UNITED STATES: Black Panther Expects Freedom After 25 Years

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Jun 1 1997 (IPS) - Militant black activist Elmer ‘Geronimo’ Pratt could gain his first taste of freedom in 25 years this week following a court ruling that his murder trial in 1972 had not been properly conducted.

Pratt, a former leader of the Black Panther Party, has been regarded as a political prisoner by many human rights activists.

He did not get a fair trial in 1972 because prosecutors suppressed information that the key witness against him was a police informer, Judge Everett Dickey ruled last week in Orange County, California.

Although the District Attorney’s office in California could still appeal against the reversal of Pratt’s conviction, his lawyers argue that Pratt’s ordeal may soon be over.

“We don’t think there’s going to be a retrial,” attorney Stuart Hanlon told IPS. “We think the case is just about done, and we’re going to try to get him out on bail” this week.

Pratt is still not a free man, despite the overturning of his conviction; he is still being held by the California Sheriff’s Office while he awaits notification of a new trial. But if no appeal is granted, any new trial would face the same hurdles for the prosecution that won the reversal from Dickey: the information that witness Julius Butler, a former Black Panther whose testimony was central to Pratt’s conviction, was a paid informant of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“The original attorneys had no idea that Butler was an informant,” said Sacramento Talavera, a spokesman for the Partisan Defense Committee, a legal activist group which supports Pratt. Given that Dickey’s ruling has now raised anew the problem of Butler’s testimony, Talavera said, “there will be a great chance of acquittal” if Pratt is tried again.

Pratt, an outspoken radical in the ranks of the Los Angeles Black Panthers at a time when the group espoused armed rebellion against the police, was convicted of the 1968 murder of teacher Mary Olsen. Until the voiding of his conviction Thursday, he had been denied parole 16 times, although his case has won the attention of dozens of human rights groups and labour unions, many of whom contend that he was targeted by the FBI’s anti-leftist Counter-Intelligence Programme (COINTELPRO).

“Never in our discussions did we ever talk about the FBI,” former juror Jeanne Hamilton said last year. “We had no clue as to their involvement…the jury was never informed that Julius Butler was an FBI informant.” If the jury had known such facts, Hamilton has testified, “there is no doubt in my mind that we would not have reached a guilty verdict.”

Other problems also surfaced in the state’s case. One retired FBI agent, Wesley Swearingen, said that he worked with an FBI “racial squad” that focused on black radical groups which, he now claims, handled Pratt’s case. Swearingen also has argued that FBI wiretaps which would prove that Pratt was 400 miles away when Olsen was killed in Santa Monica disappeared.

“It’s a real victory for justice,” Hanlon said of Dickey’s verdict. “I think it’s a repudiation of illegal government tactics that were used to persecute many people.”