There are plenty of people who’d rather the world never heard from Mumia Abu-Jamal. And now the state of Pennsylvania is trying to come up with a way to prevent him from being heard ever again.

Abu-Jamal is currently serving life in prison for the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. His case has, of course, been the subject of international attention, with many supporters arguing that his original trial was grossly unfair. While known primarily as a cause on the left, one of the most comprehensive critiques of the trial came from conservative legal writer Stuart Taylor (American Lawyer, 12/95).

Abu-Jamal was a fairly well-known local radio journalist prior to the Faulkner killing; after being sentenced to death, he continued to write and speak from death row, and that work galvanized public interest in his case. He was removed from death row in 2011.

But this most recent controversy began when students at Goddard College in Vermont selected Abu-Jamal to give a prerecorded commencement address. That evidently motivated lawmakers in Pennsylvania to come up with a remedy that is, on its face, flatly unconstitutional. The Revictimization Relief Act, as the Philadelphia Inquirer (10/14/14) reported,

would allow the victim of a crime, or prosecutors acting on the victim’s behalf, to bring a civil action to stop an offender from engaging in conduct that causes the victim or the victim’s family severe mental anguish.

Another Inquirer story (10/18/14) noted that some state lawmakers spoke out against the bill; one senator called it “the most extreme violation of the First Amendment imaginable.” On October 21, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett signed the bill into law, declaring that “over the years we’ve heard much about the constitutional rights of prison inmates.” Corbett seems proud not to have been listening.

The bill does not appear to have attracted much in the way of press attention, despite its shocking implications for anyone with an interest in a free press. And some of the coverage is unhelpful; the headline over an AP dispatch in today’s New York Times (10/22/14) is “Pennsylvania: Governor Signs Law to Help Protect Crime Victims.”

There are, of course, many people who feel victimized by the actions of other individuals; does the state really think that it can legally prevent those individuals from speaking, writing or being interviewed by reporters?

The story was covered on today’s edition of Democracy Now! (10/21/14), with excerpts of an interview with Abu-Jamal conducted by Prison Radio journalist Noelle Hanrahan:

The press ignores prisoners, as a rule. Most of what happens in prisons are never or rarely reported in the press…. Silence reigns in states all across the United States. But I went to court. I was forced to go to court by the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. And I won, in a case called Abu-Jamal v. Price, which gives me the right to write. Now they’re trying to take away my right to read my own writings. How unconstitutional is that?

That point was underscored by Hanrahan:

This is about Mumia Abu-Jamal, but it’s really about all prisoners and what the journalists have to know from inside prisons. Our society really has this incredible incarceration addiction. And we need to know, as journalists, what’s going on inside. So it affects Robert “Saleem” Holbrook, a juvenile lifer who’s in Pennsylvania. It affects Bryant Arroyo, who’s a jailhouse environmentalist and lawyer inside Frackville prison in Pennsylvania. It affects our ability as a community to get the information that we need to make decisions.

This is not the first time there has been an attempt to silence Abu-Jamal. In 1994, NPR abruptly cancelled plans to air commentaries by him it had commissioned to air on All Things Considered.

And the fact that Democracy Now! is covering this story now brings to mind what happened in 1997, when the show was set to begin airing a series of Abu-Jamal commentaries. The radio station at Philadelphia’s Temple University, KRTI, abruptly canceled its contract with Pacifica and Democracy Now! (Extra!Update, 4/97) right before the pieces were to air.

In both cases, there were questions raised about what kinds of pressure were brought to bear on the media outlets. The controversy over NPR led lawmakers like Sen. Bob Dole to muse about the need for “closer oversight.” In the case of KRTI, there were suggestions that state funding could be at risk.

Media outlets that rely on the First Amendment–all of them, in other words–should speak up about the Pennsylvania government’s efforts to silence speech.