Lawyers for former Los Angeles Black Panther...

Lawyers for former Los Angeles Black Panther Leader Elmer (Geronimo) Pratt, convicted 13 years ago in the 1968 murder of Carolyn Olsen in Santa Monica, opened a hearing for a new trial in Los Angeles federal court by claiming that the FBI deliberately lost tapes of wiretaps that might show Pratt was actually in Oakland on the night of the killing. Pratt, 37, an inmate at San Quentin since his murder conviction, filed his motion for a new hearing in federal court after state courts refused to reopen the case. The first witness in the hearing before U.S. Magistrate John R. Kronenberg was former FBI Agent M. Wesley Swearingen, who testified that he had reviewed FBI wiretap records pertaining to the Black Panthers in 1976, and noticed then that the records for December, 1968, were missing.