December 14–21, 2000

hit and run

Jail for Mumia Man

One of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s top supporters was jailed last week after admitting to a federal court judge that he had defied the terms of his probation by making a speech in Philadelphia during the Republican National Convention this past summer.

Brooklyn-based author and journalist C. Clark Kissinger, 60, immediately began serving a 90-day sentence last Wednesday after a raucous hearing in which Judge Arnold C. Rapoport ordered protesters to be forcibly cleared out of the courtroom. Kissinger’s supporters now claim that he may be the first American since World War II to be jailed for giving a speech.

"It’s very discouraging," says Kissinger’s attorney, Andrew Erba. "I’ve never seen anybody get three months for a parole violation based on a [non-violent conviction]. Our argument in the case is that, in effect, the judge is penalizing Clark for activities that are otherwise constitutionally protected."

Kissinger, a frequent media spokesman for Abu-Jamal’s legal defense team, had been placed on federal probation earlier this year for his involvement in an Abu-Jamal demonstration at the Liberty Bell in 1999. The terms of his probation require him to clear his travel plans with his probation officer, but when he was denied permission to give a speech here while the Republicans were in town, he came anyway. On Aug. 1, before an anti-death penalty crowd at the Municipal Services Building plaza, Kissinger denounced George W. Bush as a "smirking frat rat son of a former head of the CIA who went on to become a speculator oil man, and went on from there to be a blood-stained executioner, and now wants to be the ruler of the world."

During last Wednesday’s hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Goldberg used some of those words against Kissinger. "It was really quite a political case that the prosecution presented," says Debra Sweet, who is serving as Kissinger’s spokesperson while he is in jail. "The major point that Judge Rapoport made in the courtroom was that ‘disruption seems to follow this defendant wherever he goes.’"

But Goldberg says it was the defense lawyers who entered the text of Kissinger’s speech into the record. "These were the facts stipulated by Mr. Kissinger," says Goldberg. "At issue at the sentencing of any person for violation of probation is what their conduct has been while on probation — what they do and what they say." Goldberg also defends Rapoport’s decision to clear the court: "He repeatedly warned people in the audience to stop yelling. And they didn’t."

Since Kissinger’s jailing, his attorneys have failed to get his sentence stayed pending an appeal.

Meanwhile, Sweet and other Abu-Jamal supporters are seeking permission for Kissinger to serve his sentence at a federal lockup near his New York home. "There’s a whole political climate in the [Philadelphia] criminal justice system against Mumia," says Sweet.

—Noel Weyrich