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<h1>Geronimo Pratt case 40 years
late</a></u>r</h1><font size=3>
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</a></font><h2><b>Gunshots on a Santa Monica tennis court reverberated
across legal landscape. </b></h2><font size=3>Note: Edward J. Boyer, now
retired, covered the Elmer Gerard "Geronimo" Pratt case for The
Times. <br><br>
By Edward J. Boyer<br><br>
On a clear, chilly December evening 40 years ago, Kenneth Olsen, head of
the English department at Belmont High School, and his wife, Caroline,
drove to Santa Monica's Lincoln Park tennis courts to meet another couple
for a friendly doubles match.<br><br>
The courts on Wilshire Boulevard at 7th Street were dark when the Olsens
arrived about 8 p.m. Caroline went to the light meter to deposit a
quarter. When she had trouble getting the meter to work, Kenneth went to
help.<br><br>
Just as the lights came on, the Olsens noticed two men walking toward
them. As the pair drew closer, Kenneth Olsen realized both men were
carrying pistols.<br><br>
The men ordered the Olsens to put their hands up.<br><br>
"We want your bread, man," Kenneth Olsen remembered one saying.
"Give us your money. Where is it?"<br><br>
He directed the robbers to his tennis bag and his wife's purse. They
ordered the couple to the ground and started to leave.<br><br>
Suddenly, they turned and opened fire.<br><br>
Kenneth Olsen survived the fusillade; his wife did not. And those shots
fired on Dec. 18, 1968, reverberated across Los Angeles' legal landscape
for nearly three decades.<br><br>
Just over three years later, former Black Panther Party leader Elmer
Gerard "Geronimo" Pratt was sent to prison for the robbery and
murder. Pratt had maintained at his trial that he was in Oakland, 341
miles away, attending Black Panther Party meetings when Caroline Olsen
was killed.<br><br>
Even by the standards of those turbulent times, it was a crime remarkable
for its chillingly random and wanton character.<br><br>
Describing the shooting at Pratt's trial, Kenneth Olsen said: "It
came as a complete surprise to me that they actually fired. I didn't
think they would."<br><br>
He was hit five times--in the forehead and right hand, little finger,
forearm and hip. Caroline Olsen was struck in the back and hip.<br><br>
Olsen, then 31, checked on his wife as blood poured out of the wound in
his forehead.<br><br>
"Are you OK? Can you move?" he asked his wife.<br><br>
She could not. And there was no one else around.<br><br>
"I realized I had to get help for her and that I wouldn't last too
long the way blood was flowing," Olsen testified.<br><br>
He stumbled across Wilshire, barely avoiding an oncoming car, and made
his way into the Broken Drum restaurant, where a waitress called for
help.<br><br>
Caroline Olsen, 27, a teacher at Stoner Avenue Elementary School, died
later from her wounds.<br>
The thugs who murdered her netted about $18.<br><br>
Santa Monica police made little headway in their investigation of the
coldblooded assault on the Olsens. But events within the Black Panther
Party and efforts by a secret FBI counterintelligence program called
COINTELPRO intersected in 1969 to change that. Pratt was convicted in
what his defenders still call one of the most overtly political trials in
Los Angeles' history.<br><br>
A month after Caroline Olsen's murder, Panthers in Los Angeles themselves
were left reeling by violence. Their charismatic leader, Alprentice
"Bunchy" Carter, and his close aide, John Huggins, were killed
Jan. 17, 1969 in a shootout on the UCLA campus.<br><br>
Carter's death left a void, and Julius C. "Julio" Butler, a
35-year-old former Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy turned Panther,
saw himself as Carter's logical successor. But party leaders in Oakland
tapped Pratt, 20, a decorated Vietnam veteran, who had been a Panther for
only about four months.<br><br>
A bitter rivalry developed between Pratt and Butler. Pratt and other
Panthers accused Butler of being a police informant, while Butler accused
them of threatening his life.<br><br>
By May 1969, Butler had begun talking to the FBI. On Aug. 5, he was
expelled from the party, according to former Panthers and FBI documents
obtained after Pratt’s conviction. He says he quit.<br><br>
Five days later, he gave a letter to Los Angeles Police Sgt. DuWayne
Rice, naming Pratt as Caroline Olsen's killer.<br><br>
Butler had written on the outside of the sealed envelope that it should
only be opened in the event of his death. He called it his
"insurance letter," and prosecutors at Pratt's trial argued
that Butler never intended for it to be made public, likening the
envelope's contents to a deathbed declaration.<br><br>
Information disclosed after Pratt's conviction, however, revealed that
Butler's insurance letter was anything but a secret. FBI agents
approached Rice on the street immediately after Butler gave him the
sealed envelope. They demanded that the sergeant turn it over and
referred to it as "evidence."<br><br>
Rice refused, but later recalled that he wondered how the agents knew the
envelope contained a letter since it was sealed, and how could they have
known it was evidence.<br>
More than a year later, in October 1970, Butler gave Rice permission to
give the letter to his LAPD superiors. Butler explained to Rice that the
FBI was "jamming" him and that he had told agents about the
letter.<br><br>
Butler's letter said Pratt had told him of a "mission" he was
about to undertake on the night the Olsens were shot. The next day,
Butler said, he pointed to a front-page story in The Times about the
robbery and shooting. Pratt, Butler said, indicated that was the mission
he had spoken of. Pratt’s defenders have always dismissed as ludicrous
Butler’s contention that Pratt, who was extremely suspicious of Butler,
would have confessed to him.<br><br>
Butler's letter became the tool prosecutors needed in December 1970 to
convince a grand jury to indict Pratt for Caroline Olsen's murder. The
LAPD's Criminal Conspiracy Section had taken over the investigation from
Santa Monica police. Pratt, who was being held on other charges, would be
tried in June 1972.<br><br>
