Raymond Forni, the speaker of France's National Assembly,...

Raymond Forni, the speaker of France's National Assembly, slammed the death penalty in the United States and said one-time Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal should not be executed. Abu-Jamal, convicted of the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, has become the face of capital punishment in the United States through international campaigns to grant him a new trial. "It's as if this country which claims to guide the world wanted to ignore how the world is changing and even oppose its development. It's as if the United States felt proud to be the last Western democracy with the death penalty," Forni said. "We have to be America's guilty conscience so that in the end it is no longer the black sheep of Western democracies. We have to help it help itself," Forni said.