One evening almost a year ago, I found myself in an out of the way Parisian café with two friends, an American student like myself and a young Frenchwoman. The café — an inelegant little one room affair with mirrored walls and orange plastic furniture just down the street from my apartment (everyone in Paris has an inelegant little café just down the street from their apartment) — was where I would go when I ran out of coffee or wanted to meet others before a night out. It was empty that night and we sat at a table in the center.

We had hardly ordered our coffees when there was a rush on the café. In less than a minute, 30 newcomers, mostly middle-aged blacks, squeezed into the narrow room in which we were sitting, ordered drinks and arranged themselves as best they could along the outlying tables. It turned out we had wandered into the semi-annual meeting of the International Support Mumia Committee, Paris section, and that we were to be its guests of honor.

An ironic situation, to be sure, but a familiar one, too. Travel much outside the U.S. and you are bound to meet people who are heavily invested, partisan observers of American domestic politics. You get used to it. This was not the first time I had been cornered on the issue of convicted cop-killer and death-row-celebrity, Mumia Abu-Jamal. Only a week before the incident at the café, I was taken aside by a very drunken Frenchwoman and forced to explain my position on Mumia: how could I possibly justify applying the death penalty in his case? You mean apart from the fact that he's guilty? I asked. It was all downhill from there.

Granted, not everyone favors the death penalty. This is especially true in countries like France, where the death penalty is no longer practiced (see how civilized we are, French people like to point out, ignoring the fact that they only got rid of capital punishment in 1980). But whatever one thinks of the death penalty, it's difficult to dispute Mumia's guilt. On December 9, 1981, Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner was shot dead after stopping a car driven by Mumia's brother, William Cook. Instead of cooperating, Cook struck Faulkner. In response, Faulkner subdued Cook and proceeded to arrest him. As Faulkner made the arrest, Mumia ran out of an adjacent parking lot and shot him in the back. Faulkner fired back, hitting his assailant in the chest, and was then shot again, this time a fatal shot to the face.

The evidence against Mumia is overwhelming. As Daniel Flynn, executive director of Accuracy in Academia and the author of the 1999 study, Cop Killer: How Mumia Abu-Jamal Conned Millions into Believing He Was Framed, recently wrote, "the mountain of evidence against Abu-Jamal makes the O.J. Simpson case look like a Sherlock Holmes who-dunnit by comparison." First, there are the five eye-witnesses to the crime, all of whom positively identified Mumia as the perpetrator. Next, there are the half-dozen people — including Philip Bloch, an anti-death penalty activist — who report that Mumia confessed his guilt to them in the years since the crime was committed. Finally, there is the evidence from the crime scene itself. When police arrived about a minute after Officer Faulkner was fatally shot, they found a wounded Mumia Abu-Jamal wearing an empty shoulder holster and sitting a few feet from the dead policeman. As they approached, Mumia lunged for his gun, a .38 caliber five-shot revolver. Mumia is on record having purchased this gun in 1979 from a local sporting goods store. The gun contained five spent .38 caliber shell casings, which is the caliber of the bullet retrieved from Officer Faulkner's brain. As if that weren't enough, forensics investigators were able to match the grooves on this bullet to the striations of the gun's barrel, establishing that Mumia's gun had fired the fatal round.

Case closed, you might think. And, indeed, the 12 jurors who originally convicted Mumia apparently had little trouble handing down the death sentence. But despite all this, Mumia has managed over the past 16 years to turn himself into America's greatest celebrity inmate and the leading poster boy for the radical chic set. While Mumia's supporters are not always so clear on why the original sentence shouldn't be carried out, the most popular theory is that Mumia was framed.

Over the years, the "Mumia was framed" theory has taken a number of forms. There's the one about the black woman who was dismissed from the jury because of racism (in fact, she was thrown off to protect Mumia after she told a number of people that she hated him). Then there's the one about how Mumia's original defense lawyer, Anthony Williams, was involved in a secret pact with the Judge to convict his client. And, most recently, Mumia's supporters have speculated that Faulkner was killed in a bizarre mob hit arranged by other members of the Philadelphia P.D. to silence an honest cop who was on the verge of exposing their corrupt dealings. This last one was too much even for Mumia's recently fired defense attorney, who has described the story as "patently outrageous." Perhaps he, too, was in on the hit.

