'The Senate's failure to confirm Debo Adegbile to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice is a travesty based on wildly unfair character attacks against a good and qualified public servant. As a lawyer, Mr. Adegbile has played by the rules. And now, Washington politics have used the rules against him." -President Obama
Eight Democrat senators joined with their Republican counterparts to vote against Debo Adegbile, Barack Obama's nominee, to head the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. The opposition - a huge rebuke for the president - likely stemmed from Adegbile's participation with an appeal filed on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the internationally known former Black Panther who was convicted for the 1981 slaying of Daniel Faulkner, a Philadelphia police officer.
"I'm especially grateful to to the democrats who broke ranks and had the courage to do the right thing. Debo Adegbile was the wrong person for the job. There have to be better people for the position," said Maureen Faulkner, the cop's widow.
Adegbile becomes the first Obama nominee rejected under the New Senate procedures, which was approved in November requiring a majority of senators present to agree in order to proceed on a vote for most presidential nominees.
One of the Democratic senators who voted against Adegbile's nomination was West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin:
"I made a conscientious decision after talking to the wife of the victim," Manchin later told reporters.
Advocates for the the 47-year-old Adegbile included the President of the United States. Adegbile worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund between 2001 and 2013, serving as as the group's in-house voting rights expert. Democrats, which included members of the Congressional Black Caucus, had argued that his long period of working on voting rights issues.
However, Adegbile's legal work on the Mumia Abu-Jamal's case, in which he helped to convince a judge that the convicted cop killer faced a discriminatory jury, proved to be too controversial in his hopes to head the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.
Abu-Jamal, born in 1954 in Philadelphia, was convicted for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. The one time Black Panther turned president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, Abu Jamal earned the moniker "the voice of the voiceless."
Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner was shot dead while conducting a traffic stop on William Abu-Jamal's brother on December 9, 1981. Abu-Jamal was injured by a shot from Faulkner and when police arrived on the scene, he was arrested and charged, and later convicted, with first degree murder.
Abu Jamal was removed from death row in January 2012, and in March 2012 the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ruled that all claims of new evidence put on his behalf did not warrant conducting a retrial.
In 2009 Maureen Faulkner co-authored Murdered by Mumia: A Life Sentence of Pain, Loss and Injustice. The "Officers Against President Obama's DOJ Nominee Debo Adegbile" Facebook page has been set up. It already received over 22,000 'likes.'
"People forget that Mumia Abdul Jamal was sort of the dashboard 'saint' of not liberals but the hard-left; he was a real liberal of the hard-left.," said Jonah Goldberg, a Fox News contributor
"He was, in my lifetime, I look a lot of time looking into this in the 1990s - an absolutely, unequivocally guilty cop-killer; witnesses, corroboration and his own confession, but for some reason - because he was so articulate, he was such a left-wing activist, he became this hero for a lot of people on the left," Goldberg added.
In 2002, the band Anti-Flag released a song called 'Mumia's Song' on their Mobilize album. The song 'Vices' on their 2008 album Bright Lights of America features a recording of Abu Jamal speaking about the US Prison System.
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