'Trial of Justice' questions the trial

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL was a surprise guest yesterday at a panel discussion after the first screening of "Justice on Trial," a film that raises questions about whether he received a fair trial in the 1981 murder of Police Officer Daniel Faulkner.

Abu-Jamal "appeared" at a discussion at the National Constitutional Center via phone from death row at the State Correctional Institution at Greene, near Waynesburg, Pa.

Those in the pro-Abu-Jamal audience applauded when his voice came over the speaker phone.

Abu-Jamal told the crowd that he recently recalled words from the late Common Pleas Judge Albert Sabo, who presided over Abu-Jamal's original 1982 trial and at a 1995 appeal hearing.

During the summer of 1995, Abu-Jamal said, Sabo "said in open court that 'Justice is just an emotional feeling.' "

"I remember being floored by his words. . . . And he's right, it's not a reality," Abu-Jamal said. "It's just a word as easily disposed of as 'constitutional' 'rights' or 'due process.' . . . For in essence, justice is nothing in his courtroom."

Meanwhile, at a showing of the film last night at the Ritz East, nearly 150 people, including professors, former Black Panthers and die-hard Abu-Jamal supporters, some clutching signs bearing his photo, waited anxiously to see the film by Johanna Fernandez, a professor at Baruch College. Reggie Schell, 69, a former Black Panther, said he met Abu-Jamal, then 15, when he joined the group.

"He had an outstanding character. He was a good man, a good person and a good soldier," Schell said. "All that stuff they had in the paper about him is not true at all."

After four difficult years of traveling across the country doing interviews and research, Fernandez and filmmaker Kouross Esmaeli produced a film that she hopes challenges Tigre Hill's interpretation of the case, which was presented in "The Barrel of a Gun," which also premiered last night.

"We want to raise the quality of dialogue about the case," said Fernandez. "He argues that Mumia was motivated politically by members of the Black Panthers. There couldn't be a worst interpretation. Black Panthers were public enemy Number One. They fell under surveillance, murder and attacks."

At the afternoon screening, Salvatore Mastriano, a retired Philadelphia teacher, said he came to see the film because he thought Abu-Jamal's conviction "was a tremendous injustice."

"I used to listen to him on public radio years ago and I never really felt he was guilty," Mastriano said. "It just didn't make sense - the kind of person that he was - that he would do this."