Captive Maternals 1 ( James 2023) are Black people of all/none genders who are politicized into liberatory politics through delivery of care and protections. Slavery is linked to capitalism and imperialism and colonialism; it is essentially thought about as the disposability and capture of life forms that are to be crushed if they refuse consumption and disposal. Hence, politicized imprisoned people who resist state violence in their rebellions identify or name themselves as “slaves.” This for them is not a term of complete subjugation but a signifier of the state’s criminality to destroy a human in order to create a submissive object.
On the 45th anniversary of the Attica Uprising in 2016, imprisoned rebels issued a call to support the national prisoner strike and a manifesto for resistance, demanding that “the entire structure of courts and police, of control and slave-catching, must shift to accommodate us as humans, rather than as slaves.” ( Roca 2017) Just as in 1971, prisoners displayed their intellect, agency and mutability as Captive Maternals radicalized into movement mobilizers, maroon organizers and war resisters. 2 Despite the heightened trauma and aggression inflicted in prisons, the incarcerated mobilize strike after strike, such as the 2022 prison strike in Alabama opposing state terrorism and the predatory powers of police and guards. The campaign to shut down Rikers Island has been on-going for years due to the brutality of the prison employees and the violence of prisoners’ incarceration.
Within prisons and jails controlled by states and private corporations, lives are more impacted by brutality. The predatory violence from guards appears to be unregulated and undisciplined. State criminality as a structural feature in policing and incarceration is indicated by the protections given to police and prison guards who abuse, rape or kill jailed or incarcerated people. Within carceral settings, guards have sex-trafficked, tortured, maimed, and scalded prisoners. They have locked captives in solitary confinement until psychosis or suicidal thoughts overwhelm people, and guards have also beaten prisoners to death. “Survival” while assimilating or evading an oppressive regime is not equivalent to dismantling that regime through a liberation movement of war resistance. Viewed through the lens of gaslighting and surplus torture meted out against political prisoners, it becomes clear that the state enlists a diversity of actors within and beyond the judicial and prison processes (e.g., media) to pursue its anti-revolutionary antagonisms against radicals and war resisters.
US political prisoners are often forgotten about except when they are reduced to visuals and narratives of a past, historic stage of struggle, and recalibrated through their stories being repurposed in research and publications. The “militancy” of historical Black radicalism is not clearly defined due to appropriation. 3 The US has held political prisoners for decades, as well as a new cadre of risk-taking activists, e.g., those who struggled to protect forests in George and to stop “Cop Cities” only to be targeted and imprisoned as “terrorists.” (Given that the only death issued from Georgia State Troopers shooting Manuel Paez Esteban Teran (“Tortuguita”) 57 times, a private autopsy shows that they were sitting cross-legged with their hands in the air at the time, one wonders why the charge of “terrorism” rarely is appended to the US). 4 It is imperative to bring more attention to the status of political prisoners tortured and caged not just in the United States but throughout the globe. UN Mumia Liaison Group’s hearings for the Expert Mechanism on Law Enforcement and Anti-Black Racism (UN EMLER) on political prisoners was held at Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History on April 26, 2023; the hearings focused on the cases of political prisoners intertwined with state criminality. The current “living death” sentences meted out against political prisoners who struggled against state assassinations and political incarcerations continue to ensnare captives such as: Leonard Peltier, Kamau Sadiki, Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Ed Poindexter, Major Tillery. Other political prisoners have transitioned either while in captivity or within months of their release (the most recently being Ruchell “Cinque” Magee who was released in July 2023 and transitioned in August 2023). In The Forgotten Black Panthers, Santi Elijah Holley quotes former political prisoners who critique betrayals within popular culture and from cultural influencers ( Holley 2021). According to Panther and Black Liberation Army (BLA) veteran Jalil Muntaqim, contemporary entertainment industries exploit the image, name and legacies of the Black Panther Party while failing to support radical organizers violated by the state, police, and COINTELPRO; those survivors now struggle as “impoverished elders [who] suffer horrendously.” (ibid.) The use of panthers as symbols and in marketing for political postures of Panther adjacency generated material wealth in films and books and symbolic credibility in for varied celebrities and advocates who function as spokespersons for “justice” aligned with state and corporate powers. The recipients of Panther radical largess often fail to provide sufficient material support for political prisoners/prisoners of war who have been for decades and/or continue to be imprisoned: “They’re not providing any services or support for these ageing Panthers, but they’ll take the name,” (ibid.) asserts Muntaqim who maintains: “the legacy” of the Black Panther Party has been exploited (ibid.). According to Panther vet Sekou Odinga: “Someone makes a lot of money. . .nothing goes to the families of the fallen. Nothing goes to those. . .locked up, fighting for their lives.” (ibid.)
