Linn Washington
Police carp about college students’ selection of a prison inmate for their commencement speaker. It must have something to do with Mumia Abu-Jamal…the man that cops across America love to hate.
Chuck Canterbury, National President of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), issued a statement on October 1 that blasted Goddard College for its failure to block the commencement speech scheduled for Sunday (10/5) by Abu-Jamal, an alum of the small liberal arts institution in Vermont.
Canterbury castigated the fact that the group of 23 Goddard students who chose Abu-Jamal to address their boutique commencement ceremony “will be addressed by a remorseless killer who murdered Philadelphia Police Officer Danny Faulkner.”
Abu-Jamal’s controversial 1982 conviction for killing Officer Faulkner has been upheld by state and federal courts. However, that conviction is widely condemned by entities as diverse as Amnesty International, the European Parliament and the NAACP as fraught with misconduct by Philadelphia police and prosecutors that crippled Abu-Jamal’s fair trial rights.
Abu-Jamal briefly attended Goddard in the early 1970s. He obtained a B.A. degree from that institution 1996 through correspondence courses taken while on death row awaiting execution for Faulkner’s murder.