Vol. 81/No. 4 January 23, 2017
Mumia Abu-Jamal wins fight for medical care
behind bars
Abu-Jamal is a radio journalist and former Black Panther imprisoned for the last 35 years on frame-up charges of killing a Philadelphia police officer. He was on death row for 29 years, until the U.S. Court of Appeals, under pressure of a growing international campaign, changed his sentence in 2011 to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
After falling severely ill in 2015, Abu-Jamal was diagnosed with chronic hepatitis C, an often fatal viral infection that causes progressive scarring of the liver and related conditions. The disease is especially prevalent in prisons, with an average infection rate of more than 17 percent among inmates nationwide.
Since 2013, several new drugs have made it possible to cure hepatitis C in more than 90 percent of cases, with far fewer side effects. But the pharmaceutical monopolies charge up to $1,000 a pill. A 12-week course of these medicines can sell for more than $80,000, though the manufacturing cost is more like $200. Prison officials across the country deny treatment to the overwhelming majority of infected prisoners.
Pennsylvania prison doctors said Abu-Jamal wasn’t sick enough to receive the new drugs, so he sued for the right to treatment. Judge Mariani ruled Aug. 31 that the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections protocol for approving the medicines “presents deliberate indifference to the known risks which follow from untreated chronic hepatitis C.” Its effect is to “prolong the suffering” of patients and “allow the progression of the disease to accelerate.” But the judge denied Abu-Jamal’s request for relief on a technicality, saying he’d named the wrong defendants.
Abu-Jamal filed a new suit, leading to the Jan. 3 ruling. Mariani found state officials’ actions violated the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Mariani noted that although prison officials had tweaked their protocol for hepatitis C treatment, it still “presents a conscious disregard of a known risk that inmates with fibrosis, like Plaintiff, will suffer from hepatitis C related complications.” He ordered that Abu-Jamal be seen by a doctor who can prescribe the life-saving drugs and begin treatment within three weeks.
“Spread the word, because this is not what the Commonwealth [of Pennsylvania] wants people to know about — that they are engaged in unconstitutional medical practices,” Abu-Jamal told Prison Radio in a phone call Jan. 4. “Here we have a cure, and the government of Pennsylvania refused to give it to thousands of people for years, until they got to the brink of death.”
The judge found that as of June 6, only 50 of the more than 5,400 inmates with chronic hepatitis C in Pennsylvania state prisons had been treated with direct-acting antiviral drugs.
The victory in Abu-Jamal’s suit comes at the same time a separate class-action lawsuit is making its way through the courts demanding the right to treatment for all Pennsylvania prisoners with hepatitis C. Similar suits have been filed in Massachusetts, Minnesota and Tennessee.
“This is the first case in the country in which a federal court has ordered prison officials to provide an incarcerated patient with the new medications,” Bret Grote of the Abolitionist Law Center, one of Abu-Jamal’s attorneys, told the press Jan. 4.
“We’re asking people to call John Wetzel, secretary of the Department of Corrections, and demand they don’t appeal” the judge’s order, Pam Africa of International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal told the Militant by phone Jan. 9. “This fight has been going on for two years already. Often by the time prisoners do get the pill their liver is destroyed.”
There will be a demonstration outside Gov. Tom Wolf’s office in Philadelphia Jan. 13. “Our immediate fight is to stop any appeal,” Africa said. “And we’re fighting for them to lower the price so people can get this medicine. It’s not just prisoners, but people on the street can’t afford it either.”
Related articles:
Attica censorship ‘a danger to all who care about freedom’
Fight prison censorship
Prisoners in UK protest inhuman conditions
US prison population drops to 10-year low
Oppose rulers’ use of death penalty!
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