The below discussion of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, a veteran of the Philadelphia Black Panther Party, critiques how state criminality derails responsible caretaking and human rights. It does so now increasingly wearing the “Black face” of feminism. The historical archetypical representation of communal/familial care embodied in the Black woman (as slave, “Mammy,” or political vanguard) now is entangled in the narrative of white nationalist policing and law-and-order mandates. Here gender becomes increasingly “queer” as Black male political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal functions as a Captive Maternal seeking care and justice for communities, nations, and a Black female judge Lucretia Clemmons, who works as a comprador for the state to deny a fair hearing that would offer justice and human rights and reject state repression and state violence against freedom movements and intellectuals such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Captive Maternal rebel who out of love for the people risked life and freedom to become a war resister. 5
Male Captive Maternal Mumia Abu-Jamal
Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther male, achieved the stature of a politicized Captive Maternal from the age of 15 when he joined the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP). From childhood, his ability to care for and defend communities and individuals was notable. Drawn to the chant “All Power to the People!” 15-year-old Mumia joined the Black Panther Party after Philadelphia police had brutally beaten him for engaging in nonviolent civil rights protests against segregation. A former member of the Philadelphia chapter of the BPP Mumia Abu-Jamal (then Wesley Cook) was only 14 or 15 years old when he travelled by car with Black adults (in their early 20s), from Philadelphia to Chicago days after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)/ Chicago Police Department December 1969 assassination of Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. The Philly young activists planned to attend the memorials. First, they viewed the blood-soaked mattress upon which Hampton had slept, and 90-some bullet holes in the walls of his bedroom. Hampton was killed execution style with two close shots to the back of the head after being drugged by police informant William O’Neal who served as the security head officer for the Chicago BPP. State violence and assassinations of social justice organizers tend to radicalize ethical people.
In 1982, Abu-Jamal, journalist and Black Panther veteran, was convicted and sentenced to death for killing white police officer Daniel Faulkner in Philadelphia on December 9, 1981. In 2010, after over 28 years in solitary confinement on death row, a federal judge ruled Abu-Jamal’s death sentence unconstitutional. In 2011, he was released to the general prison population to serve a sentence of life in prison without parole. Since then he has faced serious medical issues that were often inadequately addressed or ignored by prison authorities and doctors.
In 2022, attempting to obtain Abu-Jamal’s written afterword for In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love, I found that prison censors kept blocking correspondence from this author and the UK-based Divided Press. Allies of Abu-Jamal prevailed in getting a copy of the manuscript to the author, and a copy of his afterword to the book publisher. They shared that in a conversation with them Abu-Jamal reflected that when he had cancer, his life had been saved by an imprisoned Captive Maternal. Gravely ill, receiving substandard medical care (hence the formation of the Medical Committee for incarcerated elders discussed below) which gave the appearance that the prison was trying to kill him through his illness amplified by their medical neglect, another incarcerated Black male provided care for Abu-Jamal in the prison hospital. That attentive and proactive caretaker functioned as a comforter and a healer; he/they brought comfort to the ailing and dying. He/they were, according to Abu-Jamal, his “Captive Maternal.”
Outside the prison, Mumia Abu-Jamal’s beloved wife Wadiya Cook also provided care during her visits from their home outside of prison. The mutual and reciprocal care reflected the diverse levels of isolating captivity so that love can curtail carceral devastations. Married to Abu-Jamal for over four decades, Wadiya Cook transitioned on December 27, 2022. Prison authorities, as expected, refused Abu-Jamal permission to attend the funeral. Despite the personal suffering and loss, Abu-Jamal has nurtured the intellectual and emotional needs of hundreds of thousands of people around the world who have read his works and listened to his podcasts as the “voice of the voiceless.” He skims the boundaries of life and death; one of his most influential books is aptly titled Live from Death Row. Abu-Jamal encourages us to engage in revolutionary love and move through stages developing clarity, commitment and sacrifices—voluntary or forced—that allow us to maintain intellectual, emotional or ethical capacity despite zones of captivity and violence.
As a political prisoner and author, Abu-Jamal functions as a Captive Maternal who is literally a captive of the state who was tortured for being a war resister. His antagonists have been clearly documented as political adversaries animated by legal corruption and white supremacist idealism. His most recent adversary though—a Black woman judge—presents as a caretaker, denouncing lynching (against her family); she replaced the retired old white war-waging male judges. This comprador, loyal to predatory policing, offers a study of how race and gender identities cannot be predictors of progress, ethical integrity, fidelity to justice or devotion to Black liberation.