Butler's letter also implicated a "Tyrone," and police arrested
William Tyrone Hutchinson in 1970. In a sworn statement given in 1991 to
investigators working on Pratt's behalf, Hutchinson said he told police
in 1970 that two men, Larry Hatter and Herbert Swilley, had bragged at a
Panther office about being present at the tennis court when the Olsens
were attacked.<br><br>
Hutchinson said he had known Swilley and Hatter since childhood and knew
them to be Butler's friends. Officers told him not to discuss what he
heard Swilley and Hatter say, if he knew what was good for him,
Hutchinson said.<br><br>
Explaining why he had not come forward with the information earlier,
Hutchinson said he took the officers' comments "to be a threat on my
life, and I still do."<br><br>
Pratt's defenders maintain that LAPD investigators did not pursue
evidence pointing to other suspects because their primary objective was
to "neutralize" Pratt and cripple the Panthers.<br>
Friends of Swilley and Hatter have described both as heroin addicts who
committed robberies to pay for drugs. Swilley was also known as a
particularly violent killer. He was shot to death in 1972 during an
argument.<br><br>
Hatter was found dead in 1978 on the Pacific Tennis Court grounds in
Santa Monica. He apparently fell while attempting to enter or leave a
building during a burglary, impaling his skull on a fence.<br><br>
The key evidence against Pratt consisted of Butler's testimony that he
had obliquely confessed the crime, Kenneth Olsen's eyewitness testimony,
ballistics tests from a .45-caliber pistol and the car allegedly used in
the robbery/murder.<br><br>
Although Butler denied on the witness stand that he had ever been a
police informant, FBI files released after Pratt's conviction showed that
Butler had been providing information on the Panthers to the bureau for
three years before the trial.<br><br>
Kenneth Olsen identified Pratt as one of the men who committed the
murder. He told the Pratt jury that "one of the most distinguishing
things about Mr. Pratt is his intensive eyes," calling them
"very piercing and very penetrating."<br><br>
Neither the jury nor Pratt's lawyers knew at the time that Olsen earlier
had identified another suspect as his wife's killer. The public defender
who had represented that suspect recalled after Pratt's conviction that
Olsen had said after that earlier identification: "The voice did
it."<br>
In fact, the first man Olsen identified as the assailant had been in jail
the night the couple was attacked.<br><br>
Had the jury known about Olsen's earlier identification, "I think
that alone would have changed our mind," said Jeanne Hamilton, a
juror at Pratt’s 1972 trial.<br><br>
LAPD criminalist DeWayne Wolfer testified at Pratt's trial that
firing pin marks on shell casings found on the tennis court matched those
on shells fired from a .45-caliber pistol seized from a Panther house. In
an earlier trial, a California appellate court ruled that Wolfer had
"negligently presented false demonstrative evidence in support of
his ballistics testimony." Another forensic scientist has
characterized Wolfer's testimony as lacking "credibility in the
minds of most forensic scientists."<br><br>
The only other person to tie Pratt to the .45 was Butler.<br><br>
The presence of Pratt's car at the murder scene is a point even some of
his defenders acknowledge. A witness saw the gunmen flee in a red and
white Pontiac GTO convertible with out-of-state plates--a description
matching Pratt's 1967 car.<br><br>
Several witnesses, however, testified that Pratt's car was used not only
by other Panthers, but by any number of people associated with the
party--including Butler on several occasions. Pratt, his defenders said,
had no idea who used his car on the day of the murder because he was in
Oakland, where he had gone earlier in the week.<br><br>
Pratt always has insisted that he was in Oakland attending Black Panther
Party meetings when the Olsens were attacked. Years later, retired FBI
agent M. Wesley Swearingen said the bureau knew Pratt was in the Bay Area
then because the Panthers were under surveillance and phones at their
party headquarters were tapped.<br><br>
Pratt's defense presented several witnesses who placed him in Oakland
during the party meetings. But they could not--3 1/2 years
later--specifically place Pratt in the Bay Area on Dec. 18, the day of
the crime.<br><br>
What turned out to be one of the most damaging pieces of evidence against
Pratt was introduced by the defense. Olsen had described his assailants
as clean shaven, but several other witnesses--including Butler--said they
always had seen Pratt with facial hair.<br>
Pratt's lawyers introduced a Polaroid photograph, supposedly taken around
Christmas 1968, showing Pratt with a goatee, which they argued he could
not have grown in the week after the murder.<br><br>
"We took the word of Pratt's brother, Chuck Pratt, about this
picture," Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., one of Pratt's attorneys at his
original trial, said. "We didn't consider it really important. We
thought it was clear to everybody that Pratt had a goatee, that he was
not clean shaven as Mr. Olsen said."<br><br>
But that photo was more important than Pratt's defense team could have
imagined. Prosecutors called a Polaroid representative who testified that
the picture could not have been taken in December 1968, because the film
used in the photo was not manufactured until May 1969.<br>
That testimony was devastating. One juror said it made him begin to
question other parts of the defense case. Another said jurors argued
during deliberations that if Pratt had lied about the photo, he could
have lied about other events.<br><br>
The jury deliberated for 10 days before it returned its guilty
verdict.<br><br>
Pratt, who now uses the name Geronimo ji Jaga, served two years in Los
Angeles County Jail and 25 years in prison--the first eight in solitary
confinement--before Orange County Superior Court Judge Everett W. Dickey
overturned his conviction in 1997 and released him on bail.<br><br>
The case was moved to Orange County after the entire Los Angeles Superior
Court bench was recused because one of its members, Judge Richard P.
