Campaign 2000: Wrong Guy, Good Cause

She has a story to tell and a permit to tell it at 6 p.m. next Tuesday in Philadelphia, but you are not likely to notice Maureen Faulkner in the crowd at the Republican National Convention. So here is her story in advance.

Faulkner grew up in Philadelphia and married a cop. She was only 24 when he was shot and killed on duty in 1981, and she had to get out of town and start over somewhere else. She ended up in California, and it was going fine until about six years ago. Suddenly, everywhere she turned, she saw her husband's killer. She saw him on T shirts, on posters, on book covers, on television. He'd become an international celebrity, called a hero by some, compared to Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. by others. Maureen Faulkner's crusade began then, and the next stop takes her back home.

"They have a right to protest, and I have a right to protest against them," Faulkner, 43, said last week in Camarillo, Calif., where she manages a medical office. Given George W. Bush's record on executions in Texas, protest groups were putting out the call to "Crash the Executioner's Ball," and thousands were expected to join in. Faulkner respects death-penalty foes. What she resents is that their poster boy is the man who murdered her husband. And so while they do their thing, she intends to hold up Daniel Faulkner's photograph as she reads the 1982 courtroom testimony of witnesses who saw the killer shoot her husband and then stand over him and fire again and again.

The man's name is Mumia Abu-Jamal, born Wesley Cook, and the facts are these: In the first hours of Dec. 9, 1981, Danny Faulkner made a traffic stop on Abu-Jamal's brother, William Cook, who was driving the wrong way on a one-way street with his lights off. Witnesses describe an altercation after Cook resisted Faulkner. Abu-Jamal, who was driving a cab and happened upon the scene, traded gunfire with Faulkner. When police arrived, Abu-Jamal was on the pavement with a bullet in his chest, his shoulder holster empty. A gun registered to him was a few feet away, with five empty chambers. Faulkner, on his back nearby, was all but gone. Four witnesses had seen all or part of the shooting and three implicated Abu-Jamal.

At his 1982 trial, Abu-Jamal feuded with the judge and insisted on representing himself. He made political speeches, was removed from the courtroom several times and was convicted by a jury of 10 whites and two African Americans, who deliberated less than two hours in the penalty phase before coming back with a death sentence. I didn't know much about the case when I moved to Philadelphia in 1985 to work for the Inquirer. But I later heard it said that Abu-Jamal, a former radio reporter and Black Panther Party member, had been railroaded and that evidence pointing to another killer had been buried. Philadelphia being what it was and my politics being what they were, none of that seemed preposterous to me. But I began to educate myself, and the things Abu-Jamal supporters didn't know were shocking.