Would this condition not be properly treated, Hepatitis C could be fatal. Since early 2015, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has deteriorated, due to what has been later diagnosed as Hepatitis C. He was removed from death row in January 2012 and in March 2012 the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ruled that all claims of new evidence put on his behalf did not warrant conducting a retrial. In 2011, the Third Circuit again affirmed the conviction as well as its decision to vacate the death sentence, and the District Attorney of Philadelphia announced that prosecutors would no longer seek the death penalty. Subsequently, the United States Supreme Court also allowed his conviction to stand, but ordered the appeals court to reconsider its decision as to the sentence.

Third Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the murder conviction but ordered a new capital sentencing hearing because the jury was improperly instructed. Going on trial in 1982, he was convicted by jury and sentenced to death, spending the next 30 years on death row.

Abu-Jamal was injured by a shot from Faulkner and when further police arrived on the scene, he was arrested and charged with first degree murder. On December 9, 1981, Officer Faulkner was shot dead while conducting a traffic stop on Abu-Jamal's brother, William Cook. Alongside his political activism, he became a radio journalist, eventually becoming president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists.

This latest point was settled by the justice system in 2011, when the original sentence of death, handed down at his first trial in July 1982, was commuted to life imprisonment.īorn in Philadelphia, Mumia Abu-Jamal became involved in black nationalism in his youth, and was a member of the Black Panther Party until October 1970. Supporters and detractors have disagreed on his guilt, whether he received a fair trial, and the appropriateness of the death penalty. He has been described as 'perhaps the world's best known death-row inmate' by The New York Times. Mumia Abu-Jamal (born Wesley Cook on April 24, 1954) is an American journalist convicted for the murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981.

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