The Janus Face of Judge Lucretia Clemons
In 2022, Judge Lucretia Clemons of the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas was assigned to preside over Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Post Conviction Relief Application (PCRA). The normative feminist narrative posits females as the victims of males; however, gender roles are flexible so that females who partner with the state apparatus can use that extended power to dominate or destroy the lives of males (a warped parens patriae emerges if violence is structural in the familial/social unit and women use the proxy powers of the state to enforce predatory laws; hence, feminism becomes state feminism as power is accumulated through bureaucracies and policing (women as police commissioners, women as CEOs of foster care removal agencies)). The most efficient way to legally engineer an execution, especially of a political dissident or opponent to the state, is through the state apparatus. The most common state “kill” would be death by life in prison, or a living death. In an October 2023 interview on RSTV/BPM, Kalonji Changa asked a political prisoner advocate and attorney if the state, despite the public recognition of COINTELPRO as an illegal kill programme, continued to engage in assassinations by keeping Black Panther Party veterans such as Mutulu Shakur and Russel Maroon Shoatz and Black rebels such as Ruchell Magee held in prison until months before their deaths? Legal malfeasance led to prolonged incarceration. For example, a California judge refused to enter into court record the 1973 jury verdicts of Magee, Angela Davis’s former co-defendant. As was the case in Davis’s 1972 acquittal, Magee’s jury exonerated him of murder, aggravated kidnapping, and conspiracy in 1973 for the August 1970 Marin County Courthouse attempted liberation of Black prisoners through a hostage exchange which ended in tragedy when prison guards shot into the hostage van. Magee remained incarcerated for fifty years after Marin County because the presiding judge refused to enter the jury verdicts in which Magee was convicted only of simple kidnapping. Released in July 2023, Magee died that October. 7 That query continues to be pertinent given the continued incarceration of political prisoners such as Mumia Abu-Jamal and the assertion after the 20th century militant mass movements were undermined or destroyed by the state that only women, particularly Black women, were fit to lead justice movements because they comprehend the violence of gender and race. Class is rarely analyzed hence most of the “Black feminist leadership” is positioned as middle-class in governance, corporations, non-profits, finance, schools, etc. An anti-Black state rewards Blacks who work as compradors but pose as caretakers; they seek not only employment security but also, as George Jackson noted, “prestige and power.” The salvific Black feminist—as the contemporary magical Negress becomes a dominant distortion within Black feminism and thus diminishes liberatory interventions that resist state feminism as a capitalist and imperialist project of “caretaking” and stabilizing of the liberal and conservative spheres.
In the stages of the Captive Maternal—caretaker, protester, movement-maker, maroon, war resister—the Black feminism that deflects from or decimates organized war resistance to state violence is either a conflicted caretaker or a comprador. The latter is the most challenging to confront; for the comprador kills caretaking by consuming its function—e.g., foster care systems and child removal claiming that they exist only to “help” poor Black and indigenous children not to create a political economy over child removal (which is endemic to the history and structure of this democracy if the children are racially fashioned or imagined as inferiors). Within their professional or profiteering portfolio, compradors could only function for communal care if they rejected state power and sought to support communities protesting and organizing matronage and war resistance to protect themselves from the state.
Feminism often colludes or aligns with state feminism because under capitalism the progression of women’s careers follows hierarchy and fidelity to the state’s punitive culture. State repression, aligned with state criminality, is amplified and structured by anti-Black/Indigenous and anti-poor/working-class carceral systems and repression such as: foster care; police brutality; mass and political incarcerations; municipal fees for infractions; parole monitoring; militaristic foreign policies that promote occupations and genocide. In the specific case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, white, masculine and white nationalist state predatory powers hid exculpatory evidence and denied Abu-Jamal a fair trial. After four decades of a judicial travesty, the state leveraged a Black woman judge into office, it provided a visual deception of progressivism by using her family story of repression and her identity as a Black woman to veil politics aligned with repression and white nationalism. The judge, Lucretia Clemons, describes herself as a caretaker who utilizes legal codes, social workers, police and imprisonment as vehicles for stability to under-resourced Black communities. Yet, Clemons’s forms of “caretaking” align with state malfeasance and anti-Black and anti-radical punitive culture. Clemons in fact functions as a “comprador.” The highly educated (Black female) comprador who wields (or carries the scales of) state power functions as an antagonist to (Black male) Captive Maternals whose care for communities and justice lead them to become political organizers and later political prisoners, those who defy state power by participating in freedom movements. 8
In the case of Abu-Jamal, and others, one finds the striking juxtaposition of a Black female comprador as an extension of COINTELPRO’s violence against Black radicals and freedom movements. (One finds this use of Black women as the public face of US policy in domestic and international policies, where Black women are appended to the CIA or State Department). 9
