Informant to Testify as Court Considers New Trial for Pratt

For almost 25 years, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. has been waiting to get Julius Butler back into a courtroom where he could be put under oath and questioned about his role as an informant for law enforcement.

Cochran will get that opportunity today when Butler, the key prosecution witness against former Black Panther Party leader Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, will testify at a hearing in Santa Ana to determine whether Pratt should get a new trial after 26 years behind bars.

Butler, a former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who later joined the Panthers, denied that he had ever been a “snitch” when he testified at Pratt’s 1972 trial. After 10 days of deliberation, a jury convicted Pratt of shooting teacher Caroline Olsen to death and critically wounding her husband during a 1968 robbery that netted $18 on a Santa Monica tennis court.

Neither Cochran, who represented Pratt at his murder trial, nor the jury knew then what FBI documents obtained later would reveal about Butler: He had provided information to the FBI for more than two years before Pratt’s trial. Two former Los Angeles Police Department officers have since given sworn statements that Butler was also their informant.

And last summer, Butler’s name turned up in a Los Angeles County district attorney’s office file of confidential informants on cards dated six months before Pratt’s trial. District attorney investigators searched that file after Butler told them in May that he had been given a gun--or money to buy one--by someone from their office.

Stuart Hanlon, another of Pratt’s attorneys, said the fact that Butler’s “informant-type relationship with every law enforcement agency working” on the murder case was kept secret should invalidate the conviction.

Butler’s relationship with the district attorney’s office will be the initial focus at Pratt’s hearing. The hearing was moved to Orange County Superior Court to avoid a conflict of interest after it became evident that a Los Angeles Superior Court judge--Richard P. Kalustian, the prosecutor at Pratt’s murder trial--would be called as a witness.

Judge Everett W. Dickey, who will preside over the hearing, told lawyers for both sides last month that he wanted to begin by hearing from witnesses who know about the district attorney’s confidential informant index.

Dickey said he wanted to know “how Butler’s name got there, how he got a number, and why that was not disclosed until now?”

Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti’s office has opposed Pratt’s request for a new trial, saying in court papers that it is unwarranted.

“Public pressure brought by uninformed citizens, celebrities, politicians and journalists cannot be the basis for an evidentiary hearing when there is no credible evidence to support such a hearing,” prosecutors have written.

Pratt has steadfastly denied having shot Olsen and her husband, who survived, saying he was in Oakland attending Panther party meetings when the crime occurred. He said the FBI knew he was in Oakland because the bureau had him under surveillance--a contention supported by retired FBI agent M. Wesley Swearingen.

But Pratt has been unsuccessful in four earlier efforts to have his murder conviction overturned. And legal experts have said that although the revelation that the district attorney’s office kept informant cards on Butler is significant, that fact may not be enough to win Pratt a new trial.

Pratt attorney Hanlon said he expects that there will be “a confrontation between Butler, who lied on the witness stand, and Cochran, who was hoodwinked.”

Butler--whom Pratt had expelled from the Panthers--was the linchpin in the prosecution’s case. He testified that Pratt had confessed to him that he shot the Olsens. Then-prosecutor Kalustian saw that testimony as crucial.

“Julio Butler has testified in this court under oath and to the jury to a confession that Mr. Pratt made to him that admits all of the elements of the offense,” Kalustian said during Pratt’s trial. “If the jury believes Julio Butler . . . Mr. Pratt is guilty. The case is over if they believe that.”

Pratt has denied making such a confession, and Pratt’s attorneys say that at least three jurors have since told them that they would not have voted guilty had they known Butler was an informant. One said she also would not have voted guilty had she known that Olsen’s husband had positively identified two other suspects before identifying Pratt years after the original crime.

“The jury was not presented all of the facts,” Jeanne Hamilton, one of Pratt’s jurors, told The Times in 1994. “Had we known these facts, there is no doubt in my mind that we would not have reached a guilty verdict.”

Over the years, Pratt’s cause has been embraced by Amnesty International, various members of Congress, a broad cross-section a clergymen and different radical organizations. FBI documents released after his trial included one memo saying he should be neutralized as an effective Panther leader.

His defenders say he was targeted by the FBI’s infamous counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, aimed at discrediting individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr. and groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Panthers.

A U.S. Senate committee that investigated and condemned COINTELPRO found that FBI agents wrote phony letters, printed phony pamphlets, and used similar tactics to spread lies about targeted individuals and groups to disrupt their activities.

Pratt’s attorneys and the jury that convicted him had no way of knowing about COINTELPRO activities because the program was still a top-secret operation when Pratt was convicted in 1972.

Seven years after Pratt’s conviction, the FBI showed Deputy California Atty. Gen. Michael Nash a document saying that a confidential FBI informant had reported on conversations about Pratt’s defense strategy.

But COINTELPRO’s efforts, and the presence of an FBI informant in what an appellate court called Pratt’s “defense environs” are not likely to become issues at the hearing in Orange County. Those issues have been unsuccessfully raised in earlier efforts to get Pratt a new trial, and Judge Dickey has said that he is not inclined to “rehear what other judges have already heard.”

Hanlon also feels that little is to be gained by revisiting those issues.

“The political issues have overwhelmed the facts in this case,” he said, adding that a courtroom may not be the place to deal with them. “The mistake we have made in the past is to try this case on the big issues,” Hanlon said. “The focus should be on what has happened to this man. What has happened. Not why.”