Let the hype, not Abu-Jamal, die

Regarding today's top story, "Abu Jamal: New hearing or life term," what seems to be poorly understood by most players (especially Philadelphia's fiery district attorney, Lynne M. Abraham) is that commuting Abu-Jamal's sentence to life in prison would take away his soapbox, end the controversy and allow Daniel Faulkner's widow to finally have closure. 

I know death penalty advocates will balk at this, believing as they do that closure for the families of murder victims can only come through further killing, but this whole saga only reveals the stupidity of capital punishment -- and not for the reasons Abu-Jamal, who is certainly guilty, would want to put forward. How has the international attention paid to Abu-Jamal, his being held up as a symbol of a flawed legal system, been helpful to Maureen Faulkner? Why has the state of Pennsylvania persisted in enabling the Cult of Mumia by pushing death in the face of charges of racial bias, etc.? 

Abu-Jamal has found his audience only because the stakes are so high, and having death hanging over his head has muddled the issue. All parties involved should assent to the clear-eyed decision of the federal appeals court, which would, after all, keep this convicted killer behind bars, even if the (perfectly legitimate, from a legal standpoint) racial bias changes were to be taken into consideration. "To move past the prime facie case is not to throw open the jailhouse doors and overturn Abu-Jamal's conviction," judge Thomas T. Ambro is quoted as saying. "No matter how guilty one may be, he or she is entitled to a fair and impartial trial by a jury..."    

As an aside, I've never understood the "victim's rights" justification for capital punishment. Life in prison punishes the offender -- it takes away an individual's freedom for their entire time on this earth, forces them to consider their reasons for being locked up and, perhaps, allows for something good come of the situation (such as their convincing others not to go down this same path). It does not glorify killers the way capital punishment does, by allowing them to seize the martyr's crown. It also allows for justice to be done should the conviction ever be overturned (think of the way DNA evidence has rocked the legal system -- how many innocent people had been sent to death before then? Even one would be too many.)  

A death sentence, on the other hand, punishes a criminal's family. It forces those who love this individual to go through the same sort of suffering that the offender inflicted on the family of the murder victim. Why would any family rocked by murder want to do this? How is this a fitting legacy for the one they have lost -- to use that death to justify further killing?