And the folks who support Mumia: strange as well. For instance, the Bruderhof people. If they just wanted to say, "As Anabaptist pacifists, we do not believe in the Dealth Penalty and we think Mumia, a convicted murderer, should get life imprisonment" -- I'm OK with that. I undersatand and respect religious pacifists.
But the Bruderhof people are --- as far as I can tell --- in absolute solidarity with him, including his underlying insistence that a black man cannot get a fair trial in AmeriKKKa.
It's just crazy.
The Bruderhof are nuts. In the early 1970s, I lived with a Catholic Worker community (also pacifist in theory, although not everbody in the group was a pacifist and one didn’t have to be a pacifist to live there) that was not too far from the upstate NY (or maybe NJ) Bruderhof community. We visited them one time, and their politics were so extreme it made my group look slightly to the right of Atilla the Hun.
They were also very creepy, because when you ate you had to listen to the readings of the founder (whose name I have forgotten) and the founder or his wife and heirs had absolute control over everybody in the group. So it doesn’t surprise me that they’re over the edge on “Mumia.”