Arnold Beverly
Encyclopedia
Arnold Beverly is a Philadelphia man who rose to prominence during the legal appeals
Appeal
An appeal is a petition for review of a case that has been decided by a court of law. The petition is made to a higher court for the purpose of overturning the lower court's decision....

 following the 1982 trial
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Mumia Abu-Jamal
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Mumia Abu-Jamal was a 1982 murder trial in which Mumia Abu-Jamal was tried and convicted for the first-degree murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner....

 of Mumia Abu-Jamal
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Mumia Abu-Jamal was convicted of the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death. He has been described as "perhaps the world's best known death-row inmate", and his sentence is one of the most debated today...

. In 1999, Beverly signed an affidavit
Affidavit
An affidavit is a written sworn statement of fact voluntarily made by an affiant or deponent under an oath or affirmation administered by a person authorized to do so by law. Such statement is witnessed as to the authenticity of the affiant's signature by a taker of oaths, such as a notary public...

 confessing to the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner
Daniel Faulkner
Daniel J. Faulkner was a police officer in the American city of Philadelphia who was shot and killed in the line of duty. Mumia Abu-Jamal was convicted of first-degree murder for the shooting and sentenced to death...

. Beverly swore
Oath
An oath is either a statement of fact or a promise calling upon something or someone that the oath maker considers sacred, usually God, as a witness to the binding nature of the promise or the truth of the statement of fact. To swear is to take an oath, to make a solemn vow...

 that while acting as a hitman
Hitman
A hitman is a person hired to kill another person.- Hitmen in organized crime :Hitmen are largely linked to the world of organized crime. Hitmen are hired people who kill people for money. Notable examples include Murder, Inc., Mafia hitmen and Richard Kuklinski.- Other cases involving hitmen...

 for the mob hired by corrupt Philadelphia police officers, he, not Abu-Jamal, killed officer Faulkner.

Abu-Jamal's senior attorneys felt that Beverly was not credible, as no witnesses have testified to having seen Beverly at the scene, and advised Abu-Jamal against using Beverly to support his 1999 appeal. This decision later became a divisive issue among Abu-Jamal's legal teams and supporters.

The Beverly affidavit

Beverly's affidavit states that he and an unnamed second person were mob hitmen
Contract killing
Contract killing is a form of murder, in which one party hires another party to kill a target individual or group of people. It involves an illegal agreement between two parties in which one party agrees to kill the target in exchange for consideration, monetary, or otherwise. The hiring party may...

 hired by corrupt Philadelphia police officers to kill officer Faulkner because of Faulkner's interference with graft and payoffs made to allow illegal activities in Philadelphia's Center City
Center City, Philadelphia
Center City, or Downtown Philadelphia includes the central business district and central neighborhoods of the City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. As of 2005, its population of over 88,000 made it the third most populous downtown in the United States, after New York City's and Chicago's...

 area. He describes the killing and states that three police officers were within view, but says "I was not worried about the police being there since I believed that since I was hired by the mob to shoot and kill Faulkner, any police officers on the scene would be there to help me."

The affidavit further states that he escaped the scene by traveling three blocks on the underground Speedline, at which point he received further assistance from a police officer, then left the Center City area in a car that was waiting for him.

Defense decision

One of Abu-Jamal's attorneys, Partisan Defense Committee
Partisan Defense Committee
The Partisan Defense Committee describes itself as a "a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization that champions cases and causes in the interests of the whole of the working people." The PDC works in accordance with the political orientation of the Spartacist League...

 member Rachel Wolkenstein, found Beverly in 1999 and presented him and his affidavit to Abu-Jamal and the rest of the legal team. Lead attorney Leonard Weinglass
Leonard Weinglass
Leonard Irving Weinglass was a U.S. criminal defense lawyer and constitutional law advocate. Weinglass graduated from Yale Law School in 1958, then served as a Captain, Judge Advocate, United States Air Force from 1959 to 1961. He was admitted to the bar in the states of New Jersey, New York,...

 and legal strategist Daniel Williams advised Abu-Jamal that Beverly was neither credible nor an asset to his case while Wolkenstein and her colleague Jon Piper argued in favor of Beverly's testimony. Abu-Jamal decided to take the advice of his more senior attorneys and not present Beverly in the appeal process, leading Wolkenstein and Piper to resign in protest.

In 2001, Williams published Executing Justice: An Inside Account of the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, in which he says he "wasn't about to embarrass myself by running with such a patently outrageous story on the most visible death-penalty case in the world." He also says that Abu-Jamal decided not to use Beverly because Abu-Jamal was "far too honorable to propagate a lie upon which to build a case for his freedom." Although largely favorable to Abu-Jamal, the book resulted in Mumia firing both Williams and Weinglass from the defense team.

Change of strategy

Abu-Jamal's next legal team revived the Beverly affidavit. Claiming it had been hidden from them, on 4 May 2001 they petitioned a federal court to have Arnold Beverly deposed
Deposition (law)
In the law of the United States, a deposition is the out-of-court oral testimony of a witness that is reduced to writing for later use in court or for discovery purposes. It is commonly used in litigation in the United States and Canada and is almost always conducted outside of court by the...

as a witness. However, under US law, a capital case defendant cannot introduce evidence during an appeal which he has known about and rejected more than a year earlier, and on 19 July 2001, Judge William Yohn denied the petition.
(In December of that year Judge Yohn overturned Abu-Jamal's death sentence but upheld the conviction for murder.)
A further petition to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to hear from Beverly, based on the claim of ineffective counsel by Weinglass and Williams, was denied on 8 October 2003 by Justices Eakin and Nigro.

External links

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