UNITED STATES: Disputed Black Panther Case Comes Up After 25 Years

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Feb 6 1997 (IPS) - A former leader of the radical Black Panther Party jailed on a murder charge has a chance to prove his oft-repeated claims of innocence, 25 years after he was first found guilty.

Supporters of Elmer ‘Geronimo’ Pratt, who has been in a California prison since he was found guilty in 1972 of murdering Carolyn Olsen and also shooting her husband Kenneth, have long maintained that he was framed because of his leftist and black nationalist politics.

Now, they say, Pratt, who has taken the name Geronimo ji Jaga, will finally get the chance he deserves for the charges against him to be judged fairly. On Feb 27, Pratt’s lawyers, Stuart Hanlon and Johnnie Cochran, will present a briefing to California Superior Court Justice Everett Dickey which, the lawyers argue, offer Pratt a shot at having his conviction voided.

Hanlon told IPS that the just-completed new hearing for Pratt, which provided evidence to bolster the claim that the Black Panther leader was framed, has sparked hopes that the basis for the 1972 conviction has been decisively undermined.

“All this has made us more hopeful than we’ve ever been,” Hanlon said. “We got to call the people we wanted to call…It’s hard to be hopeful given Geronimo’s history, but we feel really confident.”

The lawyers contend that Pratt, whom Cochran called “one of the longest-held political prisoners in the United States,” was 400 miles away from the shooting in Los Angeles of the Olsens, for which he was nevertheless charged.

Instead, they say, Pratt was set up at the behest of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which in the early 1970s set up a Counter-Intelligence Programme (COINTELPRO) designed to crack down on the Black Panthers and other radical groups.

Central to that case has been the role of Julius Butler, the key witness to the 1972 trial, whose testimony clinched Pratt’s conviction. In the new hearings this December and January, Hanlon argued, the lawyers finally were able to plead their main case: that Butler had been a paid informant of the Los Angeles District Attorneys’ Office at the same time that it was prosecuting Pratt.

“We have proven that the key witness was in fact an informant for the local police,” Hanlon said. Butler also worked as an FBI informant, he added, but Pratt’s attorneys have downplayed the COINTELPRO angle in this hearing to focus more specifically on weak spots in the original case.

That approach has already had an effect on some former jurors in the initial trial. One juror, Jeanne Hamilton, last year argued that a considerable amount of the information not revealed to the 1972 jury, including that of Butler’s status, would have tilted their verdict.

“Never, ever in our discussions did we ever talk about the FBI,” Hamilton said. “We had no clue as to their involvement…The jury was never informed that the FBI had wiretapped the Oakland and Los Angeles Black Panther headquarters and had documented evidence that Mr Pratt was in Oakland at the time (of the murder).” Neither did the jury know that Butler was an FBI informant, nor know the details of COINTELPRO.

“If we had known these facts, there is no doubt in my mind that we would not have reached a guilty verdict,” she argued.

Support for Pratt’s innocence has even come from some former FBI agents in recent years. One fKW+ûñ,VûïR,..Zû+