Undermining civil rights and human rights, Clemons performs as a “caring” Black woman. As a political actor, her performative caretaking upholds carceral frameworks that undermine the struggles of oppressed or colonized peoples. As an anti-revolutionary agent, working through the apparatus of the law, Clemons exonerates herself of complicity in predatory policing, legal malfeasance and carceral capture. Before she became a judge, while lobbying for professional advancement, Clemons videotaped a compelling family narrative of Black suffering and survival to endear her to the public, white liberals, Black psyches, and the Catholic Diocese in Philadelphia as a vulnerable and ethical “community member.” The historical suffering of Black elders/ancestors becomes absolution for Clemon’s contemporary complicity with a predatory state. One of her grandfathers, a prosperous patriarch, was lynched by a white mob in Mississippi. During and after the murder, abetted by the state, racial terrorists stole the Black family’s land, home and possessions. Think of the 1921 “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma where prosperous Blacks were terrorized, robbed and lynched. 10 Near starvation, the Black children and surviving adults of Clemon’s family were taken in by white Catholics who provided food and shelter—but not justice. This narrative is recorded and posted online for Clemons’s application to promote an appointment to the Catholic Racial Justice Commission of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and her career. Clemons asserts that her rise to state power embodies her “ancestors’ wildest dreams.” This refrain echoes throughout Black culture. In this case, its meaning is shaped by commercial “success”: Blacks gaining wealth and power under colonial, imperial and capitalist structures built on anti-Black and anti-Indigenous enslavement. If your ancestor was a freedom fighter—lineage itself is insufficient to mark an “ancestor”; ancestors are recognized for their willingness to risk and fight for Black protections and liberation; hence freedom fighters or war resisters risked their lives for the mass and thus became recognized as “ancestors,” e.g., Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral. Flights from and fights against enslavement, convict prison lease systems, Jim Crow, mass and political incarceration and captivity, the King Leopold’s murderous Congo exploitation create the identities of ancestors. The declarations of pride for ancestors who fought against captivity, torture, labour exploitation, and sexual predation enabled by predatory policing and state violence become twisted in the hands of compradors such as Clemons who claims to be the ancestors’ wildest dream while enabling state abuse and Black suffering and imprisonment.
Compradors mask their intentions—not to be resistors to abuse and living deaths in confinement but to be enablers of abuse and death. Maya Angelou’s poem “The Mask” 11 grapples with the duplicity of Black appearance and disappearances in white-dominated spaces, arenas where the mandate or felt need to be an “agreeable” Black is marketed as an insurance policy to stave off anti-Black violence by state and majority society. There is, however, a vast difference between Angelou’s description of a Black female maid riding a NYC bus laughing aloud and reflecting the historical grinning masks memorialized in Step-n-Fetch-It and Mammy. Clemon’s moves among shadows of projections of Black care, denial and disposability; her mask of Black feminist and judicious care is a cover for state assassination. From W.E.B. DuBois’s sophisticated veil woven by the talented tenth as “Black saviours” to sci-fi pop culture’s Anakin Skywalker Darth Vader headgear, one finds that supposed liberators shift into compradors; unless they risk their stature for the freedom of oppressed peoples, they work for empire, as the arms of an imperial state. As a Black woman, Clemons has the ability to read and appreciate and identify with Maya Angelou and W.E.B. DuBois while she dons not only a Black robe to uphold malfeasance and the death of freedom organizing but also her own masks that veil her identity as a comprador.
As a judge, Clemons’s role is to impartially adjudicate trials with balance and fairness. Disproportionately, those at her/court mercy are Black, working class, and poor people. In relation to political prisoners who challenge(d) state predatory powers, Clemons willingly performs as an enforcer of and stabilizer for white nationalism and colonialism. Clemon upholds the racist preferences of lethal policing and judicial malfeasance Clemons’s March 2021 statement/ for appointment to the Racial Justice Commission of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, one sees the promotion of an image of a judge with ethics who is fair and opposed to anti-Black violence. Referencing the South African anti-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission as well as the slogan of Black protestors, Clemons performs a faux alliance with anti-racists (performance is central in court). The grandson of Mumia Abu-Jamal, writing as Jamal Jr., #LoveNotPhear (2022), in “Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation: In Deed,” quotes Clemons:
I think one of the most important things to focus on is truth and reconciliation. A familiar cry in the street during the social justice protests is “No justice, no peace.” And while I know that many people want peace, they really want quiet. Quiet is not the same as peace. Peace requires justice, and justice requires truth. 12
Clemons’ performative rhetoric repeats the positions of those seeking a fair hearing/trial; however, Clemons’ Janus-faced narrative seeks to hijack the moral high ground. Wearing the concerned mien of the Black maternal, she shoulders respectability and responsibility politics but aligns with the state’s repressive police apparatus. Hence, Clemons is a Black maternal but not a Captive Maternal, she is complicit in state power not seeking to undo or flee from it. From COINTELPRO to local, lethal cops, predatory policing facilitated the disappearance and demise of freedom rebels. The US judiciary facilitated the living and post-mortem deaths of war resisters who risked their lives and freedom to fight colonialism. Judge Clemons denied Abu-Jamal’s petition for a new trial after more than forty years of incarceration based on racist judges, bribed and intimidated “witnesses” following the 1981 killing of white police officer Daniel Faulkner. Maintaining his innocence, Abu-Jamal and his attorneys sought to bring to the court’s and to the public’s attention suppressed evidence from the original trial hidden for decades in the District Attorney’s office. The face of resistance to disclosing facts to the public and to the possibility of a new hearing or trial would be a Black maternal, although the engineers and mass construction for the obstruction of justice and a fair hearing and trial would be a white nationalist-leaning, imperial state.
