A Widow Fights Back : She Deplores Celebrity Support for Her Husband’s Convicted Killer

This week Maureen Faulkner is returning once again to the Philadelphia courtroom where, as a young widow 13 years ago, she sat for the trial and conviction of the man accused of murdering her husband.

She has already spent several weeks there this summer, attending hearings on whether former journalist and Death Row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal should be granted a new trial.

“It was very hard on me when I went back,” said Faulkner, who moved to Southern California a decade ago to build a new life.

She was sipping coffee in a Los Angeles International Airport terminal Friday morning, waiting to catch another plane to her hometown, this time for closing arguments in the hearings.

“It was the same courtroom--Courtroom 253. And it’s the same judge. And the same perpetrator. . . . I just thought I would never see this evil man again.”

Abu-Jamal, sentenced to death for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner, last month was granted a stay of execution pending his legal appeals. He has become an international cause celebre, winning the support of movie stars, authors and politicians. In newspaper advertisements, petitions and protests, his advocates clamor for a new trial, arguing that he was unfairly convicted.

And so, from her Los Angeles-area home, this shy but very determined woman has launched a counter-campaign “to get the truth out.”

She has no doubt that Abu-Jamal executed her 25-year-old husband by shooting him between the eyes on a cold December morning a couple of weeks before Christmas. “I think the truth has been twisted so much that people do not know the facts of the case,” said Faulkner, 38.

She has been interviewed on national television and waded through crowds of screaming Abu-Jamal supporters outside the Philadelphia courtroom. With the help of friends and former colleagues of her husband, she is raising money to take out newspaper advertisements and urging a boycott of the company that recently published a book Abu-Jamal wrote from prison.

When the volume of essays, “Live From Death Row,” was released in May, Faulkner hired an airplane to tow a 30-foot banner around the Massachusetts headquarters of the publishing firm: “Addison-Wesley supports convicted cop killer,” declared the banner, pulled through the sky during rush hour.

“I needed something to fight back, so that’s what I did--and got a lot of publicity,” she explained with an air of satisfaction.

(Addison-Wesley representatives have said they are not Abu-Jamal’s advocates but believe he has a right to be heard as an articulate correspondent from Death Row.)

Likewise, when Faulkner learned last year that National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” news program was planning to broadcast Abu-Jamal’s commentaries from prison, she wrote to NPR’s major donors, “letting them know they were contributing to a radio station that’s going to financially reward a convicted cop killer.”

Criticized from other quarters as well, NPR canceled the commentaries, citing editorial judgment.

Faulkner cannot abide the idea of Abu-Jamal making money behind bars.

“He has a little cottage industry running from his prison cell,” she said. “That is the problem. He is profiting from the death of my husband.”

She is also writing letters to the editors of newspapers and has talked to reporters in Europe and China.

“It hurts me,” she said of the campaign for Abu-Jamal. “It’s sad to see all these people who are standing behind him and screaming ‘Free him!’ People don’t know what the victims go through.”

Indeed, her rising public profile has brought her hundreds of letters of support from the families of crime victims, as well as invitations to speak to victims’ groups.

Maureen and Daniel Faulkner had been married for 13 months when he was killed. He had become a police officer at the age of 20 and told her that if anything ever happened to him, she should remember that he died doing what he loved.

The shooting occurred during a pre-dawn traffic stop. Faulkner stopped a car driven by Abu-Jamal’s brother, William Cook. They got into a fight just as Abu-Jamal, a former radio journalist turned cabdriver, cruised by.

By the time more officers showed up to assist Faulkner, he had been shot in the back and the forehead. Abu-Jamal sat wounded on the curb.

Witnesses later identified Abu-Jamal as the killer and said he had boasted of the shooting at the hospital--the same one at which Faulkner was pronounced dead.

In pressing for a new trial, Abu-Jamal’s supporters argue that the police suppressed evidence, the trial judge displayed open contempt for him and prosecutors limited the number of black jurors and then played on the fears of white jurors by drawing attention to Abu-Jamal’s youthful membership in the Black Panther Party.

Once president of the Philadelphia Assn. of Black Journalists, Abu-Jamal was known for radio commentaries supporting MOVE, a black separatist group in Philadelphia. His was a different world than the Faulkners’. “We did not know who this Jamal was,” recalled Maureen.

She is the youngest in a large, law-and-order Irish Catholic family--as was her husband, whom she described as happy-go-lucky, someone who left his work at work.

After the trial, she moved to New York and then Southern California, where one of her brothers lived with his wife. She declines to discuss personal details, or precisely where she lives or works. But she has clearly made another life for herself since her early widowhood, even backpacking around the world.

Asked what she will do if Abu-Jamal wins a new trial, she pauses. “I will stand behind this and see it to the end.”

“I’ve had so many people say to me, ‘Maureen, why, why go back? Why rip open the wounds of 14 years ago?’ And I have to. I have to stand up for the name of Danny Faulkner,” she said.

“If I did not do this and some day Jamal was granted a new trial and did walk the streets a free man, within my heart, I would never be able to forgive myself.”