Big win for Hep-C infected inmates: Federal Judge Orders Pennsylvania to Provide Anti-Viral Hep-C Treatment to Mumia Abu-Jamal

By Dave Lindorff

            In a stunning conclusion to a year-and-a-half legal drama, a federal judge in Scranton, has ordered the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to quit stalling and to begin treating prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal with the latest available and highly effective anti-viral drugs for curing him of a raging and life-threatening case of Hepatitis C.

            Abu-Jamal, back in early 2015, fell into a diabetic coma, the result of an undiagnosed case of active Hepatitis C which he contracted sometime during his 36 years as a prisoner in the Pennsylvania prison system.

            Convicted and sentenced to death back in 1982 for the 1981 murder of a white police officer at what was a highly controversial trial fraught with perjured prosecution testimony, withheld evidence and under the control of a clearly biased judge, Abu-Jamal, at the time a prominent Philadelphia journalist, in 2001 had his death sentence overturned on constitutional grounds and was instead given a sentence of life in prison without parole. But prison authorities, aided by the state’s judicial and law-enforcement establishment, have continued to torment him and harm him in any way possible, for example keeping him in solitary on death row for several years of appeals after a federal judge had already tossed out  his death sentence, and even then keeping him in solitary as long as possible before finally transferring him to the general prison population after his death sentence was finally confirmed by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

            When it became clear that Abu-Jamal was seriously ill with Hepatitis C -- an epidemic in prisons across America and in the Pennsylvania prison system where at least 7000 prisoners are known to have active cases of the deadly disease -- efforts by his supporters, family and legal team to get him treatment began immediately. But these efforts have been stymied at every turn by a prison bureaucracy loathe to offer medication that reportedly can cost $80,000 or more for one full course of treatment. (Of course, unmentioned is the reality that the cost of Abu-Jamal’s two hospitalizations for the serious conditions caused by non-treatment of the disease have already cost taxpayers $170,000, as will also be the case for other infected inmates who are left untreated).

            Bret Grote, legal director of the Abolition Law Center, a Pittsburgh-based Pennsylvania prison advocacy organization, says that the preliminary injunction issued by Federal District Judge Robert Mariani, the first such order nationwide demanding state-of-the-art anti-viral treatment for a prison inmate with Hep-C...

            For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/3412