Ex-Panther Renews Bid for Release From Prison

Former Black Panther leader Elmer (Geronimo) Pratt of Los Angeles is renewing his effort to win freedom for a murder committed on a Santa Monica tennis court 23 years ago.

Pratt, imprisoned at Tehachapi State Prison, has long maintained he was at a Black Panther Party meeting in Oakland at the time of the crime. Now, in papers filed in Superior Court here, Pratt claims to have new evidence supporting that contention.

Pratt, 43, was convicted in July, 1972, of murdering Caroline Olsen, who had gone to Lincoln Park in Santa Monica to play tennis with her husband Dec. 18, 1968. The killers also robbed the couple of $30. The alleged accomplice has never been found.

In a 146-page petition, Pratt’s lawyers, Stuart Hanlon and Robert Bloom, acknowledged that the murderers used Pratt’s car in the getaway. But they said other people had access to Pratt’s car, and that Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale, and other new witnesses now place Pratt in Oakland at the time of the crime.

In an affidavit, Seale said there had been a bitter split within the party that prompted Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton to tell members that they “should not associate with or help Geronimo in any way.”

“I knew, of course, that Geronimo could not have committed this crime because he was in Oakland at the time attending a BPP meeting,” Seale said in the statement. “I felt very conflicted about testifying for Geronimo at his trial, but I followed the directive of the party and did not testify.”

Other witnesses--as well as Pratt--testified during the trial that he was in Oakland. His lawyers contend that the weight of the new witnesses might persuade a jury that Pratt could not have committed the murder.

Additionally, two private investigators now say they have seen logs of FBI wiretaps that showed Pratt was recorded speaking by phone in Oakland less than three hours before the murder occurred. Bloom and Hanlon also said that details about such a tap apparently are missing from FBI files.

“If we get a fair judge, we’ll win. The problem has always been that justice is not equal,” Hanlon said.

Hanlon, who has represented Pratt for years, lost an effort to persuade a federal magistrate in Los Angeles in 1985 that Pratt should have a new trial. He hopes to keep the case in San Francisco, where, he contends, judges will not be biased against Pratt.

Pratt’s lawyers claim that the prosecutor, Richard Kalustian, now a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge, withheld key information from the defense--that the FBI was involved in the case and had “choreographed” evidence used against Pratt.

“It sounds to me like the same old stuff,” Kalustian said in an interview. “You can try to pick apart the evidence, but it was pretty straightforward.”