Reporters Sans Frontières

Published on 9 October 2009

To mark World Day Against the Death Penalty tomorrow, Reporters Without Borders is releasing the interview it was given on 22 September by Robert R. Bryan, the attorney who represents journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, a death row resident since 1982. His lawyer since 2003, Bryan talks about the appeals in his case and the current situation of the death penalty in the United States.

Watch the video :

(subtitled in Spanish) http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xa... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXZf... (subtitled in French) http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xa... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICF9...

"I have never seen a case in which there is so much zeal, so much passion to kill a client as there is for Mumia," Bryan told us. He went on to talk about the problems during the trial and his hopes of one day managing to save Abu-Jamal, whose only crime, he said, was to be black and a journalist "writing about injustice."

Last June, Abu-Jamal wrote an article for Reporters Without Borders from his cell, entitled "Journalism in Hell," in which he described what it was like to be writing on death row (http://www.rsf.org/Journalism-in-He... ).

Bryan has known Abu-Jamal since 1985 but was not able to take over his defence then. Abu-Jamal remember him 18 years later, at a time when he was aware not only of the unfairness of the trial that resulted in his death sentence and the many irregularities in the appeal procedures but also the mistakes made by his own lawyers until that moment.

Bryan has been defending death row cases for the past 30 years and has always managed to prevent his clients being executed.