According to the FBI, he was a particularly dangerous individual who had returned from Vietnam to fight against the Establishment as a combat-toughened killer.
In 1970, Elmer Geronimo Pratt, the 21-year-old head of the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles, told a reporter, “We are going to drive the pigs out of the community.”
Pratt had a raspy drawl that spoke of his upbringing on the Louisiana bayou. He was thick, compact, and level-eyed. In African American communities, he portrayed the police as an occupying force that would bring about his brutal demise. I may be dead by the time you see me again.
He claimed he was being set up when he was put on trial in 1972 for the execution-style murder of a white schoolteacher during a robbery.
At first, his defense lawyer, a young Johnnie Cochran Jr., wrote Pratt’s speech off as paranoid. However, Cochran would go on to characterize the case as a twilight zone of official corruption, betrayal, dishonesty, and lying.
Pratt was imprisoned for 27 years after his conviction, and Cochran was troubled by the case because he thought Pratt was innocent and that prosecutors had cleverly taken advantage of a mistake he made during the trial. Years would pass before the authorities’ blatant infidelity in their fight against alleged subversives was exposed.
According to Stuart Hanlon, 76, the radical defense lawyer from San Francisco who took up Pratt’s appeal as a law student and relentlessly fought it for decades, it initially appeared to be a rather simple murder case.
In December 1968, two gunmen approached 27-year-old Caroline Olsen and her husband on a Santa Monica tennis court and demanded money. After telling the pair to lie face down, the men started shooting. Her spouse was hit but survived, while she suffered fatal injuries. The bandits received $18.
The inquiry stagnated, and it wasn’t until 1970 when former police officer and beautician Julius Julio Butler accused Pratt as a suspect. As a former Panther, Butler had despised Pratt’s promotion to head coach of Los Angeles.
In this series, Christopher Goffard digs into archives and the recollections of individuals who were present to explore past crimes in Los Angeles and abroad, from the well-known to the forgotten, the significant to the obscure.
Butler, the state’s star witness, stated in his testimony that Pratt had visited his beauty parlor, declared he was going on a mission, and then cited a Santa Monica shooting report to prove it was his doing.
“Have you ever been a police informant?” Cochran questioned Butler. Butler vehemently disputed it.
Olsen’s widower pointed to the defendant and declared, “That’s the man who murdered my wife,” which was devastating for the defense.
Cochran introduced a witness who had seen Pratt in the Bay Area around the time of the murder on the stand and argued against the validity of cross-racial witness identification, especially when under stress. Additionally, he donned Pratt, who had received awards for valor during two Army tours in Vietnam and who had what Cochran described as a soldier’s disdain for whoever had shot the defenseless Olsen in the back.
Cochran introduced an exhibit that had a disastrous backlash, even though he believed the case might be won. Pratt’s brother handed him the Polaroid, insisting it was shot a week after the shooting. In contrast to the widower’s first account of the shooter as a clean-shaven black man, it revealed Pratt to have a beard.
A Polaroid employee used by the prosecution to dispute that the film had not even been produced until five months after the crime, which damaged the defense’s credibility and caused jurors to question Pratt’s other statements.
Jurors found him guilty of first-degree murder after ten days. 25 years to life was the sentence. You’re mistaken. Pratt burst, “I didn’t kill that woman.” You dogs are racists.
Pratt was kept in solitary prison for the following eight years. After being moved between prisons, he was eventually permitted to visit his spouse; his wife had two children. The panel waited for him to apologize during a string of failed parole hearings. He maintained that he hadn’t.
He would claim that the last person he had killed was in Vietnam.
Pratt’s defense team was not given a lot of information by the authorities. The fact that Olsen’s widower had earlier named another guy as the shooter was not disclosed. (The man couldn’t have done it because he was incarcerated at the time.)
The extent of the star witness’s employment as an informant for law enforcement authorities was also not disclosed. Butler’s close ties to the FBI, the Los Angeles Police Department, and the L.A. County district attorney’s office in scores of cases were pieced together by Pratt’s attorneys using FBI papers that were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
The Panthers, homegrown terrorists with weapons caches and frightening Maoist ideology, had been the most dangerous group in the nation, according to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. His secret COINTELPRO program was a campaign of spying, wiretaps and sabotage aimed at crushing perceived subversives and thwarting the coalition of militant black nationalist groups.
