Jamal's new legal team joins the case at a crucial moment, as the former Black Panther waits to see whether a federal judge in Philadelphia will agree to hear his last-ditch habeas corpus appeal of his death penalty and conviction on first degree murder charges. After this he has no more automatic right to appeal. It also represents a major shift in strategy. Rather than challenging the fairness of his original trial and subsequent appeals on constitutional grounds, he is now asserting his absolute innocence in the case.

The question on the minds of some longtime Jamal supporters is why this shift is occurring now, just as a federal judge is finally considering his appeal. Some speculate that after spending two decades on death row under almost solitary confinement conditions, already having faced two execution dates, and unable to meet family and friends except while shackled and seated on the other side of a thick plexiglass window, Jamal may have decided on his own not to rely on the appeals arguments developed by his former legal team.

He may instead, this theory goes, have opted for a high-risk political and legal strategy -- a kind of legal "Hail Mary" pass -- with a witness whose mob-hit conspiracy theory, if found credible, would necessarily result in Jamal's being released from prison an innocent man. Indeed, in a recent statement by Jamal which Kamish read at a sparsely-attended two-day encampment at Philadelphia's City Hall on May 12, Jamal tells his supporters, "I have received some criticism for recent changes in my legal team. I don't fear criticism, but I must say I don't agree with this one. You have seen lawyers violate their own rules with total abandon with the blessing of the courts. How can you say you don't believe in the system and then believe lawyers who betrayed their so called client's interests?"

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He adds, "I thank you all for joining in this ongoing battle for freedom and justice. And, if you by chance choose not to join me, I have one simple request: don't get in my way."

While that sounds like a confident decision to move forward with a new strategy, it remains difficult to ascertain how much of that confidence is the result of advice received from two attorneys who have been offering him counsel behind the scenes, and behind his prior attorneys' backs, for over a year. Nor is it clear how much Jamal knows about the paucity of trial and death penalty experience of his new legal team. After all, Jamal has little or no independent access to the outside world, and is largely dependent for his information on a handful of people who visit him in prison. A letter sent by express mail to Jamal back in mid-May asking for comment went unanswered.

It's been more than a month now since Marlene Kamish and Eliot Lee Grossman introduced themselves as Jamal's new attorneys at a hastily convened sidewalk press conference May 4 in front of the Philadelphia Federal Courthouse, where they had just entered their names as the attorneys of record in his crucial habeas corpus appeal for a new trial. Grossman is a California lawyer with expertise in international law and discrimination law, not death penalty work, but Kamish is widely credited within the Free Mumia movement as instrumental in getting artist Manuel Salazar off of Illinois' death row in 1995.

Many of Kamish's former colleagues on the Salazar case, however, are openly critical of her work. Though she bills herself (as do her supporters) as crucial to the legal effort that led to Salazar's release, in fact her former boss says she was booted off one of Salazar's legal defense teams, and was only peripheral to another. Attorneys who worked with her also claim she got overinvolved emotionally with Salazar, who like Jamal had been convicted of killing a cop, and that the entanglement led to some bad judgment concerning legal strategy. There were also questions about whether she may have coached witnesses to provide testimony that wasn't entirely correct. In the end, many of her colleagues on that case remember her as a disruptive and negative force.

"She blocked our relationship with our own client," says Karen Shields, Salazar's lead attorney during his initial appeal proceeding, in which Kamish was the third-ranking lawyer on the team for a time. "For some unknown reason, she didn't trust us and made sure that Salazar didn't trust us either. It was all very odd. I cannot understand why she'd want to cut him off from everyone else who wanted to help," says Shields, now a state court judge in Chicago.

Critics suggest that a similar scenario may be playing out in her relationship with and defense of Jamal. For the past 15 months, they note, Kamish has been living in the area around the SCI-Greene maximum security prison where Jamal is incarcerated, reportedly meeting almost daily with the otherwise isolated death row inmate. During this period, she, Grossman and Jamal have apparently decided upon a stunning new defense, based on the testimony of a purported mob hit man. This controversial witness, Arnold Beverly, claims that he, not Jamal, shot Officer Daniel Faulkner on that night in 1981, acting on behalf of corrupt Philly cops. And Jamal, for the first time telling his version of events, corroborates key parts of the supposed hit man's tale -- even though he and his former lawyers earlier decided the alleged mob hit man witness wasn't credible, and rejected using him and his story.

Kamish and Grossman have also publicly criticized Jamal's prior attorneys, accusing them of malpractice and incompetence. In the process they have angered many in the anti-death penalty movement, who view Weinglass especially with near-reverence.

"This area of law is a small circle of people, and we tend to help each other," said a Philadelphia attorney familiar with the case, who noted that it was "unusual and unfortunate" to see new attorneys in a death penalty case attacking their predecessors. "There is no offense taken over a change of counsel, and it's important to have the cooperation of the previous counsel. In this case, though, they seem to have just taken over the files and stopped communicating."

Both Weinglass and Williams confirm that no effort has been made by the new attorneys to contact them for advice or for information about work they might have been doing on the Jamal appeal that had not yet made its way into the court documents and files that were turned over to them.

Repeated efforts to obtain comment from either Kamish or Grossman were unsuccessful. Calls to their offices with specific requests for them to explain their death penalty experience remain unanswered. A third attorney on the team, local counsel J. Michael Farrell, a graduate of Georgetown Law School and a former professor of criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, does have significant death penalty experience at the trial and appellate level, but he says he is "not significantly involved in the case," serving only as the local representative at the court on behalf of the two out-of-state lead attorneys.

Former colleagues, and attorneys familiar with Kamish, who earned her law degree from the Kent School of Law of the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1990, agree she is an excellent organizer and a great investigator -- both important skills in political cases like Jamal's. But they insist she primarily played a peripheral and outside-the-courtroom role in the Salazar case, which involved the fatal shooting of a Joliet police officer.

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