2 Mayors Urge New Trial for Ex-Black Panther Pratt

Imprisoned former Black Panther Party leader Elmer (Geronimo) Pratt, who is serving a life sentence for a murder he says the FBI knows he did not commit, should be given a new trial, the mayors of Compton and Pasadena said.

At a news conference on the steps of Compton’s City Hall on Tuesday, Compton Mayor Omar Bradley and Pasadena Mayor William M. Paparian called on Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti to promptly complete his review of the case and request a new trial for Pratt.

“We want everyone to know that Geronimo Pratt is not an enemy of America,” said Bradley, flanked by two dozen Pratt supporters.

Paparian called Pratt an American hero who was decorated in Vietnam for saving five wounded soldiers from a burning helicopter and for saving the life of his lieutenant.

To believe that Pratt would have committed murder within six months of those heroic acts requires a “leap of faith that defies all logic,” Paparian said.

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 during a robbery that netted less than $30.

Retired FBI Agent M. Wesley Swearingen has maintained for nearly 20 years that Pratt was framed as part of the bureau’s counter-intelligence program. Missing logs of FBI telephone taps would prove that agents knew Pratt was in Oakland at the time of the crime, Swearingen says.

Pratt was convicted of the Olsen murder in 1972, but the jury and his defense lawyers, who included Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., did not know that a key prosecution witness, Julius C. (Julio) Butler, had been providing information to the FBI. The defense also did not know that Olsen’s husband, Kenneth, had previously identified another suspect as the gunman. Nor did they know 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 never have found him guilty had they known that information.

At Pratt’s trial, Butler, now chairman of the board of Los Angeles’ First AME Church, testified that he was neither a police nor FBI informant and that Pratt had privately confessed committing the murder to him.