The Pulse: No doubt on guilt, but fighting on was futile.

Maureen Faulkner's acquiescence to a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole for Mumia Abu-Jamal should mean exactly that.

Her view was clear Wednesday when she stood with District Attorney Seth Williams as he announced that he would not pursue a new sentencing hearing for the convicted cop killer. And her decision should effectively end the three-decade legal battle, rather than give rise to a new effort to free the man who a jury determined killed Philadelphia Police Officer Danny Faulkner at point-blank range.

First, Abu-Jamal's guilt is not in doubt. Thirty years of attempts to overturn the jury's finding as to guilt have uniformly failed. He did it. And without relitigating all of the evidence that says so, just ask yourself if his brother, William Cook, who witnessed the murder, would have stayed silent all these years had he seen something suggestive of Abu-Jamal's innocence?

Second, no court has ruled that Abu-Jamal's sentence was unconstitutional. Instead, the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit held that the instruction to the jury in the penalty phase was constitutionally flawed insofar as the possibility existed that the jury could have concluded that any finding of mitigating circumstances needed to be unanimous when, in fact, unanimity was not a legal requirement. Or, as Maureen Faulkner has called it, a "hair-splitting technicality."

And here's another important distinction:

There is no evidence that the jury was actually confused about anything. The specter of confusion is a defense-team canard that was never even raised in years of state appeals. Only when the case went to the federal level was this theory thrown at the wall, notwithstanding that there is zero evidence of any juror having been confused. A year ago, I tracked down and spoke with the jury foreman from the 1982 trial. He told me there was no confusion whatsoever on the part of those who deliberated Abu-Jamal's fate.

That's why, until Williams announced his decision Wednesday, the commonwealth remained able to sentence Abu-Jamal to death - again - so long as he was first afforded a new hearing. But that would have been an expensive lesson in futility.