evidence of judicial and prosecutorial misconduct and the worldwide activism on behalf of Abu-Jamal have all made his case a global symbol of U.S. justice gone wrong.

In 2000, Amnesty International found that the case "was irredeemably tainted by politics and race and failed to meet international fair trial standards."

Send this letter to the district attorney of Philadelphia, the governor of Pennsylvania, the U.S. attorney general and the U.S. president:

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