Mumia Abu-Jamal – a prolific writer, human rights activist, voice for the voiceless – told the Guardian in a telephone interview, “Hope is an element of Struggle, is it not?” He said, “As we used to say in the old days, ‘A luta continua.’”
Mumia Abu-Jamal is the most recognized political prisoner in the world. His case is known and supported nationally and internationally. Mumia Abu-Jamal is a grandfather, award-winning broadcast journalist, prolific author, and former Lieutenant of Information for the Philadelphia Chapter of the Black Panther Party. He has devoted his reporting career to supporting Black liberation and exposing brutality and corruption within the police and prison system. On Dec. 9, 1981, he was arrested by the Philadelphia Police Department on suspicion of the murder of a police officer after being shot himself. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death.
Mumia was initially detained pretrial at the Detention Center and Holmesburg Prison, from December of 1981 through May of 1983. He was held in continuous solitary confinement on death row at SCI Greene and Huntingdon for 28 years from 1983-2011. In 2011, his death sentence was overturned, and he was resentenced to life in prison without parole, also known as “Death By Incarceration.” From 2012 to present, he has been detained at State Correctional Institution (SCI) Mahanoy, a state prison operated by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
In September 2024 the Pennsylvania Superior Court denied Abu-Jamal’s sixth petition to reverse his 1982 conviction. A request to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court for permission to appeal was denied on March 26, 2025. Abu-Jamal is approaching his 45th year of detainment under the authority of the law of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Considering all the efforts nationally and internationally to release Mumia, with legal appeals exhausted, Mumia’s legal team petitioned the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to examine Mumia’s case and support efforts to release him. The petition was submitted on July 28, 2026 by the Abolitionist Law Center, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Center for Constitutional Rights, California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), and Release Aging People in Prison Campaign (RAPPC).
The 20 pages of background and 48 supplemental materials submitted to the U.N. points out that Death by Incarceration is inherently arbitrary and RACIST.
(Submission to United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention on Behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal)
This petition says:
“Mr. Abu-Jamal is one of a staggering number of individuals in the United States condemned to die in prison. As of 2020, 203,865 people in the United States were serving life or virtual life sentences, of whom 8,252 were in Pennsylvania; 56,245 people in the United States are serving formal sentences of life without parole, of whom over 5,000 are in Pennsylvania. While Black people represent only 10.9% of the total Pennsylvania population, they constitute 62% of all those serving life sentences in the state prison system. A growing consensus of international authorities have condemned Death by Incarceration sentencing in the United States as violative of international prohibitions on racial discrimination.”
Mumia is 72 years old, served 44 years, has declining health, and does not present a risk to the public. He was released from death row and solitary confinement into the prison’s general population in 2012. Given the violations of international law inherent to life sentences without parole, will this working group find a legal basis for challenging Mumia Abu-Jamal’s sentence of Death by Incarceration?
Hope is an element of Struggle. We said it in the old days and we say it now.
The Struggle continues!
Free Mumia and All Political Prisoners. Now!
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