A Tangled Web the D.A.’s Office May Have to Undo

It must have been after I lost some dust-up with a neighbor kid that my father weighed in with one of those credos we’re brought up on: The difference between the good guys and the bad guys isn’t who wins, it’s who plays by the rules.

That’s the simplest way to begin a complex tale of a case that is fanning old embers into new flames, about the fine points of law and the high stakes of politics inside and outside the district attorney’s office.

The case has roots in an era hard to evoke in this more placid age. The Black Panther Party began in 1966, cadres of armed black men in black leather jackets bent on countering police excesses, standing against Martin Luther King’s passive resistance. In 1967, armed Panthers marched into the state Assembly to protest proposed restrictions on guns. The FBI, considering the Panthers “the greatest domestic threat to American security,” used wiretaps, surveillance and counterintelligence. There were cop-Panther shootouts in New Haven, in Oakland, in L.A.

Amid all this came a supposedly slam-dunk murder case, a Santa Monica woman killed in an $18 robbery in December 1968. Elmer Pratt, “Geronimo,” a ranking Black Panther, was arrested on the word of Julius Butler, an ex-sheriff’s deputy and ex-Black Panther fallen out with Pratt and the party. He testified that Pratt confessed to him, the jury believed him, and Pratt spent 25 years in prison for a murder he says he did not commit.

Five times in those years, Pratt went to the judicial well seeking a new trial, contending he was set up, that the FBI, which kept tabs on Panthers, knew he didn’t do it and let him go to prison anyway to “neutralize” him. And five times he came up dry.

The sixth time, he drew water. An Orange County judge agreed: Had the jury known fully of Butler’s many contacts with the LAPD, the FBI and the D.A.’s office, it might have voted not guilty; some of them later said so.

As D.A.s like to say, they pursue not conviction but truth. Still, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti remains convinced of Pratt’s guilt and appealed the Orange County judge’s decision. The issue now is not innocence, but the more nuanced matter of whether Pratt got a fair trial. The consequences of this remind me of another childhood credo: Be careful what you wish for, it might come true.

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By next month, the three-judge state Court of Appeal panel will act on the Orange County judge’s ruling. If the panel reverses it, that would wipe out the order for a new trial or “other appropriate disposition,” sending Pratt back to prison and his attorneys to the state Supreme Court to appeal. Affirming it gives Garcetti several options, none of them enviable:

* He too could appeal.

* He could retry the case--an immensely daunting prospect 30 years after the fact, one which could also rake up embarrassing reminders of tactics the D.A.’s office would rather forget, like the 1980s scandal of prosecutors using fabricated jailhouse confessions.

* Or he could move to dismiss, citing obstacles to a retrial and the fact that Pratt has already spent a quarter-century in prison.

If this were about Garcetti’s political aspirations, he’d fare better by dropping it. The D.A.’s job has become like the old La Brea Tar Pits: gleaming invitingly, but once you’re in, it’s a sticky sinkhole. Freeing Pratt would score grudging points among black voters, but not enough to turn around anger over Garcetti’s prosecution of O.J. Simpson. And the larger electorate, indifferent to a 30-year-old case, might simply shrug it off as another big one the D.A.’s office screwed up, a dead case not worth the cost of pursuing.

No, the real constituency is internal: the D.A.’s 1,031 prosecutors and the police. An already demoralized D.A.’s office, riven by factions and rivalries, could perceive a decision not to pursue this as a repudiation of itself. Both Harry B. Sondheim, who headed the D.A.’s appellate division, and Mike Carroll, who first took the case to the grand jury, are still around, still well regarded. Repudiate them, and you impugn the integrity of the office.

And the police? In 1992, D.A. Ira Reiner agreed that police misconduct warranted freeing two men convicted of murder, and you could have cooked wieners on the steam coming out of Daryl Gates’ ears. If Garcetti backs away from Pratt, Gates could rise up in a thunder of sound-bite wrath.

In 1968, Garcetti was just out of law school, working on the quixotic Gene McCarthy presidential campaign. Decades later, the Pratt case has been left on his doorstep as the McMartin case was left on Reiner’s, dog doo deposited by someone else’s dog, now his to clean up. And anyone with dogs knows that no matter how you scrub, the smell can remain long after the mess itself is gone.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com