Mumia Abu-Jamal — Black Panther Party veteran at fifteen, then Philadelphia's "voice of the voiceless" radio journalist and defender of MOVE — was convicted of the 1981 killing of Officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death in a trial his supporters worldwide regard as the era's paradigmatic political proceeding: before Judge Albert Sabo, who a court stenographer swore she heard promise to help "fry the n----r," with a purged jury, suppressed witnesses, and a manufactured confession that surfaced months after the fact.

From death row Abu-Jamal became the world's best-known American political prisoner — author of Live from Death Row, honorary citizen of Paris, subject of protests on five continents. His death sentence was vacated in 2011 and he remains imprisoned for life without parole, his case still the dividing line in every argument over political imprisonment in the United States.