Misguided Move Against Pratt

What can explain Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti’s unwise decision last week to appeal the release of Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt?

The former Black Panther Party leader has already served more than 27 years behind bars for his conviction in a murder trial that a judge last summer ruled was tainted.

Before his release on bail in July, Pratt spent more time in prison than many who had been fairly convicted of murder. Yet Pratt’s conviction in the 1968 shooting death of Caroline Olson and the wounding of her husband was anything but fair. The judge who overturned Pratt’s conviction found that the prosecution’s star witness, Julius C. Butler, lied on the stand and that prosecutors kept from Pratt’s lawyers the fact that Butler was a police informant.

The arguments in the 202-page appeal that Los Angeles prosecutors filed Friday are the same lame ones that Orange County Superior Court Judge Everett W. Dickey rejected in finding that the trial was tainted. Not to mention that after a quarter-century, the witnesses in this case are either dead or their memories have grown dim. The far smarter move would have been to just drop this sorry case.

The prosecution of Pratt seemed politically motivated from the start, with many convinced that prosecutors and the FBI sought to neutralize the Black Panther Party here through a conviction. Now Garcetti’s decision to appeal raises natural questions about whether politics--and the zeal to win--once again mean more than seeing that justice is done. Does the district attorney need to shore up support among his own prosecutors? Controversial personnel transfers and his awarding of bonuses to prosecutors in the O.J. Simpson case eroded support among his troops. A preelection plebiscite of deputies last year revealed Garcetti to be only slightly more popular than his strongest challenger, who went on to give Garcetti a scare at election time.

The D.A.’s office faces acute problems ranging from spotty enforcement of child support orders to underpaid prosecutors. The decision to devote scarce public resources to try to re-imprison Geronimo Pratt is a fool’s errand.