PROSECUTOR IN GERONIMO PRATT CASE
REFUSES TO LET GO


By Akinshiju C. Ola



    After serving some 27 years in the California prison system,
Elmer Geronimo ji Jaga Pratt was released June 10 on $25,000
bail. While the Los Angeles County District Attorney did not
oppose the bail for Pratt, he vowed to appeal the
decision--indicating the possibility that the former Black
Panther leader may be retried.
    "During my office's exhaustive review, we discovered new
evidence relating to the credibility of a witness against Mr.
Pratt," said District Attorney Gil Garcetti. "We did not discover
any new evidence pointing to Mr. Pratt's innocence."
    Geronimo has consistently charged that he was the victim of a
political frame-up, and over the years evidence has surfaced that
support his contention. He was arrested in 1970 and convicted in
1972 for the December 1968 murder of a Santa Monica
schoolteacher, Caroline Olsen. Following years of legal struggle
and harassment by prison officials, Pratt's conviction was
overturned as the result of a petition filed by his attorneys,
Johnnie Cochran and Stuart Hanlon. He had been denied parole
sixteen times.
    Documents released since Geronimo's conviction have indicated
that he was framed by the Los Angeles Police Department and the
FBI's COINTELPRO operation which targeted members of the Black
Panther Party and other Black nationalist groups. The LAPD
established its Criminal Conspiracy Section (CCS) as a special
anti-Black Panther hit squad. During Pratt's trial, the FBI, LAPD
and the D.A.'s office deliberately withheld from the defense
information gathered through three sets of FBI wiretaps proving
that Geronimo was 400 miles away when the murder was committed.
Also withheld from the defense was the fact that the victim's
husband had identified another suspect, and that Julius Butler,
who testified against Pratt, was an FBI and LAPD informer--which
he lied about on the stand.
    In August of 1996, it was discovered that Butler was not only
an informer for the FBI and LAPD, but also for the Los Angeles
D.A.'s office. In 1995, former FBI agent M. Wesley Swearingen's
book FBI Secrets: An Agent's Expose, was published by South End
Press. Earlier, Swearingen had testified that Geronimo was set
up, and he flatly pointed out that based on his 20-year knowledge
of FBI wrongdoing, he was not surprised that Pratt was framed for
murder. He then went on to talk about the three different sets of
FBI wiretaps withheld from the defense at the trial.
    "Additional proof of Geronimo's innocence was compiled by
James McCloskey, a lay minister and investigator, and submitted
to D.A. Gil Garcetti [in 1993], with the request that he reopen
Geronimo's case," according to the Partisan Defense Committee's
(PDC) newsletter, "Class-Struggle Defense Notes." In 1992,
McCloskey conducted an investigation that "won freedom for two
Black men, Clarence Chance and Benny Powell, who had spent 17
years in prison on concocted evidence, when the city conceded
that had been intentionally framed."
    McCloskey's findings were used in a Fox-TV series which PDC
counsel Valerie West stated in a petition, "exposed for the first
time the identity of the likely perpetrators of the murder for
which Plaintiff has already served 23 years." The petition
charged that Pratt was being harassed because of the publicity
being given to his struggle, and it was a violation of the Eighth
Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Following
the television series, Geronimo was transferred to Mule Creek
Prison and put in a double cell.
    It was the latest of a string of incidents, including years
in the hole and the continuing denial of parole. Later,
Geronimo's lawyer, Kathleen Cleaver, was barred from his
thirteenth parole hearing. Prison authorities were intent on
forcing Pratt to renounce his commitment to the struggle of Black
people and "to change his attitude toward the criminal justice
system."
    Attorney Cochran asserts that the evidence clearly shows that
Geronimo was framed, and the D.A.'s appeal will come to naught.