Cop's Widow Seeks To Disqualify D.A. Krasner In Mumia Appeal

"The Supreme Court made it crystal clear," Bochetto said in 2020, that any further appeals by Abu-Jamal "should be be handled by the attorney general's office."

It began on Dec. 9, 1981 on Locust Street, between 12th and 13th Streets, when Officer Faulkner pulled over William Cook. Faulkner, who had radioed for backup, was in the process of handcuffing Cook when his brother, then known as Wesley Cook, crossed the street and shot the police officer in the back.

"As Officer Faulkner lay on the ground bleeding, Jamal shot him four more times at close range, once through the center of his face," Faulkner's lawyers wrote in their Nov. 12th King's Bench petition to the state Supreme Court, asking that Krasner be disqualified as prosecutor in the case.

A jury convicted Cook/Jamal of first degree murder in 1982, Faulkner's attorneys wrote, "based on overwhelming evidence, including multiple eyewitness identifications," and Jamal's admission to a hospital security guard and another police officer that "I shot the motherfucker and hope he dies."

In their latest appeal, Abu-Jamal's lawyers claim that the new evidence included a letter from Robert Chobert, an eyewitness in the Faulkner murder, to the prosecutor, a letter that allegedly shows that Chobert was "offered payment in connection with his testimony."

Mumia's lawyers also argued that prosecutor McGill was improperly tracking the race of all prospective jurors in the case, with the intention of excluding minorities. They also claim that McGill gave Cynthia White, a prostitute who was another eyewitness to the murder of Faulkner, "incentives and promises" to testify, because McGill was supposedly tracking her subsequent prosecutions for misdemeanors.

In his affidavit, McGill stated that none of those allegations were true.

After the Abu-Jamal trial was over, McGill wrote in his affidavit, he thanked Chobert for his testimony, which the prosecutor said was given "at great risk to his own personal safety."

At that time, the prosecutor said, he asked if he could do anything for Chobert, and the witness asked if he could be "compensated for the time he lost from his taxi business." In his affidavit, McGill said he told Chobert he would "look into it." In his letter to McGill, Chobert apparently was trying to remind McGill about the possibility of being compensated.

But the conversation between McGill and Chobert happened after the trial. Same for Chobert's letter, included in the alleged newly discovered evidence. It was written by Chobert in August 1982, a month after Abu-Jamal was convicted.

"The suggestion that I paid a witness to testify is offensive and particularly preposterous given the timing" of the witness's original identification of Mumia as the shooter, McGill said, which was done well before McGill ever entered the case as prosecutor.

McGill conceded his handwritten notes from the trial did list the race of the prospective jurors, as well as where they lived, their vocations and the vocations of their relatives, etc. He said the original jury he picked had four blacks, but one was struck by lawyers for Mumia and a second was dismissed by the trial judge.

Two black jurors, McGill said, remained on the jury that convicted Mumia.