New Hope for Geronimo Pratt : Legal system: The former Black Panther has spent 22 years in prison for a murder he says he didn’t commit. Now a crusading lay minister has persuaded prosecutors to re-examine the case.

He has tried for parole 12 times--and been denied. Amnesty International has tried to win him a new trial. Political luminaries and even one of the jurors who convicted him say he deserves another chance.

But Elmer (Geronimo) Pratt’s best hope for freedom may have finally arrived in the person of a crusading clergyman who specializes in exonerating the “convicted innocent.”

Lay minister Jim McCloskey is behind this week’s decision by the Los Angeles County district attorney to re-examine a case against the former Black Panther Party leader, who has been imprisoned 22 years for murder.

McCloskey, whose New Jersey-based Centurion Ministries acts as a private detective service in selected death penalty and life sentence cases, has conducted his own investigation into the case against Pratt.

In a detailed report turned over to Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, McCloskey said he became convinced that Pratt had nothing whatsoever to do with killing Carolyn Olsen on a Santa Monica tennis court and wounding her husband in 1968 during an $18 robbery.

Pratt, 46, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, is serving a life sentence for the slaying, but has always maintained his innocence.

This week, Garcetti’s office confirmed that the Pratt case is under review as a result of new evidence, but would not elaborate.

In addition to McCloskey, Garcetti has been urged in recent months to review the case by one of the jurors who convicted Pratt, as well as by U.S. Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), Don Edwards (D-San Jose) and others.

Through the years, other individuals and organizations, including the human rights group Amnesty International, have called for a new trial for Pratt.

There had been little response from authorities until McCloskey entered the picture with his 13-year-old Centurion Ministries.

The ministry gained national attention in 1992, when McCloskey’s work freed Clarence Chance and Benny Powell, two Los Angeles men who were wrongfully convicted of the murder of a sheriff’s deputy and spent 17 years behind bars.

McCloskey also is credited with freeing 10 other convicted people around the country.

He told The Times last week that he recently met with Los Angeles prosecutors about the Pratt case, which has been in and out of the court system for nearly two decades.

Appeals have been consistently denied and attempts to get the case reopened on the grounds that key evidence was not presented at Pratt’s trial have been unsuccessful.

Pratt, who spent his first eight years in prison in solitary confinement--illegally, a jury later determined--was denied parole for the 12th time last year.

Stuart Hanlon, a San Francisco lawyer who has represented Pratt for 15 years and who contacted McCloskey after learning of the Chance and Powell case, said McCloskey’s findings are significant given other evidence that has been unearthed over the years.

The new evidence, he said, further discredits the prosecution’s main witness and provides other suspects for the killing.

Hanlon said he is heartened by the new review of the case.

Pratt arrived in Los Angeles from his native Louisiana three months before the Olsen shooting. At the time, he was a 21-year-old recruit in the Los Angeles branch of the Panthers.

In 1970, when he was arrested in the Olsen slaying, he had moved up the party ranks and was an official of a faction headed by Eldridge Cleaver.

Pratt has insisted for years that he was a victim of COINTELPRO, a controversial FBI program that was designed to covertly disrupt and create dissension within politically radical groups of the 1960s and ‘70s, such as the Black Panthers. Critics of the program also have also accused it of using unethical tactics to undermine the credibility of prominent radicals.

Pratt maintains that he was in Oakland at the time of the Santa Monica shooting, which McCloskey and Hanlon say is confirmed by lawyers who say they have seen FBI wiretap transcripts of a call Pratt made from Oakland three hours before Olsen was killed.

In addition, prominent former Black Panthers, including Bobby Seale and David Hilliard, have recently signed affidavits saying Pratt was in Oakland at the time of the murder. Seale and Hilliard were feuding with Pratt in 1972 and would not testify on his behalf at his trial.

According to Hanlon, the most significant pieces of new evidence uncovered by McCloskey are affidavits from four people who say two other men, now dead, confessed to them that they had killed Olsen and wounded her husband.

McCloskey’s report also includes FBI memos saying the key witness against Pratt, a former sheriff’s deputy turned Panther named Julius Butler, was providing information to the agency before he accused Pratt of the Olsen killing. That was withheld from Pratt’s defense lawyer and the jury in the case, McCloskey contends.

Butler is currently an official of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles and did not return several calls to his church office. During Pratt’s trial, Butler strongly denied cooperating with the FBI, but documents made public by the agency in the early 1980s indicate that he provided information.

McCloskey also obtained statements from two former police officers who say Butler had contact with the FBI for months before he accused Pratt of the Olsen killing. “There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the jury would never have convicted Mr. Pratt had we known any of these facts,” Hamilton wrote.

Superior Court Judge Richard Kalustian, who as a deputy district attorney was Pratt’s chief prosecutor, would not comment Tuesday, saying he had no facts upon which to base a statement.