Request For a New Trial/Evidentiary Hearing
In an October 2022 San Francisco Bay View article, Prison Radio codirector, attorney Noelle Hanrahan, an ally to Abu-Jamal, wrote that Judge Clemons’s oral statements during Abu-Jamal’s hearings to reopen his case—due to the district attorney’s (DA’s) corruption and malfeasance—mirrored the Philadelphia district attorney’s stance that the courts must “preserve convictions at all costs.” ( Hanrahan 2022) According to Hanrahan, Clemons dishonestly upheld the prosecution’s conviction by ignoring that “racism was a hallmark of the original trial” (ibid.) in a trial driven by racism, not evidence. On May 25, 1983, Judge Albert F. Sabo sentenced Abu-Jamal to death after the court found him guilty of first-degree murder. Although she knew that dozens of boxes of evidence potentially absolving Abu-Jamal of the 1981 shooting of police officer Daniel Faulkner were hidden by the District Attorney's (DA) office for decades and only made public in 2019, Clemons’ October 2022 review of Abu-Jamal’s petition maintained that he had no legal standing for a new trial.
The Supreme Court ruling in Brady v. Maryland mandates that the prosecution suppressing “evidence favourable to the accused. . .violates due process.” 13 ( Griffen 2022) The release of boxes of potentially exculpatory evidence in 2019 from the newly elected progressive DA’s office of Larry Krasner indicated that the former prosecutor McGill violated the Supreme Court ruling in Batson v. Kentucky, which held that Black defendants are denied equal protection under the law if Black people are intentionally excluded from the jury. Prosecutor McGill’s handwritten notes showed that he marked “B” next to potential jurors who were Black. During voir dire, ten of the fifteen people McGill struck from the jury were Black. McGill prevented 71 per cent of prospective Black jurors from serving on Abu-Jamal’s jury. According to former National Lawyers Guild executive director Heidi Boghosian, Philadelphia has a “ Batson problem” of racial discrimination in jury selection:
From 1977–1986, its district attorney struck off 58 per cent of potential Black jurors, compared with 22 per cent of white ones. In the homicide cases that McGill tried from September 1981 to October 1983, he peremptorily challenged African-American jurors 8.47 times more than non-Black ones ( Cohn 2022).
Judge Clemons asserted that Abu-Jamal’s Batson claim was waived because he didn’t object at trial and on direct appeal. She maintained that Abu-Jamal would have been convicted anyway and indicated her intent to deny his petition for a new trial or evidentiary hearing. Attorneys and fair-trial advocates outside the court protested that if the evidence was not released by the DA’s office until 37 years after the trial—when a “progressive prosecutor,” Larry Krasner, was elected district attorney of Philadelphia—that this was impactful, and so Abu-Jamal deserved a hearing. Organized campaigns and protests led the judge to postpone or prolong her decision. She moved the decision to December 16, 2022, after hearing from both parties. Attorneys Judith Ritter, Samuel Spital and Bret Grote had argued in court that if the jury had heard the newly discovered evidence hidden from Abu-Jamal and his attorneys, Abu-Jamal would not have been convicted of murder.
Interracial activists and Captive Maternal protesters followed outside the courthouse, with some 50 supporters of Abu-Jamal inside the court and the UN amicus brief (discussed below). To the advocates and public, Clemons appeared to move away from her original intent of consigning Abu-Jamal to a living death in prison. That was not in fact the case. In April 2023, she ruled against Abu-Jamal (ibid.) Organizing and writing campaigns—Captive Maternal agency on the protest and movement stages—had bought time but not brought justice. Abolition did not prevail. Revolution was not a viable option. What then is instructive about the productivity and the limitations of Captive Maternal agency that can petition but not engage in war resistance? The various political tactics and stages waged included a male judge attempting to mentor Clemons into ethical behaviour; a male investigative reporter informing the public about the facts of Abu-Jamal’s lengthy and corrupted legal case; a female poet and a female philosopher who used their literary skills to sway the legal apparatus toward justice. Their organizations, committees and coalition manifested as marronage. Still, they could not stop the war against a loving, Black political prisoner, a Captive Maternal deeply rooted in Agape.
Legal and Spiritual Mentor Judge Wendell Griffen
Retired Judge Wendell Griffen adjudicated trials for decades in the south before he became a full-time spiritual mentor as a pastor. In a 2022 press conference, Judge Wendell Griffen and investigative journalist Linn Washington, Jr. weighed in on ethics and accountability surrounding Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case. Julia Wright of the Mumia Health Committee and Michael Schiffman of Germany were also present among others. The press conference sought to inform the public about the necessity of righting miscarriages of justice.
