Robert Dole

Mr. DOLE

Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, I want to take a moment to pay tribute to Chick Reynolds, former Chief Reporter of the Office of the Official Reporters of debate, who I understand passed away early this morning. For over 45 years, Chick brought a keen eye and a quick mind to the world of stenographic reporting. From his first job at the Department of Defense to his official post in the Senate, Chick often found himself in the center of newsmaking headlines. Whether it was the Joseph McCarthy or Jimmy Hoffa hearings or the tragic day of President John Kennedy's assassination, Chick preserved many moments of history with speed and accuracy second to none. I know I speak for my colleagues when I recognize Chick Reynolds who served the Senate with distinction and loyalty for the past 21 years. Our thoughts and prayers are with his wife, Lucille.

Mr. DOLE

Mr. DOLE. Let me just indicate for everybody--then we will have a vote in a minute--this is the provision, so-called Dole provision and the so-called Daschle provision combined. I have taken out one objection. We have indicated to Senator Rockefeller, I have also indicated to Senator Dorgan that I would consent if they wanted to move to strike or whatever if they had problem with a section. I thank Senator Daschle.

Mr. DOLE. Senators Simon and Lott have reached the same agreement. I think with the Daschle amendment, if somebody had not approved, they would have that same right?

Mr. DOLE. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. DOLE. This will be the last vote today.

Mr. DOLE. I send a modification of my amendment to the desk. This has been agreed to by the Democratic leader and the managers.

Mr. DOLE. The Senator is correct, he would have that right. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DOLE. If the Senator will yield, I would be prepared, and I think Senator Daschle, in any provision in our amendment to protect the rights of anyone. If it takes consent, I would give consent right now that the Senator would have the right to move to strike that section next week if the Senator wanted more debate at that time. I certainly do not want to take away anybody's rights, but I think what we are trying to do is get a lot of these things we have sort of agreed on into the package without any further delay. And then obviously I would be willing to agree right now if the Senator wanted to offer a motion to strike or whatever on Monday or Tuesday, we could debate it at that time.

Mr. DOLE. I think that would apply to Senator Daschle's provision, too. Mr. KERREY addressed the Chair.

Mr. DOLE. I withhold that request until the Senator from Nebraska has had an opportunity to look at the request.

Mr. DOLE

Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand in recess until the hour of 12 noon on Monday, June 12, 1995; that, following the prayer, the Journal of proceedings be deemed approved to date, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and there be a period for the transaction of morning business not to extend beyond the hour of 1 p.m., with Senators permitted to speak for up to 5 minutes each. Further, that at the hour of 1 p.m., the Senate resume consideration of S. 652, the telecommunications bill and the pending Thurmond second- degree amendment to the Dorgan amendment No. 1264.

Mr. DOLE

Mr. DOLE. Finally, I ask unanimous consent that no bill, resolution, or amendment regarding the congressional gift ban rule or lobbying reform bill be in order prior to the execution of this agreement.

Mr. DOLE

Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Daschle's name appear immediately following mine on the leadership resolution.

Mr. DOLE. I ask unanimous consent that Senator Thurmond and Senator McCain be added as original cosponsors.

Mr. DOLE. I will be happy to yield.

Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, I note we are in a period of morning business right now. We are trying to get some agreement on gift ban and lobbying reform. I am prepared, if we can get that agreement, to proceed to it. I need to be absent for 5 minutes from the Chamber. Mr. DASCHLE addressed the Chair.

Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote by which the resolution was agreed to.

Mr. DOLE. I think we can take action on it and still give, say, to 5 o'clock for anybody else who wants to be added as a cosponsor. I ask unanimous consent that that be permissible.

Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, I also ask unanimous consent to add Senators McCain and Thurmond and the Presiding Officer, Senator Kempthorne, as cosponsors.

Mr. DOLE

Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, I ask that I may use some additional leader time.

Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. DOLE

Mr. DOLE. The article is all about his book, ``Live From Death Row.'' I also say that people wonder why some of us are frustrated with National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, when they use taxpayer's funds. If it had not been for Members of Congress-- in this case, probably taxpayers out there, citizens calling it to our attention--you would have been hearing this cop killer on National Public Radio with commentaries, and they were going to pay him, I think, $120 per commentary. So when we talk about a waste of taxpayers' money and about National Public Radio--which could be an arm of the Democratic party as far as I am concerned--and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, I hope the American people understand the kind of things they are willing to put on the air. This happened to be one of them that was stopped because of a firestorm that developed. But it seems to me that it is another indication that we can probably use that taxpayer money in some more useful way. Exhibit 1 [From the Washington Post, May 18, 1995] Condemned To Silence? (By Megan Resenfeld) There is an image from Mumia Abu-Jamal's trial that stays with Maureen Faulkner, even now, 13 years later, Abu-Jamal was charged with killing Faulkner's husband, Daniel, a 25- year-old Philadelphia policemen, by shooting him first in the back and then pumping four bullets into his prone body. When the ballistics expert held up her husband's bloody blue shirt to display the bullet holes, Abu-Jamal, seated at the defense table, turned around and looked at Maureen Faulkner. ``He smiled at me,'' she says. Abu-Jamal, then a freelance radio journalist and part-time cab driver, was convicted of Daniel Faulkner's murder and sentenced to death. But today he has become a cause celebre among a segment of literary names, his case taken up by well- known civil liberties lawyer Leonard Weinglass, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Rep. Ron Dellums (D-Calif.) and actors Whoopi Goldberg, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee and Ed Asner, among others. They claim Abu-Jamal was wrongly convicted and sentenced, despite what the prosecution, and a jury, believed was convincing testimony from eyewitnesses and unrefuted ballistics evidence. Two other groups, Amnesty International and PEN, a writers' free-speech advocacy association, take no position on Abu-Jamal's guilt or innocence, but question the fairness of his trial and sentencing. But what really has Faulkner upset is that Abu-Jamal has just published a book, ``Live From Death Row,'' for which an advance of about $30,000 was paid--although it is unclear to whom. Nether Weinglass not the publisher, Addision-Wesley would confirm the amount or say who got the money. A first printing of 32,500 copies has been shipped to bookstores around the country. ``A rare and courageous voice speaking from a place we fear to know: Mumia Abu-Jamal must be heard,'' writes prize- winning author Alice Walker in a book jacket blurb. And: ``Everyone interested in justice should read the words of this innocent man,'' declares lawyer William Kunstler. ``Does an innocent person turn and smile at the widow when the bloody shirt is held up?'' Faulkner asks. As far as Maureen Faulkner is concerned, the celebrities and human rights activists are remnants of the radical chic who have lined up like leftist lemmings and signed on to a bad deal. The claims that Abu-Jamal has a freedom-of-speech right to be heard, as expressed by his publisher and his supporters, strike her as lame. ``He is a convicted murderer,'' she says. ``Just as felons lose their right to vote, I think that by taking another man's life, he forfeits the right to freedom of speech.'' A Delicate Balance It's an argument as old as crime. How, in a nation ruled by law, are the rights of the accused and the convicted protected without abusing the survivors and victims? Like a tipsy boat trying to right itself, we shift from one side to the other, focusing first on the perpetrators and then on the perpetrated upon. And when the death penalty is involved, the emotion of the argument is even more intense, and the cries of injustice from both sides increase in pitch. The battles are as often fought in the arena of public opinion as in the courtroom, and this is where Faulkner has taken up her battle station. Abu-Jamal, now 41, will file his next appeal in June, said Weinglass. He has already been rebuffed twice by both the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court. His death warrant has not been signed, but the new governor of Pennsylvania, Thomas J. Ridge, campaigned as a pro-death- penalty Republican. Abu-Jamal's profile has never been higher. He has become a virtual folk hero. Even as the book reviews start coming in, benefits for his defense fund--at least three committees are raising money for him in different cities--are planned for this weekend in New York City. John Edgar Wideman, who wrote an introduction to the book; Melvin Van Peebles; two members of the MOVE group in Philadelphia with which Abu-Jamal was associated; Weinglass and others are giving a public reading from the book Saturday afternoon for $15 a ticket. Another reading, by actor Giancarlo Esposito, will be held that night for $250 a ticket. Spokesmen at two of Abu-Jamal's legal defense committees yesterday declined to say how much money has been raised. There have been rallies of support here and overseas. A typical pamphlet, published by the liberal- leaning Quixote Center in Hyattsville, is headlined: ``A Saga of Shame.'' So Faulkner has decided to raise her profile too. This week she was in Washington for the annual National Police Week, lobbying cops and their families to boycott the book. She is starting a nonprofit organization, with some help from Philadelphia's Fraternal Order of Police, to counter the attention give to Abu-Jamal's case. She is spending