While these conspiracy theories may add up to the recipe for a successful Hollywood film, they are entirely lacking in credible evidence to back them up and, as such, do nothing to support Mumia's case. But then it's not always clear that evidence matters to Mumia's supporters, who often don't bother to deny his guilt at all. Many of them, one suspects, know perfectly well that Mumia is guilty. Guilt, however, like the life of Daniel Faulkner, is something about which they just don't care.

Which raises the question, why all the fuss over Mumia? How did Abu-Jamal convince so many people (and not just in the United States!) to support a cause which appears to have so little behind it? For anyone with knowledge of radical political circles, the answer is sadly obvious. The radical left has long romanticized criminals as the vanguard of authentic social rebellion. Sartre did it, Gide did it, Mailer did it, and now, Hollywood does it. For all of them, the idea of the romantic criminal is part and parcel of a larger Marxist aesthetic in which anything that tends to the destruction of the dominant class is valuable in itself.

Contemporary Hollywood, of course, is not explicitly Marxist. Nor, for that matter, are most of Mumia's on-campus supporters. But their love of violence and criminality arguably is (remember the Benetton ads?). Having long ago lost faith in proletarian revolution, they continue to cling to the fundamental us-against-them attitude of traditional Marxist doctrine. In this world, somebody is always getting oppressed and somebody is always doing the oppressing. The oppressed, needless to say, are uniquely noble victims and the oppressors, agents of evil. In recent years, the left has increasingly tended to conceive of oppression in exclusively racial terms. In place of Marx's proletariat we now have "the brown people of the earth." And, in place of Marx's "capitalist-bourgeosie" we are offered "the white European male." Class war has become race war and, as in all holy wars, there's satisfaction in believing you're on the right side of history.

For these Marxists gone bad, Mumia fits the bill to a tee. As a teenager, he served as the Minister of Information for the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party. Later, he worked as a cab driver, moonlighted at a radical black radio station and was affiliated with the notorious black nationalist organization, MOVE. He had cool dreads, wrote underground journalism, and, until recently, was on death row. In him, one could recognize a whole cluster of dearly held left-wing clichés: the grass-roots black intellectual; the despairing race rebel who turns to violence; the victim of white oppression singing from his prison cell. These clichés are the key to Mumia's worldwide success and prove, once again, that there is no end to the sentimentality of the left. For his supporters, Mumia the individual never mattered. Neither, for that matter, did Mumia the criminal cop-killer. No, what has always mattered most is Mumia the image, Mumia the symbol, Mumia the standard-bearer.

And Mumia has done a fine job in all of these roles. In 1995, he published his memoir, Live from Death Row. That same year, he gained national attention after he was booted as a contributor from National Public Radio due to pressure from the Philadelphia chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police. And, today, Mumia continues to write and talk, submitting articles and reports from his prison cell and enjoying a wide audience. A quick web search reveals pro-Mumia organizations in every Western European country and Japan. If Mumia didn't exist, one's inclined to say, the left would have had to invent him. But in a measure they have.

On December 18, in a ruling which put an end to nearly 20 years of appeals, Federal Judge William Yohn threw out Abu-Jamal's 1982 death sentence on the grounds that the jury which originally convicted him may have misunderstood their instructions. Yohn's ruling has outraged Mumia's supporters and opponents alike. For Mumia's supporters, justice will be had only once the original conviction is overturned and Mumia is granted a retrial. For his opponents, justice will be had only once the sentence has been carried out and Mumia is dead. Yohn's decision ensures that neither side shall be satisfied anytime soon.

And yet Judge Yohn's ruling is not without its bright side. While Yohn's decision has saved Mumia, it has almost certainly killed the "save Mumia" movement. Now that their hero has been denied martyrdom, the pro-Mumia ranks can only crumble. I wonder how the International Support Mumia Committee, Paris section, feels about all of this. Perhaps they are celebrating. If so, it's for the last time.