In his statements, Griffen asks Clemons to transition back into an ethical community and away from being the machinations of racist police forces. The training he offers is more about Agape and the possibilities of justice. Griffen maintains that the value of the individual is determined by their contributions to community and life; hence there must be a willingness to discipline themselves/ourselves to resist repressive or reactionary politics and not to be cowed by the unethical and brutish just because they are normative in punitive structures that reward compliance. The male judge offers advice to the younger female judge, who is also a mother of two Black boys. The elder judge reminds Clemons that judges can still keep their jobs as state employees to feed, house and educate their families and have comfortable lifestyles, without jettisoning fairness before the law. Griffen is a living example of that capacity—to comply to save lives and stabilize society but not obey police forces to kill lives.
The Black male ethical judge builds a bridge for the Black female comprador judge, inviting her to move from the zone of complicity in violence to autonomy, it need not be a movement, just a fair legal ruling that protests against political persecution and anti-Black animus within law enforcement and the law itself. Clemons could return to stage 1 of the Captive Maternal—the stage of conflicted caretaker but only if she agrees to stop perverting the law and persecuting—she is a judge whose de jure function is to be impartial not a prosecutor who wants convictions to bolster their career. Griffen’s narrative in the 2022 press conference laid out strategies that went beyond this specific trial. If his analyses were adopted one would find not just one isolated ethical judge but a maroon camp of judges with strategies to uphold the law as the protection of vulnerable communities and individuals from legal malfeasance and the judiciary’s complicity in malfeasance and murder. The maroon camp becomes the womb of an abolition project embedded in the courts. There are specific tasks for birthing an alternative to predatory law. First, Griffen instructs communities to engage in “court watching.” ( Griffen 2022) He advocated for groups and communities to intentionally scrutinize “everyday cases” (ibid.) not focus mostly on “high-profile cases” (ibid.) that draw media attention and become entertainment news. This is labour and work that move the Captive Maternals toward war resistance. Groups and communities, according to Griffen, must closely and intentionally watch and monitor “how judges hold court, how judges deal with and dispose of cases;” (ibid.) by doing so they will discern and learn the patterns of racist judiciaries that affect everyone and corrupt the legal system, according to Griffen who warned: “[a]s goes Mumia, so goes the issue of justice for every soul.” (ibid.)
Griffen’s public instructions that Clemons act fairly and judiciously remind the public that in US democracy judges have the longest terms as elected officials based on the expectation that “courage would allow them to be free from domination. . .mob pressures.” (ibid.) This call-out affirms his sworn duty to uphold the law as an ethical project not constantly poisoned by white nationalism, classism, and colonialism. The male judge engages in communal caretaking; he extends care beyond the community of the political prisoners, progressives, and radicals. Griffen is inclusive. He opens the circle of Black communities that are not only under siege but also in resistance mode to the compradors. Any returnee to even the primary stage of conflicted caretaker means one less hustler and comprador augmenting a predatory state and police apparatus.
Advocating support to every sector, Griffen offers community and shelter to Clemons who evokes memories of Philadelphia’s first Black mayor, Wilson Goode, who in 1985 authorized the bombing of Osage Avenue, killing MOVE (Christian Movement for Life) adults and children and burning down a Black middle-class/working-class community while white firefighters watched the blaze, following orders to not intervene in the inferno as the images of the documentary The Bombing of Osage Avenue attest. Respite from state violence is more likely to occur when communities and captives can get the bureaucracy and police forces to stand down in terms of their aggressions. Respite from violence might be more feasible than a restoration of a democracy that was born in enslavement and genocide. The task was not for Clemons to undo the evil or structural violence in the world. The task was for her to be competent and ethical at her job, which taxpayers were/are funding. Clemons is asked to choose legal and human rights over corruption and institutional police power. She chose the latter.
When Clemons defiles the culture and legacy of the civil rights movement, her betrayals become codified in culture and text: press conferences, news articles, open letters written with polite petitions to the judge, and poetry. The civil rights movement is culture. Griffen poses a public query to Clemons, asking if she is willing to abandon her 20th-century civil rights inheritance by adhering to racist malfeasance:
Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case exposes. . .judicial condonation of police misconduct and judicial basic tolerance of racism in the criminal punishment system. Judge Bruce Wright famously wrote a book titled Black Robes, White Justice that I read before I began law school decades ago. And Judge Wright wrote that all too often people forget that many people walk into courtrooms and they see Black and brown defendants, and they see white judges, white prosecutors, oftentimes white defence attorneys, everybody in the courtroom is white, even at the appellate level. . .[what] we have to deal with is a judicial system that has become essentially numb, blind, and unwilling to acknowledge its own cultural incompetence, its own cultural deadness, its own embrace of white supremacy and racism. (ibid.)
