The death penalty has been dropped against a USA journalist in Philadelphia who has spent thirty years on death row. Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of killing white police officer Daniel Faulknerin 1981, will have his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, after Faulkner’s widow reportedly persuaded prosecutors to stop pushing for the death penalty. The death sentence of Abu-Jamal, a former member of the African-American leftist group Black Panther, was quashed in April, and the state of Pennsylvania was given six months to select a jury and hold a new sentencing hearing, or agree to a life sentence.