her weekends and Wednesdays writing to schools and school boards, urging them to boycott Addison-Wesley's large text-book operation. And she's gone even further. Last week she hired a plane to fly over Addison-Wesley headquarters in Reading, Mass., trailing a 30-foot banner. It said: ``Addison-Wesley Supports Convicted Cop Killer.'' ``I and all of us at Addison-Wesley feel great sympathy for Mrs. Faulkner and the terrible ordeal she suffered,'' said David Goehring, head of the firm's trade publishing division. ``But this is a book with an important message. I think this is a highly disturbing book, challenging our assumptions of the death penalty. Is that a reason to deny someone his freedom of speech?'' `life goes on' Maureen Faulkner is a small, blond, determined woman who has done as well as she could to cope with her young husband's murder. She was only 25 when he died, before they'd had a chance to finish their college degrees, buy a house, have children. Both were the youngest of large families, born and raised in Philadelphia. She was aware of the dangers of her husband's career. They had a pact always to kiss good night, and kiss goodbuy, regardless of marital ups and downs, because life was so uncertain. And they had discussed the possibility of his death. ``He said, `If anything happens to me, I died doing the work I love most. Life goes on. I want you to be happy,''' she says. And Faulkner has had a full life--no professional widowhood for her. After the four-week trial, she left her job as an accountant for a Philadelphia corporation and worked for Trans World Airlines in New York, selling tickets. She backpacked around the world, trekked in Nepal, climbed the foothills of Everest. After she moved to Southern California about 10 years ago, she owned and operated a deli with one of her brothers. She earned a private pilot's license and started to raise show dogs--Hungarian Viszlas. For the past seven years she has worked as a medical assistant for an office of obstetricians. Although she has not remarried, she lives with a boyfriend. She still is afraid to give out information about where she lives or works, because all during the trial she got nasty phone calls, which she attributes to supporters of Abu-Jamal. She changed her unlisted number more than a dozen times, but somehow they always got it. Her anger, long dormant, was rekindled last year when she heard that Abu-Jamal had been hired by National Public Radio to do a series of commentaries from prison for $150 each. She protested, and then got a list of NPR's contributors and wrote to hundreds of them. In the ensuing storm of argument, NPR canceled the contract. The canceled commentaries form the bulk of ``Live From Death Row.'' Then, in March, her uncle sent her a clipping about the book. ``I couldn't sleep all night,'' she says. ``I screamed, I cried, I [[Page S8082]] didn't know what to do.'' At 5 a.m. California time, she called Addison-Wesley in Massachusetts, and thus began her ongoing battle with the publisher--and with David Goehring personally. ``I think it is immoral to reward a convicted cop killer financially,'' she says. Even after 13 years away, her Philadelphia accent is strong. ``And I think David Goehring is going to look at himself in the mirror one day and realize he made a mistake.'' But the two are arguing from such differing perspectives that they will probably never agree. Faulkner operates from an unshakable belief in Abu-Jamal's guilt, while Goehring says the question of guilt or innocence is not relevant to what he sees as the power of Abu-Jamal's description of what it's like to be on death row. He does not see the book as part of Abu-Jamal's quest for vindication, or as part of a campaign against the death penalty. ``We are making his voice available,'' he said. ``Our role is not to take sides.'' Indeed, he said, the company has published a book arguing for victims' rights, ``With Justice for Some,'' by law professor George Fletcher. Goehring declined to say how many copies were printed. But for Faulkner, guilt is everything. Freedom of speech? Does every prisoner have the right to a book contract? ``What does eloquence have to do with a convicted murderer?'' she asks. eager for justice Daniel Faulkner was killed early one cold December morning, two weeks before Christmas, in 1981. His widow believes the evidence of Abu-Jamal's guilt can be pinned to two things: Five bullets were emptied into her husband, and five bullets of the same type were missing from Abu-Jamal's gun. They were high-velocity, +P-type bullets that fragmented so completely police could not match them to Abu-Jamal's gun, which was found on the sidewalk, next to Abu-Jamal. He too was wounded, shot in the stomach by Faulkner. Abu-Jamal had a license for the gun, and a store owner testified to selling him the bullets. Two people testified that he shouted in the emergency room, ``I shot the [expletive].'' ``From an evidentiary standpoint, the case against Mumia Abu-Jamal was . . . one of the strongest I have seen in 24 years as a prosecutor,'' wrote Assistant District Attorney Arnold H. Gordon to NPR chief Delano E. Lewis a year ago. ``Abu-Jamal was identified . . . by three eyewitnesses who had never lost sight of him during the entire incident,'' he wrote. But Weinglass, in his afterword to ``Live From Death Row,'' claims there were witnesses who saw another man fleeing the scene, and that Abu-Jamal was denied the right to represent himself and given an unprepared court-assigned lawyer. His sentencing was tainted by prosecutorial misuse of information about Abu-Jamal's teenage involvement with the Black Panthers as well, Weinglass asserts. Faulkner hopes her campaign will tap into public frustration with the criminal justice system. Daniel Faulkner, she says, would have fought just as hard in her memory. She supports the death penalty, and is eager for Abu- Jamal's death sentence to be imposed. ``I'd like to be there,'' she says.

Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, last year, I spoke out against National Public Radio's stunningly misguided proposal to hire convicted cop- killer Mumia Abu-Jamal to provide a series of ``Death-Row Commentaries.'' Fortunately, NPR had the good sense to cancel its contract with Mr. Abu-Jamal, who was convicted 13 years ago of murdering Daniel Faulkner, a 25-year-old member of the Philadelphia police force. Mr. Abu-Jamal remains on death row to this very day. Despite a 4-week trial and despite a case that Assistant District Attorney Arnold Gordon describes as ``one of the strongest I have seen in 24 years as a prosecutor,'' there are still those who believe that Mr. Abu-Jamal is the victim of a political witchhunt. Some even go so far as to consider him a political prisoner. A bevy of left-leaning Hollywood celebrities have apparently rallied to Mr. Abu-Jamal's defense, raising money for a legal defense fund and helping to promote Mr. Abu-Jamal's new book, ``Live From Death Row.'' According to news accounts, the Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. has paid an advance of nearly $30,000 for Mr. Abu-Jamal's latest creative venture. Of course, most Americans are right to wonder why a person convicted and sentenced to death for viciously murdering a police officer more than 13 years ago is still sitting on death row. This only serves to underscore the wide gap between crime and punishment in America. Americans are also fed up with the tiresome criminal-as-a-victim-of- society philosophy, apparently embraced by Mr. Abu-Jamal's most ardent supporters. As Richard Costello, the president of the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police, recently explained: This pseudo-political garb Jamal has tried to wrap himself in is just a sleazy attempt to save his own hide. . . . This is not a political case; this is the case of the cold-blooded killing of a police officer doing his job. . . . It is well past time for the jury's sentence to be fulfilled. Keep in mind it has been 13 years. The victim has been long forgotten, and the victim's family, but this man is still around. Just last Friday, Pennsylvania's Governor Tom Ridge took a big step to [[Page S8081]] ensure that the Jury's sentence is fulfilled by signing Mr. Abu-Jamal's death warrant. Governor Ridge could have taken the easy way out by avoiding this politically contentious issue, but instead he has stood his ground and confronted it head-on. He deserved our praise. I also want to commend Governor Ridge for his efforts over the years to enact meaningful habeas corpus reform. On Wednesday, the Senate passed a series of reform proposals that, if enacted into law, will go a long way to end the endless appeals and delays that have done so much to weaken public confidence in our system of criminal justice. Although Governor Ridge is no longer in the House of Representatives, having gone on to bigger and better things as Governor of the Keystone State, his hard work in Congress on behalf of habeas reform may finally be paying off. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that an article that recently appeared in The Washington Post be reprinted in the Record immediately after my remarks.

Mr. DOLE

Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, if there is nobody here to debate the telecommunications bill, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate stand in recess under the previous order, following the outstanding remarks about to be made by the Senator from Nebraska--I added that ``outstanding''--Senator Exon.

Mr. DOLE

Mr. DOLE. And they can be here Monday. So I just hope if we are told we have not had time, we need more time to debate, that they will think about what they did not do on Friday and what they could have done on Monday.