Update: On Friday morning, Aug. 30, Judge Monte Watkins announced his approval of the proposed order that vacates Abdur'Rahman's death sentence, replacing it with a life sentence.
Davidson County District Attorney Glenn Funk stood in a courtroom Wednesday morning and told Criminal Court Judge Monte Watkins that Nashville death row prisoner Abu-Ali Abdur'Rahman should not be executed next year because of misconduct by the prosecutor in his 1987 case, including racial discrimination in jury selection.
Funk submitted a proposed order that would vacate Abdur'Rahman's death sentence but keep him in prison for the rest of his life. Abdur'Rahman and his attorney, Bradley MacLean, signed the proposed order in court and Watkins will likely rule on whether to accept it by tomorrow.
“Overt racial bias has no place in the justice system,” Funk told the court, adding that “the pursuit of justice is incompatible with deception. Prosecutors must never be dishonest to or mislead defense attorneys, courts or juries.”
Abdur’Rahman, a black man, has been on death row for 32 years, since he and an accomplice were convicted of killing Patrick Daniels and stabbing Norma Jean Norman during a robbery. Norman survived, and her two daughters — both of whom were present during the attack — sat in the front row of the court gallery on Wednesday. The remarkable development comes less than two weeks after the state of Tennessee executed its fifth prisoner in just over a year. Abdur'Rahman was scheduled to be executed on April 16, 2020.
In a 2016 motion, MacLean argues that then-Nashville Assistant District Attorney John Zimmermann — who is now a prosecutor in Rutherford County — had discriminatory intent during jury selection when he struck two prospective African American jurors. Pointing to contradictions between the prosecution’s stated reasons for striking those jurors and “the truth derived from the record and the prosecution’s own notes,” MacLean argues that Zimmermann was relying on “false, racist stereotyping” of black people. MacLean argues that in the case of one prospective black male juror, Zimmermann falsely claimed the man “appeared uneducated” and “had a reduced intellect.”
MacLean reiterated those details in court on Wednesday, adding that Zimmermann's notes from the trial further exposed a racist strategy. In a filing from this week, MacLean notes that prosecutors identified each prospective juror by race and, using their own ranking system, "ranked the African American jurors whom they struck as equal to or higher than most of the White jurors whom they did not strike."
But the problems with Abdur'Rahman's case don't end there. His defense attorney has since admitted that he failed to do his job in 1987 and told the ABA Journal in 2011 that “Abu-Ali is on death row because of me." Zimmermann also suppressed evidence the defense was entitled to see.
As MacLean noted in court Wednesday, Funk himself is already on record condemning Zimmermann for racist comments about jury selection. In a November 2015 letter to the Tennessee District Attorneys General Conference, Davidson County District Attorney Glenn Funk highlights and disavows comments Zimmermann made at an annual conference. In one instance, Funk writes, Zimmermann said “he would strike jurors with a 37215 area code, an affluent part of town, if the case involved people from ‘the inner city’ because ‘in Nashville, rich people don’t care about what happens in East Nashville.’ ”
Funk goes on: “While the racial implications in the previous comment were inferential, his next statements were blatant advice to use race in jury selection. Specifically, Mr. Zimmermann described prosecuting a conspiracy case with all Hispanic defendants. He stated he wanted an all African-American jury, because ‘all Blacks hate Mexicans.’ ”
More recently, Zimmermann — who is now a prosecutor in Rutherford County — was accused in a lawsuit of targeting Egyptian business owners, falsely claiming they were selling illegal “marijuana derivatives.” All charges related to the bogus busts — known as “Operation Candy Crush” — were later dropped.
On Wednesday morning, Funk emphasized that Abdur'Rahman's guilt was not in question and said he'd spoken to the victims and their family members before the hearing.
"Last week and yesterday I spoke with George Daniels, the brother of murder victim Patrick Daniels," Funk said. "He advised that he would still like to 'burn his ass' and in a separate comment he stated that he wants this case to be over to finally have closure. He vowed 32 years ago to honor his brother by seeing this case to the end. I also spoke with Norma Jean Norman last weekend and yesterday who was the victim, in count two, of the stabbing. Her position is that she is at peace and has forgiven Mr. Abdur'Rahman but she does not want him to ever be released from prison. I spoke with [Norman's two daughters] and they still bear the emotional scars of being children cowering in a bedroom and hearing the murder of Patrick Daniels and then having to see their mother crawl into their bedroom with the butcher knife still stuck in her back ... These women do not exactly share their mother's forgiveness of Mr. Abdur'Rahman but they are supportive of her position."
He went on to say, however, that "a prosecutor's job is to pursue justice and to do so" with honesty and integrity. With his proposed order, Funk conceded that Zimmermann had fallen far short of that standard and refused to stand by his conduct.
Speaking to reporters outside the courtroom, MacLean said the murder of Daniels, the attack on Norman and the trauma done to her daughters as well as other family members "cannot be mitigated." He praised Funk's move to vacate the death penalty.
“Fortunately today, the district attorney general performed his rightful function," MacLean said. "It takes moral courage to correct a 32-year-old wrong. It takes political courage to correct a wrong for which you are not responsible. For that kind of courage, Mr. Abdur’Rahman and his entire legal team are eternally grateful.”
