---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2002 11:44:42 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: Former Black Panther Jamil Al-Amin sentenced to life in prison
Former Black Panther Jamil Al-Amin sentenced to life in prison
<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/mar2002/amin-m20.shtml>
By Peter Daniels
20 March 2002
Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, the Muslim minister who, as H. Rap Brown, was a
leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s and
later a leader of the Black Panther Party, was sentenced last week to life
in prison. Al-Amin was convicted earlier this month in connection with the
death of a sheriff's deputy in Atlanta two years ago. The jury, after
deliberating for five hours, rejected prosecution demands for the death
penalty, but took the option of a life sentence without parole.
Al-Amin, 58, continues to insist on his innocence, and will appeal his
conviction. Ed Brown, himself a civil rights and SNCC activist in the 1960s
who did not follow his younger brother's path into the Panthers or Islam,
but has remained close to him, stated that Al-Amin told him after his
arrest, "Notwithstanding what you've read, I didn't shoot anybody." Ed
Brown added, "If Jamil says he didn't do it, he didn't do it. He's not
going to tell me something that is not true."
Ed Brown believes that the police and FBI may have targeted his brother,
who changed his name after converting to Islam in the 1970s.
Al-Amin's conviction was based on a decision by the jury to overlook
numerous inconsistencies in the prosecution case. The sheriff's deputy who
survived the March 16, 2000 shootout, which took place when two cops
attempted to serve a warrant on Al-Amin, positively identified Al-Amin as
his assailant. The deputy, however, said that the gunman had gray eyes;
Al-Amin's eyes are brown. The officer also said that he had returned fire
and shot his assailant in the stomach. Police reports mentioned blood at
the scene, and the police used this to get a warrant to search Al-Amin's
belongings for bloodied clothing or other signs of injury. However, when
Al-Amin was arrested four days later he had no injuries.
Al-Amin has argued that he is the victim of a government vendetta that has
its origins in events that took place more than three decades ago, and is
also related to his current prominence as a Muslim cleric. Several aspects
of the trial support this charge.
The head of the FBI team that arrested Al-Amin four days after the Atlanta
shooting did not report to his supervisors that one of his agents, Ron
Campbell, kicked and spat at the defendant. This same FBI agent was
involved in a 1995 killing in Philadelphia, in which he shot a man he was
trying to arrest for skipping a court date on charges of assaulting two
police officers. In that case, Campbell claimed he shot Glenn Thomas when
he was faced with a weapon, but an autopsy showed that Thomas had been shot
in the back of the head. Campbell was later exonerated in the killing.
Fulton Country Superior Court Judge Stephanie Manis refused to allow the
defense to raise the actions of white FBI agents in covering up Campbell's
assault on Al-Amin. Defense attorneys wanted to tell jurors that they had
to consider the possibility that FBI agents planted key evidence, an
assault rifle and handgun, near Al-Amin when he was arrested. "You may not
ask the race question ... to show planting of evidence," the judge said. "I
believe it is too speculative. It also has a substantial danger of
diverting the jury."
Al-Amin has been the victim of continuous official harassment in recent
years. His brother, Ed Brown, is quoted in the March 18 issue of the Nation
magazine as saying, "Harassment, sometimes routine and petty, sometimes
pretty serious. Just one damn thing after another. No matter how absurd.
The police simply would not leave my brother alone ... an ongoing police
vendetta."
Immediately after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Al-Amin was
picked up by the authorities for questioning. He was released without a
shred of evidence being presented tying him to the attack.
Two years later, in August 1995, FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms agents arrested Al-Amin in a month-old shooting case. He was
released later when the victim of the shooting said he had not seen the
shooter but had been threatened with jail if he did not implicate Al-Amin.
It has also been pointed out that the March 16, 2000 events took place less
than a month following the acquittal of four New York police officers in
the killing of Amadou Diallo, an African Muslim immigrant. Tension was high
in black neighborhoods of major cities around the country.
As Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, a former SNCC field secretary and current
professor at the University of Massachusetts, wrote in the above-mentioned
Nation article, "One has to wonder ... why, in the climate created by those
events, the Atlanta authorities chose to act as they did. Why was it
necessary to send into a Muslim community, under cover of darkness, heavily
armed men wearing flak jackets to bring in a respected and beloved
religious leader, a figure of fixed address and regular and predictable
habits? And this in the service of a warrant for charges they describe as
relatively minor. Who authorized this action and in this manner? Was this
abysmally poor judgment, or deliberate provocation?"
Supporters of Al-Amin have pointed out that he incurred the wrath of the
authorities and embarrassed the middle-class civil rights spokesmen as long
ago as 1965, when, as the chairman of the Washington DC affiliate of SNCC,
he was invited to a meeting, along with other civil rights figures, with
President Lyndon Johnson at the White House. Thelwell relates Brown's
report on this meeting. "Rap told me that LBJ had entered the meeting
expressing his great displeasure at all-night demonstrations outside the
White House, which were so noisy that ^A'his little girls' had been unable
to sleep. The courtiers each in their turn had expressed distress and
apologies for this inconvenience to the presidential family. Rap, when his
turn came, said that he too was real sad that for one night the
presidential daughters' repose had been disturbed, but black people in the
South had been unable to sleep in peace and security for a hundred years.
What did the President plan to do about that? He had thought that this was
what they were meeting to discuss." Johnson and the civil rights
establishment were livid.
Brown was one of the major figures targeted by the notorious Cointelpro
counterintelligence program set up by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. He was
indicted for inciting a riot in Cambridge, Maryland in 1967, and was put on
the FBI's Most Wanted List when he skipped his Maryland court date, shortly
after two of his allies died in a car bombing.
Cointelpro led to provocations and police killings of Black Panther leaders
and others, as well as frame-ups such as those of Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt,
released only a few years ago after decades behind bars for a murder he did
not commit.
The surveillance and harassment of Brown, if they ever ended, seem to have
resumed in the 1990s, as he emerged as an increasingly prominent Muslim
religious figure with a national as well as local following. Ed Brown has
raised the question as to whether a prominent Muslim cleric like his
brother can get a fair trial in the wake of the September 11 attacks, at a
time when hundreds of Muslim immigrants continue to languish in indefinite
detention with no rights and no charges brought against them.
Al-Amin's supporters include several hundred civil rights activists, black
political figures, Muslim religious leaders and others who signed an
advertisement published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution during the
trial asking for a "fair and careful weighing of the evidence." The ad was
signed by Julian Bond, former Black Panther president Elaine Brown, poets
Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka, folk singer Pete Seeger, and former
Washington DC Mayor Marion Barry, among others.
Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., also issued a
statement expressing her "concern about fairness and justice in the trial
of Mr. Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin."
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