Judge Sides With Ex-Black Panther, Orders One-Man Cell

A federal judge has said state prison officials apparently retaliated against former Black Panther leader Elmer (Geronimo) Pratt after he told television interviewers that new evidence shows his innocence in a 1968 murder.

Pratt was transferred in January to the state prison at Mule Creek in Amador County and housed with another inmate rather than in a one-man cell, his placement for nearly all of his imprisonment. His doctors say double-celling aggravates Pratt’s medical problems.

State Corrections Director James Gomez has acknowledged ordering the transfer and says he did it at the request of unidentified state legislative aides so that Pratt could be closer to his wife and children in Marin County. But U.S. District Judge Stanley Weigel stopped just short of calling Gomez a liar.

The circumstances of the transfer, and two previous findings of prison system retaliation against Pratt, “point to a retaliatory motive,” Weigel said in a June 27 ruling. He said the transfer was ordered--under unusual procedures that prison officials tried to conceal--two days after Pratt had agreed to a Los Angeles television interview.

“It is doubtful . . . that (officials) were acting out of goodwill toward (Pratt),” the judge said.

He ordered officials to keep Pratt in a one-man cell, where he was transferred in February by Weigel’s previous order in the case.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Peter Siggins said Tuesday the state would probably appeal the ruling.

Pratt was the Black Panthers’ deputy defense minister in Southern California when he was convicted in 1972 of the December, 1968, robbery and fatal shooting of schoolteacher Caroline Olsen on a Santa Monica tennis court.

Sentenced to life in prison, he has appealed unsuccessfully to state and federal courts, saying he was at a Panther conference in Oakland at the time of the killing and was denied crucial FBI evidence that would have cleared him.