Mr. Abu-Jamal, a 72-year-old award-winning broadcast journalist and prolific author, has been incarcerated for more than four decades, since December 1981. He was arrested and charged with murdering a police officer after being found at the scene, also shot. After being convicted and given the death penalty, he was held in solitary confinement on death row (1983-2011) for 29 years, a gross violation of the international Mandela Rules limiting solitary confinement to 15 days. Throughout, Mr. Abu-Jamal has been targeted for his political expression, associations, and his race—prior to his arrest, at trial, and over the course of his incarceration, appeals, and postconviction proceedings, including repeated attempts to censor and silence his political writings and speech.

The UN submission clearly documents the racial discrimination Mr. Abu-Jamal has been subject to along with deprivation of his right to represent himself, deprivation of adequate time and facilities to mount a proper defense, and political interference.

Mr. Abu-Jamal has diligently pursued a new and fair trial through appellate and post-conviction proceedings in both state and federal court, but has exhausted all legal avenues for relief. Though his death penalty was overturned, Mr. Abu-Jamal’s sentence of life without parole – also known as death by incarceration (DBI) – is torture: a cruel, inhumane, and degrading punishment that violates international law.

Now an elderly man, Mr. Abu-Jamal has endured multiple near-death medical crises, including hepatitis C, congestive heart failure, a preventable hyperglycemic emergency that threatened his life, and multiple ophthalmic conditions that, due to inadequate medical care by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, pose a significant risk of permanent blindness.

As the submission states, Mr. Abu-Jamal is one of a staggering number of individuals in the United States condemned to die in prison. As of 2020, more than 200,000 people in the United States were serving life or virtual life sentences, of whom nearly 8,300 were in Pennsylvania; more than 56,000 people in the U.S. are serving formal sentences of life without parole, of whom more than 5,000 are in PA. Black people comprise only about 1 in 9 of incarcerated people in PA, but 2/3 of those serving life sentences. A growing consensus of international authorities has condemned DBI sentencing in the U.S. as violating international prohibitions on racial discrimination. In November 2023, the United Nations Human Rights Committee recommended that the United States “establish a moratorium on the imposition of sentences to life imprisonment without parole.”

View the July 28 submission to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention