FREDDIE’S DEAD
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
[Col. Writ. 10/20/02]
The thrilling falsetto of the late, great singer and musician, Curtis Mayfield, comes to memory, his tenor voice giving life to a lament about the death of a drug-user named Fred. His great gift of song graced the soundtrack of an otherwise forgettable movie of the 1970s, called Superfly.
"Freddie's dead ... that's what I said..." --Mayfield.
The chorus would not leave my mind when I learned that Fred Thomas, a fellow denizen of Death Row, died at 6:00 AM on Tuesday, Oct. 8th, 2002, after being found in a coma in a death row cell in Graterford Prison some days before.
He died five months after a Philadelphia judge granted him a new trial based upon prosecutorial misconduct and police lies. He died while still on death row (and not at home) because the DA fought against the new trial tooth and nail.
Long-time readers of this column will remember an earlier piece on Fred, and I will not repeat that work here. Suffice it is to say, Fred was framed for the murder of a FedEx driver, William Moyer, on Christmas Eve 1993. While this is my considered opinion after my review of the record, don’t take my word for it. At an evidentiary hearing in Fred’s case in May, 2002, Judge Willis W. Berry, citing prosecutorial misconduct, held that Fred didn't "get a fair trial." Speaking from the bench, Judge Berry announced: "[I]f the jury knew what I knew about this case, and knew what I knew about [Officer] Ryan or what everybody knows now, no way, in my opinion, would they not find reasonable doubt in this case".
Indeed, the evidentiary hearing proved that the DA and the cops conspired to produce false witnesses to implicate Fred (who have since recanted), and to prevent an eyewitness (Maria Fielding) from testifying, for she gave a statement in 1993 that Fred was NOT involved in Moyer’s shooting! A cop named James Ryan threatened Ms. Fielding with the seizure of her kids if she testified for Thomas. The DA, Roger King, told the court and defense that his office was "redoubling" its efforts to locate Ms. Fielding, while she was, at the time in police custody! They did not "locate" her because they didn't want her to testify.
They didn't want the jury to hear the truth.
Meanwhile, diabetes devastated Fred’s health, destroyed his liver, and put him into a deadly coma.
An innocent man was sent to death row, and, sure enough, he died. He died, not from lethal injection, but from the equally lethal poison of prosecutorial and political ambition, from police corruption, from judicial deference, and from the debilitating effects of Death Row.
He died from poverty (for rich men can afford good lawyers); he died from a system that saw him as expendable, as a statistic, not a man. Freddie's dead.
Text © copyright 2002 by Mumia Abu-Jamal.
All rights reserved.
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