An Obsessive Prosecution Ends

Certainly it’s good news that Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti has now acknowledged what he should have years ago: that the 1972 murder conviction of Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt was tainted beyond redemption by questions of fairness and official misconduct. However, that Garcetti took up this case, the sorry handiwork of his predecessors, and pursued it with unseemly zeal through one court after another spotlights misplaced priorities within the D.A.’s office.

Pratt is a former Black Panther leader who spent 27 years behind bars after being arrested in the 1968 robbery-murder of schoolteacher Caroline Olsen. Garcetti’s decision Wednesday to finally drop his bid for a retrial was forced by an appellate court ruling Tuesday that upheld a 1997 Orange County court decision overturning Pratt’s conviction and setting up his release from prison.

Garcetti could have appealed once again, to the California Supreme Court, but even he, at long last, appears to have seen that the rope has run out. How much money and time spent prosecuting Pratt could have been more usefully directed?

The case against Pratt depended on a man who was both a disgruntled ex-Panther and a former L.A. sheriff’s deputy and who, the Orange County judge concluded, lied on the witness stand. Neither Pratt’s lawyers nor the jury learned what the prosecution knew--that this key witness, the one who fingered Pratt as the murderer, was a police and FBI informant. Absent that knowledge, defense attorneys had no opportunity to challenge his credibility through cross-examination.

The case against Pratt could have been seen as a long-past injustice, part of a politically motivated effort by local law enforcement in the 1960s to neutralize the Black Panther Party. But by his dogged involvement, Garcetti made this case and its ends-justify-the-means legacy his own.