Assimilation or advancement often entails loyalty to coercive cultures and employment in carceral sectors (military, policing, social work, education, etc.) Griffen juxtaposes the courageous with the cowards, signifying that most first-stage Captive Maternals—seeking education, employment, respectability, stature, wealth, prestige—internalize anti-Blackness aligned with white power:
Mumia must be set free now. Now if you’re a law professor, that’s the law professor’s answer that gets you an A on the question. Anything less than that is a subpar answer. But Judge Clemons has to have the courage to do that, and unfortunately we’ve seen that 40 years of judges have lacked that courage. She’s only the second Black judge. One Black judge had the courage. But the majority of judges have not had the courage. . .Quite frankly, one of the problems of being a Black judge is having to explain to white peers, and I’ve been an appellate judge, they are unable to understand their own cultural incompetence and how it affects criminal punishment and justice. This is the challenge. (ibid.)
This conversation among Black judges is public but also “familial” or communal. An elder speaks to someone in the same profession who appears indifferent to injustice. Griffen also speaks to the larger society and community about the Black woman judge who had the opportunity to reinvent herself as a Captive Maternal or at least an ethical and competent judge:
Judge Clemons has a good, hard decision to make. It is a good decision in that it is a decision to say that there was wrong done in this man’s case. It was wrong to conceal the evidence from his defence team. It was wrong for him to be tried, and convicted on concealed evidence. It is right for us to consider that evidence. And it is right to overturn his conviction. The hard thing is for her to look her colleagues and the police culture in the face and say that these wrongs do not get righted by ignoring them. They get righted by declaring them wrong and requiring that they be fixed. And the only way to fix this is to grant Mumia freedom and require a new trial. That’s the hard thing. But it is the right thing. . .Judge Clemons has a duty to do the right thing, and it’s our job to call her to that duty and say, “You can do this. You can do this. You must do this. And we are with you as you do it.” (ibid.)
Griffen challenges Clemons to demonstrate her commitment to justice by committing to acknowledge that US courts recognize that there should be remedies for those who have had their due process rights violated; hence, Clemons must grant relief to Abu-Jamal:
As a state court trial judge who has tried murder cases and presided over murder cases, I understand the pressures that weigh on judges to defer to public opinion and especially to police opinion. . .the Arkansas 1919 Elaine Race Massacre, a 1923 case from the US Supreme Court, speaks very loudly to me. In that case, five Black men were tried and convicted of murder in less than 30 minutes. . .and the US Supreme Court ruling in 1923 Moore v. Dempsey overturned that conviction and held that they were entitled to a new trial based upon a habeas petition brought on their behalf. Mumia Abu-Jamal is entitled to the same kind of relief too. The UN working group says so. The question is whether or not a judge in Philadelphia has the courage to say so. Mumia’s freedom lies in that question. (ibid.)
A comprador could become a Captive Maternal, but the transformation from entitlement to shame and self-reclamation on the side of justice and liberation would be eviscerating of the public self as wrapped in prestige and power; although the spiritual and ethical self might be clamouring within for freedom.
Investigative Journalist and Advocate Linn Washington
Philadelphia-based investigative reporter Linn Washington, Jr. has covered Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case since 1981. Washington emphasizes that all levels of the judiciary, including the US Supreme Court, sanction misconduct based on racial prejudice or anti-Blackness. All levels of the judiciary have enacted unethical conduct or complicity in the harming of Black people in general and Black activists in particular. According to Washington, months after the Supreme Court upheld Abu-Jamal’s conviction, it granted relief to a white supremacist prison gang member in Delaware; the inmate had escaped and killed someone but the court ruled that the prosecution had made errors in his most recent murder case ( Washington 2022). Washington emphasized that the courts granted relief to an unnamed white supremacist murderer that the courts would not provide to Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther Party member (he left the BPP in 1970). According to journalist Washington, Abu-Jamal, on his own, appealed to the Supreme Court for relief which they denied (ibid.). Months later, the Court—based on the Delaware ruling—provided the same relief to a white man in Nevada, a devil-worshipping cult member who killed some of his relatives (ibid.). According to Washington, it is an outrage that the Supreme Court granted relief to a white racist “devil worshipper” prison gang member but denied relief to Abu-Jamal because he had been a member of the Black Panther Party 12 years before he was arrested.
Washington references three other 1981 high-profile murders where malfeasance was striking but notes that the Commonwealth v. Abu-Jamal case is assumed to have no state bias. Given the routine corruption by police and prosecutors, Washington asks rhetorically,
[w]hy would the only case without a single instance of impropriety be the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, former Black Panther Party member, investigative journalist, and an activist who would observe police brutality, track the case numbers and then monitor the trials and report to the public? (ibid.)
Washington maintains that: the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent (WGEPAD) brief explains structured racism in the US criminal and civil justice systems. Improprieties, according to Washington, have been traced to police, prosecutors and judges. In Commonwealth v. Abu-Jamal, the journalist asserts that the judges “whitewashed the racism that has been extraordinarily evident since the actual beating of Abu-Jamal on December 9, 1981, by police that happened even before he was formally arrested.” (ibid.)