According to Hanlon, the FBI pursued Geronimo because he was an innate leader.
It became evident that Butler had been assisting Hanlon as he put materials together. Rejecting appeal after appeal, however, courts ruled that Butler had not been an informant he had been a contact and nothing more, according to one judge and that Pratt did not deserve a new trial.
He remained dangerous. If he chooses to set up a revolutionary organization upon his release from prison, it would certainly be easy for him to do so, a prosecutor said at one parole hearing. He does have this network out there.
When defense lawyers brought their evidence to then-L.A. County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti in 1993, they presented it as a chance to undo the injustice his predecessors had sanctioned two decades earlier. But Garcetti s review dragged on for years, and the attorneys turned again to the courts.
This time, the courts granted a hearing. Because the L.A. County Superior Court bench was recused the original prosecutor was now an L.A. County judge and a probable witness the case was transferred to Orange County Superior Court. For Pratt s supporters, this provoked a chill. What hope did they have in a staunchly conservative county?
But Judge Everett Dickey surprised them.
It s clear that this is not a typical case, Dickey said. It cries out for resolution.
This time, Pratt s team was armed with evidence never heard at the original trial. They had the testimony of a retired FBI agent who supported Pratt s claim that he had been in Oakland during the killing.
They knew that the D.A. s office had allowed Butler to plead no contest to four felonies in exchange for probation, around the time he testified against Pratt.
And they had an index card, recently discovered by one of Garcetti s investigators in the office files, that listed Butler as a D.A. informant. It was filed under B; it had been there all along.
It had never been turned over to the defense. How could they have not turned this over? Garcetti said in a recent interview. I couldn t find anyone who would fess up to the fact that, Yeah, we had that document in the files.
Still, Garcetti s prosecutors downplayed the card s importance. Butler was not an informant, they argued vehemently, but merely a source.
In late 1996, Cochran finally got a chance to confront Butler. He had waited years. Butler had become an attorney and an official at a prominent Los Angeles church. He insisted he had been merely a liaison between law enforcement and the Panthers.
Cochran asked him his definition of informant. He admitted he had told the FBI that Pratt had a submachine gun. He said his definition of an informant was someone who supplied accurate information.
So under your own definition, you were informing to the FBI? Cochran asked.
You could say that, Butler said.
Dickey threw out Pratt s conviction, concluding that Butler had lied and that prosecutors had hidden evidence that could have led to Pratt s acquittal.
Pratt was released on bail in June 1997, to the cheers of his supporters.
The greatest moment of my legal career, Cochran called it.
Pratt flew home to Morgan City, La., to see my mama and my homefolks, he said. It wasn t easy getting here.
He said he wanted to hear rain on the tin roof of his childhood home.
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Pratt s legal ordeal was not over, however. Garcetti appealed, saying he had found no evidence pointing to Pratt s innocence. He did not drop the case until an appeals court sided with Pratt in February 1999. The following year, Pratt won $4.5 million in a false-imprisonment lawsuit against the city of L.A. and the FBI. He bought a farmhouse in Imbaseni, Tanzania, where he enjoyed the companionship of Pete O Neal, a former Black Panther who had fled the U.S. in 1970.
O Neal found him dead at home in May 2011. Pratt had been hospitalized with high blood pressure, a condition that had plagued him for years, but had torn out his IVs and gone home. He hated confinement. He was 63.
We always say, The system works, but no, the system only produced the right result because Geronimo and the community and a band of lawyers fought the system. The system doesn t work by itself, said Mark Rosenbaum, one of the lawyers who helped with Pratt s appeal. They took away half of his life. And they couldn t break him.
So, who killed Caroline Olsen? Hanlon believes the killers were other Black Panthers a pair of heroin addicts known to feed their habit with armed robbery. They died violently in the 1970s, one by gunfire, the other impaled on a fence during a burglary.
In a recent interview, Garcetti, one of the defense team s primary antagonists for years, said that his views on the case have evolved. In retrospect, he regrets fighting to keep it alive.
He was more likely framed than he was the person who actually committed the crime, Garcetti said.
Since leaving office, he said, he has learned more about the U.S. government s tactics against disfavored groups in the 1960s and 70s.
I have read enough to know the FBI, from the top down, were working to isolate any quote-unquote leader in the Black Panther movement, and it wouldn t shock me to learn that they went after people who really hadn t committed a crime that they were bent on removing from the scene.
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