Who is Keith Ellison? Documented defender of cop killers.
In September 1992, Minneapolis police officer Jerry Haaf was murdered execution-style, shot in the back as he took a coffee break at a restaurant in south Minneapolis. Police later determined that Haaf’s murder was a gang hit performed by four members of the city’s Vice Lords gang.
The leader of the Vice Lords was Sharif Willis, a convicted murderer who had been released from prison and who sought respectability as a responsible gang leader from gullible municipal authorities while operating a gang front called United for Peace.
The four Vice Lords members who murdered Haaf met and planned the murder at Willis’s house. At the time, Keith Ellison-Muhammed X was a Minneapolis attorney in private practice. And within a month of Haaf’s murder, Ellison appeared with Willis supporting the United for Peace gang front.
In October 1992, Ellison helped organize a demonstration against Minneapolis police that included United for Peace. “The main point of our rally is to support United for Peace in its fight against the campaign of slander the police federation has been waging,” said Ellison.
Willis was the last speaker at the demonstration. Willis told the crowd that Minneapolis police were experiencing the same fear from young black men that blacks had felt from police for many years. Ellison told the crowd that the police union is systematically frightening whites in order to get more police officers hired. That way, Ellison said, the union can increase its "power base.”
Ellison publicly supported the gangsters. In February 1993, he spoke at a demonstration for one of them during his trial. Ellison led the crowd assembled at the courthouse in a chant that was ominous in the context of Haaf’s cold-blooded murder: “We don’t get no justice, you don’t get no peace.” Ellison’s working relationship with Sharif Willis finally came to an end in February 1995, when Willis was convicted in federal court on several counts of drug and gun-related crimes and sent back to prison for 20 years.
The Haaf case wasn’t an aberration for Ellison. In February 2000, he spoke at a fundraiser sponsored by the Minnesota chapter of the old National Lawyers Guild, on whose steering committee he had served—the chapter was raising funds for former Symbionese Liberation Army member Kathleen Soliah, who had been a fugitive from justice for 25 years, on charges related to the attempted pipe bombing of Los Angeles police officers in 1975.
In his National Lawyers Guild speech Ellison spoke favorably of cop killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and “Assata Shakur” (Joanne Chesimard), who was wanted for the murder of New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster in 1973.
He denounced law enforcement authorities for prosecuting the attempted murder of police officers. According to Ellison, cop killers are social justice warriors fighting the good fight.
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