20 January 2010 :

Supreme Court reverse reversal for Mumia Abu-Jamal. The US Supreme Court has overturned a decision by a lower court to block the execution of a former "black power" militant. Federal District Judge William Yohn in 2001 had overturned Abu-Jamal’s death sentence after finding that the form used by the trial jury in 1982 to establish whether jurors felt there were any mitigating circumstances was flawed, and could have left panelists mistakenly believing that before they could consider any such mitigating factors in their deliberations, they would all have to agree such a factor existed. On March 27 2008 (see) the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia upheld the 2001 decision by Judge Yohn. Today, in a brief order, the Supreme Court sent the case back to a U.S. appeals court based in Philadelphia for further consideration in view of the high court's recent decision in an Ohio case that had raised similar issues. Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a similar ruling in the case of Frank Spisak, a neo-Nazi who killed three people in 1982. The court's action, which was not a ruling on the merits of the case, could lead to Abu-Jamal's death sentence being reinstated, too. Abu-Jamal, 55, black, a former member of the Black Panthers militant group, was convicted and sentenced to death in 1982 for murdering white Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in an early morning confrontation on December 9, 1981. The Black Panthers were a revolutionary "black power" group active in the US in the 1960s and 1970s. See also 19/07/2001, 13/09/2001, 21/11/2001, 04/12/2001, 18/12/2001, 20/12/2001, 21/12/2001, 08/12/2005, 27/03/2008, 06/10/2008, 06/04/2009.