Federal courts have ruled<\/a> that McBurney violated Al-Amin’s constitutional rights, but that it’s unlikely his actions substantially affected the verdict.<\/p>\nThis week’s filing says McBurney \u201ccrossed the line from aggressive advocacy into misconduct that undermined the core principles of justice,\u201d accusing him of misrepresenting evidence and withholding critical information from the defense, among other things.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese were not minor oversights; they reflected a troubling pattern of behavior that prioritized winning over truth, and conviction over justice,\u201d the filing says.<\/p>\n
McBurney did not immediately respond to an email Thursday seeking comment.<\/p>\n
FBI Special Agent James Campbell approached Al-Amin while he was on the ground in handcuffs, kicked and spit on him, and said, \u201cThis is what we do to cop killers,\u201d the filing says. A reprimand of Campbell \u201cdid not clear SA Campbell’s stain on the investigation,\u201d it says.<\/p>\n
Lawyers for Al-Amin have also maintained that Campbell planted the guns used to shoot the deputies at the site where Al-Amin was arrested.<\/p>\n
The Associated Press was unable to find contact information for Campbell to seek comment.<\/p>\n
Campbell had been transferred to Atlanta after shooting an unarmed Muslim man in the back of the head, the filing says. That man’s supporters accused Campbell of planting a gun found at the scene.<\/p>\n
The judge did not allow the jury to hear about the prior shooting after the defense presented newspaper articles about it, wanting to use that shooting to demonstrate bias and motive to plant guns. If defense attorneys had presented recently interviewed witnesses rather than relying on articles, the judge likely would have allowed the jury to consider that information, the new filing argues.<\/p>\n
New DNA evidence<\/p>\n
Al-Amin’s lawyers argued that nothing connected Al-Amin to the guns used to shoot the deputies. Willis’ office used DNA testing that wasn’t available at the time of the trial to test the guns and related items.<\/p>\n
The tests excluded Al-Amin from the DNA found on both guns. But Al-Amin’s DNA was identified on a leather belt wrapped around one of the guns, the filing says. That evidence is a strong indication of his guilt, especially when paired with prior ballistics evidence and testimony, the filing says.<\/p>\n
The shooting<\/p>\n
As a radical activist in the 1960s, Al-Amin once said violence was \u201cas American as cherry pie\u201d and that Black people would use violence, if needed, to fight oppression.<\/p>\n
He converted to Islam during a prison stint and moved to Atlanta in the 1970s, becoming the leader of one of the nation\u2019s largest Black Muslim groups, the National Ummah.<\/p>\n
On March 16, 2000, Fulton County sheriff\u2019s deputies Ricky Kinchen and Aldranon English went to Atlanta\u2019s West End neighborhood, where Al-Amin lived, was an imam and owned a grocery store, to serve a warrant for failure to appear in court on charges of driving a stolen car and impersonating a police officer during a traffic stop the previous year.<\/p>\n
English testified at trial that Al-Amin fired a high-powered assault rifle when the deputies tried to arrest him. Then, prosecutors said, he used a handgun to fire three shots into Kinchen\u2019s groin as the wounded officer lay in the street.<\/p>\n
He was arrested four days later in White Hall, Alabama, a small town where he had helped develop a Muslim community.<\/p>\n
This story was first published on Feb. 19, 2026. It was updated on Feb. 23, 2026, to correct that the date of the murder conviction was in 2002, not 2000.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ATLANTA (AP) \u2014 Georgia prosecutors defending the 2002 murder conviction of a onetime Black Panther leader known as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":121296,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[57136,119,121,120,11443,46,31,38,457,51,11365,1856,42,17220,6803,7076,44],"class_list":{"0":"post-121295","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-allentown","8":"tag-alamin-fani-willis-judge-mcburney","9":"tag-allentown","10":"tag-allentown-headlines","11":"tag-allentown-news","12":"tag-black-experience","13":"tag-courts","14":"tag-crime","15":"tag-general-news","16":"tag-homicide","17":"tag-indictments","18":"tag-juries","19":"tag-law-enforcement","20":"tag-legal-proceedings","21":"tag-race-and-ethnicity","22":"tag-shootings","23":"tag-trials","24":"tag-u-s-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121295\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/121296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}