Ex-Panther Pratt Denied Parole for 13th Time : Prison: He calls panel members political pawns. D.A. is reviewing a report arguing his innocence in the 1968 Santa Monica slaying of a teacher.

Former Black Panther leader Elmer G. (Geronimo) Pratt was denied parole for the 13th time Wednesday by commissioners he later described as “pawns in the political manipulations engulfing me the whole time I’ve been in prison.”

Nearly 50 of Pratt’s supporters demonstrated outside the entrance of Mule Creek State Prison in this Amador County community as the three state Board of Prison Terms commissioners conducted the hearing inside.

Pratt is serving a life sentence for the 1968 murder of schoolteacher Caroline Olsen and the wounding of her husband on a Santa Monica tennis court.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, whose office opposed parole Wednesday, has been reviewing Pratt’s case since crusading lay minister Jim McCloskey, of New Jersey-based Centurion Ministries, submitted a detailed report arguing Pratt’s innocence.

Although Pratt and his attorneys did not expect to prevail at the parole hearing, they saw it as a forum to focus public attention on the case as Garcetti continues his review.

So many facts point to his innocence of the murder charge for which he has served 23 years in prison, Pratt said, that he can only hope that the truth will come out soon.

In denying Pratt parole, the panel said he would pose “an unreasonable risk to society.” His crime was “callous,” and he has “failed to demonstrate evidence of positive change,” said board Chairman Steven G. Baker.

Pratt has steadfastly maintained that he was in Oakland--400 miles away--attending meetings of the Black Panther Party’s central committee on Dec. 18, 1968, when Olsen was shot to death during a robbery that netted less than $30.

He also insists that the FBI knew that he was in Oakland, but that he was framed as part of the bureau’s infamous COINTELPRO program aimed at disrupting and neutralizing black organizations and leaders during the 1960s and 1970s.

Wednesday’s hearing was punctuated by sharp exchanges between parole board members and Pratt and his attorney, Stuart Hanlon. The board questioned why Pratt has been cited in two disciplinary reports since his hearing last year, why he has not accepted a work assignment, and why no letters were presented at this hearing indicating that he would have a job or that he would be able to live with his wife upon release.

Pratt and Hanlon dismissed those questions as part of a political game. “We know you can create (disciplinary reports),” Hanlon said, adding that a federal judge has said that Pratt’s treatment in California prisons is retaliatory.

In June, U.S. District Judge Stanley Weigel of San Francisco ruled that state prison officials apparently retaliated against Pratt after he gave a television interview saying that new evidence pointed to his innocence.

Pratt was transferred in January to Mule Creek and housed with another inmate, rather than in a one-man cell as he has been during nearly all of his sentence. Putting Pratt in a double cell aggravates nightmares, insomnia and combat-related stress traceable to his Vietnam combat experiences, for which he was decorated, his doctors said.

Weigel said Pratt’s transfer was ordered, under unusual procedures that prison officials tried to conceal, two days after Pratt agreed to the television interview.

At one point, parole board member Ron Koenig said it seemed that Pratt “still has a criminal mentality.” Pratt responded: “I think you have a criminal mentality. There is a difference in the way we think.”

He later said his mentality was not criminal during his days as a Black Panther because he was seeking “to free people who are in bondage.”

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One of the work assignments that Pratt refused at Mule Creek would have required him to work with white inmates who belong to the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist group, Hanlon said. Pratt refused the task to reduce the possibility of violence, Hanlon said.

As for Pratt’s residence and job prospects, his prison file is filled with dozens of letters offering employment--including one from a university in the east African nation of Tanzania where he has been offered a teaching post, Pratt said.

“Mr. Pratt’s case since his arrest and conviction has been a political case,” Hanlon told the panel. “He was arrested because he was a Black Panther. He has been punished in prison for political reasons.”

Hanlon also noted that Pratt asked to be represented by former Black Panther central committee member Kathleen Cleaver at Wednesday’s hearing, but that she was not even allowed into the hearing room. Cleaver, a Yale Law School graduate and a law professor at Emory University in Atlanta, watched the hearing on a television monitor in an adjacent room.

Anything that Pratt might do to comply with parole conditions set by the board would be inadequate, Hanlon said, because he expects totally new conditions to be imposed at the next hearing.

“We’re not allowed to talk about the fact that Pratt did not commit the murder,” Hanlon said. “The man is not admitting it because he didn’t do it.”

The board denied parole for one year, but Koenig said he felt that a two-year denial should have been imposed, citing what he called Pratt’s “criminal mentality,” among other factors.

Pratt was convicted of the Olsen murder in 1972, but defense lawyers and the jury did not know that a key prosecution witness had been providing information to the FBI; that Olsen’s husband, Kenneth, had previously identified another suspect as the gunman; or that an FBI informant had infiltrated what an appellate court decision called the “defense environs.”

Three jurors who convicted Pratt have said that they would not have done so had they known about Olsen’s earlier identification of a suspect and that Julius C. Butler, the former Panther who implicated Pratt in the murder, had more than 30 documented contacts with the FBI over a two-year period before the trial.

Pratt said he believes that his lawyers and investigators working with McCloskey are very close to finding the “smoking gun” that will reveal who killed Olsen.

McCloskey gained national attention in 1992 for winning the release of Clarence Chance and Benny Powell, two Los Angeles men who had served 17 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of killing a sheriff’s deputy.