A Shameful Move:
Senate Blocks Nominee for Role in Appeal of Mumia’s Death Sentence
March 10, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
By a vote of 52 to 47, the U.S. Senate refused to confirm Debo Adegbile, President Obama’s pick to be head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Adegbile is currently a senior counsel on the staff of the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Before that, Adegbile was director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (NAACP LDF). By traditional standards, he was eminently qualified for the post. On top of this, the Democratic majority in the Senate had recently changed the rules so as to require only a simple majority to confirm presidential appointments.
So what happened? Fascists, like the Fraternal Order of Police, launched virulent attacks on Adegbile’s nomination because, while litigation director of the NAACP LDF, he signed off on an appeal brief for the well-known African-American political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.
But not only did fascists like the Fraternal Order of Police, and Texas senator Ted Cruz rail against Adegbile, his nomination was torpedoed by a number of Democrats who voted against him. Some prefaced their “no” votes with lame and hypocritical invocations of the right to a lawyer, but then pissed on that very principle. Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, for example, said “As a lawyer, I understand the importance of having legal advocates willing to fight for even the most despicable clients, and I embrace the proposition that an attorney is not responsible for the actions of their client.” But he said he had to oppose Adegbile because of the impact of what was actually a worldwide movement of millions to defend Mumia Abu-Jamal (which he called a movement “to elevate a heinous, cold-blooded killer to the status of a political prisoner and folk hero”) which Coons said had “shown great disrespect for law enforcement officers and families throughout our region.”
The NAACP LDF brief may have outraged “law enforcement officers,” but it argued that Abu-Jamal’s conviction and sentencing were unconstitutional because Black people were systematically excluded from the jury, and that the judge’s jury instructions, that led the jury to sentence Abu-Jamal to death, were improper and unconstitutional. That argument was upheld in significant part by an appeals court, which overturned Abu-Jamal’s death sentence.
When this kind of thing happens to a prominent attorney nominated for a Justice Department position, it sends a chilling message and has ominous implications for society as a whole. When it happens with the active, virulent participation of a significant number of Democratic senators, it sends a message about the harm that comes from relying on the Democrats to stand up for even the rights supposedly protected by the U.S. Constitution. And when something like this happens, it should impel people who want a world where dissent, and the legal rights of the accused are protected to look WAY beyond the “alternatives” of the Democrats and Republicans and the system they both serve and enforce.
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