According to the UN-WGEPAD amicus brief, the original trial judge, the late Albert Sabo, was quoted in 1982 using a racist slur while stating that he would assist prosecutors to bend or break the law in order to win a conviction. Sabo violated judicial impartiality and the Code of Conduct for Pennsylvania judges. He also denied Abu-Jamal his right to self-representation and participation in jury selection (ibid.). Sabo’s rulings, according to Washington, kept evidence from the jurors; his racist acts violated the right to a fair trial.
University of Heidelberg Professor Michael Schiffmann reports that racism in jury selection is central in most criminal cases, citing the 1998 study by University of Iowa Professors David Baldus and George Woodworth, who published a ten-year review of Philadelphia’s death row cases. They showed that the average likelihood for Black and white potential jurors to be stricken was a four-to-one ratio from 1983–1993. In 1999, Abu-Jamal’s defence was granted a habeas corpus petition relevant to prosecutor Joseph McGill’s six cases from 1981–1983 which had an 8.5-to-one ratio of Black jurors being stricken. In Abu-Jamal’s case, the likelihood of Black jurors being stricken by prosecutor McGill increased to ten-to-one; when the racial identity of one of the jurors could not be clarified because the defence was prevented from clarification, this potentially rose to 14-to-one. Should the responsibility of justice rest on the judiciary—despite pressures from police opinion, police unions, reactionary media, and bigoted and ignorant white peers and people of colour who follow their lead?
Conclusion
Julia Wright, daughter of novelist Richard Wright, cofounded the Mumia Health Committee with German professor Michael Schiffman and others to assist elders ageing in prison with extensive health care needs. Such organizations work against state criminality in its substandard medical care for the imprisoned, its neglect and the violence it routinely inflicts on those swept up into the carceral state. The Health Committee supports Abu-Jamal, and other incarcerated elders. The legal component still exists but it focuses on the denial of competent care or the need to release elders. This committee is influenced by another nonprofit Releasing Aging People from Prison (RAPP). Based in NYC, the organization emphasizes that after 20 years of incarceration, nearly all sentences should be closed and the incarcerated released. RAPP also asserts that the prison environment fosters serious health conditions and that after 20 years of incarceration, those held inside are unlikely to commit crimes if released. It routinely lobbies the State House in Albany for prison reforms.
Following the failure of courteous public letters to Judge Clemons, before she sentenced Abu-Jamal to a living death in prison, South African trade unionists posted their February 17, 2023, Open Letter to US Judge on Mumia Abu-Jamal Case—NUMSA. NUMSA, The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, noted the international solidarity against the apartheid supported by Black Americans in the United States and union workers who refused to unload cargo from the apartheid state:
On behalf of hundreds of thousands of metalworkers in South Africa, who know both the bitter taste of injustice and the undying hope for freedom, we call on you Judge Lucretia Clemons to do the right thing and free comrade Mumia Abu-Jamal. The whole world is waiting with a mixture of joy and sorrow firmly believing for a just ruling that will do justice and free Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia’s freedom has been defended and pursued by both Archbishop Tutu and President Nelson Mandela. It is in your hands today to open the way for truth and freedom for America’s most well-known political prisoner. We eagerly await your response in the hope that you will be persuaded and do what is just in the interest of humanity, and undo this grave injustice that has visited Abu-Jamal for more than four decades ( Jim 2023).
To view Clemons as a comprador in black robes, one complicitous in the long history of police and judicial abuse and obstruction of justice, is to acknowledge that Blacks/women/Black women/feminists/anti-racists enact and support state criminality, particularly against Black radical actors who laboured in liberation movements. Wright describes Clemons as an enforcer of white supremacist legalism. The adage “Justice is blind” is ironically amplified as Clemons, a Black woman in black robes, echoes the narratives of white nationalism and anti-radicalism structured in police departments and district attorney offices: all political actors as radicalized prisoners shall be disappeared.
Wright’s poem presented on Black Power Media addresses Black/African’s internalization of anti-Blackness and how (Black/African) officials who inflict civil rights and human rights atrocities—as catalogued in the 1951 We Charge Genocide. Wright’s poetry asserts that Judge Clemons: “has entered Black history/And that is her prison.” ( Wright 2022) In the poem, the judge’s prison differs from that of Abu-Jamal—he is physically captive but spiritually and intellectually free; she is physically free intellectually and spiritually chained to corruption and predatory Philly cops. For Wright, Clemons resides within “the prison of Black history” as a comprador (ibid.); but Wright optimistically asserts that the judge realizes that she will be judged by “Black history” for her lack of ethics despite her attempts to portray herself as also a “victim” of anti-Blackness while being complicit with it (ibid.). For Wright, Clemons will remain accountable to our collective history of dishonour and death within US democracy as Clemons’ sons “study her decision in their textbooks.” (ibid.)