Reopen the Case of Geronimo Pratt : Justice: A private investigation amasses evidence that the jury was misled in the ex-Black Panther’s murder trial.

On Dec. 18, 1968, a young woman named Carolyn Olsen was robbed and then shot to death on a Santa Monica tennis court by two young black men. In July 1972, after 10 days of jury deliberations, Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt was convicted of this cruel murder and sentenced to life in prison.

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I have conducted an exhaustive reinvestigation of every single facet of this case for 3 1/2 years, and I have absolutely no doubt that Pratt is completely innocent of this crime. I have submitted my findings and evidence to Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti with the request that he review the fairness of the trial and the validity of the verdict. He agreed to do so. That was in July, 1993. Now, having waited 2 1/2 years in vain for the district attorney to respond, we at Centurion Ministries are assisting Pratt in seeking justice from the courts. Soon he will file a writ of habeas corpus, presenting in detail the documented evidence that amply demonstrates not only his innocence but also the extent to which his conviction was based on false testimony knowingly presented by the prosecution.

At the time of the shooting, Pratt was a 21-year-old UCLA freshman and veteran of two tours in Vietnam, for which he was heavily decorated. Pratt had befriended two fellow students, Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, who also were the leaders of the Los Angeles Black Panther Party. Both were murdered in January 1969 by a rival organization. That spring, the party leadership in Oakland put Pratt in charge of the Los Angeles chapter.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had named the Black Panther Party the single most dangerous threat to national security. Pratt soon became a target of the FBI’s counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO. (This “dirty tricks” operation was roundly criticized by the Senate’s Church Committee in the mid-1970s.) Pratt’s promotion created a rivalry that led a disenfranchised party member, Julius Butler, to inform on Pratt in particular and the Black Panthers in general for the FBI.

Pratt’s jury had no idea that the FBI had played a part in this case. In fact, the FBI was mentioned only once during the trial, when a defense witness said that he had been interviewed by the FBI. The prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Kalustian (now a Superior Court judge) admonished him, saying, “The FBI’s never been involved in this case and you know it.” We now know this is far from the truth.

Because of space constraints, I cannot detail all of my evidentiary findings. I will focus here on how Geronimo Pratt was targeted by the government for his political activities and wrongfully prosecuted for the murder of Carolyn Olsen.

In April 1969, when Pratt assumed his party leadership position, both the FBI and the LAPD’s Criminal Conspiracy Unit, whose responsibility it was to investigate black extremist groups, began to monitor him. In January 1970 and again in June 1970, FBI memos stated that he was to be “neutralized as an effective BPP functionary” and that “the legitimacy of Pratt’s BPP authority is to be challenged” by “COINTELPRO operation #1.” That October, the FBI and the LAPD, working together, began manipulating evidence against Pratt for the Olsen murder. By December, he was indicted and arrested.

The prosecution’s case rested largely on Butler’s assertion that Pratt had confessed to him the the day after the murder.

At the time of Pratt’s ascendancy in the Black Panther Party, Butler, a former L.A. deputy sheriff, was head of party security for Southern California. Butler, 36, felt that he, rather than a 21-year-old newcomer, should have been named successor to Carter and Huggins. Soon after taking charge, Pratt relieved Butler of his duties and a little while later further humiliated him by expelling him from the party. At the trial, Butler falsely testified that he had quit. However, FBI memos state that Butler told the FBI he had been expelled.

Butler was an FBI informant from at least the summer of 1969 until the eve of the Pratt trial in March 1972. Yet he testified that he had never been an informer at any time.

Butler was expelled by Pratt on Aug. 5, 1969. Five days later, he wrote in a letter that Pratt had bragged to him about “killing a white school teacher. . . on a tennis court in Santa Monica.” FBI agents observed Butler give this sealed letter to an LAPD officer friend for safekeeping. A few days later, Butler told FBI agents about the letter and its contents, but it remained in his friend’s hands until October 1970, when Butler told him to give it to the FBI.

Kalustian’s pretrial notes confirm that the case against Pratt “all began when the FBI saw JB give letter to R.” Remember, this is the same prosecutor who told Pratt’s jury that the FBI had no involvement in the case.

Again, I stress that none of this FBI involvement with Butler was known by the Pratt jury. Even former FBI Director William Webster acknowledged in 1980 that “the primary issue is whether Pratt is entitled to a new trial because the jury was unaware that Butler supplied information to the FBI.”

Pratt has always maintained that when Olsen was shot, he was in Oakland, 400 miles away, attending party meetings. Neither the jury nor Pratt’s defense knew that the FBI had an illegal telephone wiretap in place at the party’s L.A. headquarters in November and December 1968, or that the FBI subsidized an illegal Oakland police wiretap on the party’s national headquarters.

The significance of this is that Pratt would routinely telephone the L.A. office when he was out of town. Thus, if he was in Oakland at the time of the Santa Monica murder, as he claims, that could be established through the wiretap tapes, transcripts and/or log summaries. Unfortunately, this has been impossible to ascertain because the relevant wiretap materials have disappeared.

Wes Swearingen, a retired FBI agent whose job in L.A. involved responding to requests for FBI documents, has described this disappearance of wiretap materials as “incredible.”

I agree with Swearingen, who states in his 1995 book, “FBI Secrets, an Agent’s Expose,” that “Panther Leader Elmer Pratt was framed by the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department in 1972.” Swearingen shared a desk with Pratt’s FBI case agent throughout 1972 (the year of Pratt’s trial). He asserts in a sworn affidavit that he heard the agent tell someone on the telephone that the FBI knew that Pratt was in Oakland at the time of the murder in Santa Monica.

The tragic and infuriating result of these “missing” wiretap materials is that Pratt can never use them to prove his innocence.

None of the Black Panther leaders testified at his trial. By then, the party had split, with Pratt left on the “wrong” side, and helping him in any way was forbidden. Recently, however, six party leaders, including then-chairman Bobby Seale, have given affidavits swearing, with persuasive corroborative detail, that he was with them in Oakland.

Three jurors have told me that if they had known of the FBI’s pervasive involvement, they would have voted not guilty. One of the jurors has stated this in writing to Garcetti and Atty. Gen. Janet Reno.

All of the evidence that we have collected and documented is persuasive and more than enough to reopen this case and see that justice is served for this innocent man.

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James McCloskey is the founder of Centurion Ministries, which is based in Princeton, N.J., and provides investigative support for indigent people wrongfully convicted of capital crimes. He was instrumental in the 1992 vindication and release from prison of Benny Powell and Clarence Chance, convicted of killing an off-duty deputy sheriff in Los Angeles in 1973.