Excerpts PRESS CONFERENCE STATEMENT: BY ZACK DE LA ROCHA OF RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE (1/28/99)

Since the Fraternal Order of Police continue to picket Rage Against the Machine concerts, it seems appropriate to reprint this statement from RAM themselves, forwarded from student activists in New York.

Working to ensure the legal rights that all us presume to enjoy certainly has turned out to be controversial!

Let me say straight up that tonight’s benefit is not to support cop killers, or any other kind of killers. And if there were no question about the guilt of Mumia Abu-Jamal, we would not be holding this concert.

But whether Jamal is guilty, or is himself the victim of an outrageous miscarriage of justice, is precisely what is at issue. Tonight’s benefit seeks to answer that question by allowing Jamal to have the fair and impartial judicial review that he was denied by the state of Pennsylvania.

The proceeds from tonight’s event go, not to Mr. Jamal, but to pay for the investigators, forensic experts, and lawyers needed to get an unbiased hearing of this case in the federal courts.

Parents should be proud that their children are attending and standing up for the rights to which all people are entitled.

We first heard of this case some years back when the Fraternal Order of Police and Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole pressured National Public Radio into censoring a series of commentaries on prison life recorded by Mr. Jamal. Then Pennsylvania prison authorities put Mr. Jamal into punitive confinement as punishment for writing his first book, Live from Death Row, published by Addison-Wesley.

We began to ask ourselves, shouldn’t political dissidents in THIS country enjoy the same rights that the U.S. government demands for political dissidents in China or Iran?

We have a great deal of sympathy for anyone who is a victim of tragedy, including the widows of slain police officers. But we do not feel that the proper answer to tragedy is to inflict injustice on others. We need to base ourselves on fact, not on emotion. And our path to closure should be paved with a search for truth and justice, not a search for revenge against whomever is targeted by the police.

Rage Against the Machine is not a stranger to controversy. And we are happy that our small effort in doing this benefit has focused increased attention on this case. We find ourselves following in the footsteps of Bob Dylan, whose famous song and concert for Ruben "Hurricane" Carter in 1975, helped to free someone who was falsely accused of murder right here in New Jersey.

It is ironic that tonight, on the day after the Pope called for an end to the death penalty in the United States, we will have others outside tonight calling for the taking of a life on the flimsiest of evidence.

One of the great things about young people is that they DO question, that they do care deeply about justice, and that they have open minds. We hope that some of them brought their parents tonight!