“This Can’t Be Happening!” Guest Bret Grote, attorney with the Abolition Law Project in Pennsylvania, talks about a federal court hearing in Scranton, PA, where he and another lawyer, Robert Boyle, argued on behalf of their client, prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, for an injunction ordering the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to stop withholding treatment for his active case of Hepatitis-C — a potentially fatal disease that has already damaged his liver and brought on a case of adult diabetes as well as a horrific and debilitating skin disease. A ruling on that injunction is expected in weeks. If it goes in Mumia’s favor and he treatment is ordered, it could have a wide impact, not just on the estimated 10,000 state prisoners known to have the disease, but also nationwide, where Hepatitis-C is epidemic in the nation’s prisons.

Host Dave Lindorff and his guest, Dr. Jess Guh, the newest member of the ThisCantBeHappening.net online news collective, talk about Mumia Abu-Jamal’s court battle in federal court in Scranton to force the state’s prison system to provide him with treatment for his active and potentially fatal case of Hepatitis C. Dr. Guh, a primary car physician from Seattle who has been investigating the shoddy standard of health care in the nation’s prisons, and who has gone over somd 100 pages of Mumia’s medical record, says that what Pennsylvania and many other states are doing to prisoners in their control is nothing short of malpractice and neglece on a massive scale.