Kalustian, who as a deputy district attorney prosecuted Pratt, was to be
called as a witness.<br><br>
Dickey, by all accounts a conservative, law enforcement-oriented judge,
publicly branded Butler, the prosecution's key witness, a liar and ruled
that Los Angeles County prosecutors had suppressed evidence favorable to
Pratt's defense.<br><br>
"The importance of Butler to the prosecution cannot be denied,"
Dickey later wrote in his decision. He noted that Pratt was never a
suspect until police learned the content of Butler's letter, and that
Kalustian "emphasized Butler's importance in argument both to the
trial judge and to the jury."<br><br>
At Pratt's trial in 1972, Kalustian had summed up just how important a
witness Butler was: "Julio Butler has testified in this court under
oath and to the jury to a confession that Mr. Pratt made to him that
admits all of the elements of the offense. If the jury believes Julio
Butler, Mr. Pratt is guilty. The case is over if they believe
that."<br><br>
Butler had denied under oath that he had ever been an informant for law
enforcement, saying "the connotation (of) informant means a snitch,
and I have never been in the world a snitch."<br>
But in the hearing before Dickey, prosecutors revealed that Butler’s name
had turned up in a confidential informant file kept by the Los Angeles
County district attorney's office.<br><br>
San Francisco attorney Stuart Hanlon, one of Pratt's lawyers, called the
informant card on Butler a "smoking gun," saying the district
attorney's office knew during Pratt's trial that Butler was an
informant.<br><br>
"The fact is that he was an actual informant, and no one said
anything about it in court," Hanlon said. "The informant status
of a main prosecution witness is always reversible error."<br><br>
Three jurors, including Hamilton, told Jim McCloskey, whose Centurion
Ministries independently investigated Pratt’s case, they would never have
convicted Pratt had they known Butlerwho went on to become a lawyer and
chairman of the board at Los Angeles' First African Methodist Episcopal
Church--was an informant.<br><br>
In overturning Pratt's conviction, Dickey ruled that despite Butler's
denials, he had been an FBI informant for at least three years before the
trial. Dickey also ruled that Butler had been an informant for the LAPD
and for the very agency that prosecuted Pratt--the Los Angeles County
district attorney's office.<br><br>
A detective in the district attorney’s office gave Butler $200 to buy a
gun several months before Pratt's trial, Dickey noted, even though Butler
was a convicted felon who could not legally possess a firearm.<br><br>
Several law enforcement officers knew Butler carried the gun, even though
doing so was a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison, Dickey
said.<br><br>
Pratt's defense lawyers, Dickey said, were not given information needed
to show Butler's motive for naming Pratt as Caroline Olsen's killer. Had
Pratt's lawyers known of Butler's activities, they could have devastated
his credibility on cross-examination, the judge said.<br><br>
After Pratt’s release, then-Los Angeles Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti appealed
Dickey’s decision. But one veteran prosecutor said parts of Garcetti's
appeal were difficult for experienced trial attorneys to fathom.<br><br>
"There appears to be a whole bunch of stuff out there that was not
turned over to the defense that should have been--like guys buying a guy
a gun," he said. "Had this been turned over, would it have
affected the outcome? That question doesn't pass the straight-face
test."<br><br>
Garcetti lost his appeal and Pratt settled a false imprisonment and civil
rights lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles and the FBI for $4.5
million. Pratt now splits his time between Morgan City, La., his home
town, and east Africa. He has used part of his settlement to support
projects for young people in Morgan City and a community founded by
former Panthers in Tanzania.<br><br>
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