LOS ANGELES (AP - 03/28/96) -- The last time Jeanne Hamilton saw Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt was in 1972, when she and other jurors convicted the former Black Panther of murdering a schoolteacher.
Hamilton now believes they sent an innocent man to prison. Pratt, 48, and his lawyers plan to return to court Thursday to seek a new trial. Hamilton wants to be there.
"I'm scared to death, and I want to look at him and tell him I'm sorry," said Hamilton, a schoolteacher.
Pratt contended he was in Oakland, 400 miles away, the night Carolyn Olsen, 27, was shot to death in 1968 during a robbery on a Santa Monica tennis court. Her husband, Kenneth Olsen, was wounded. Pratt is in a Northern California prison and has served 24 years of a life sentence.
Pratt's case has become a cause celebre, prompting protests and drawing support from Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union and members of Congress.
Defense attorneys say prosecutors withheld key evidence as part of an FBI frame-up.
"I didn't know I was up against the entire government," said Johnnie Cochran Jr., who as a young lawyer years before the O.J. Simpson case represented Pratt.
Cochran has failed four times to get a new trial. This time, he says he has more evidence and six witnesses who will verify Pratt's whereabouts. The defense also claims to know who committed the crime, although both men are now dead.
The defense this time also has the help of crusading lay minister Jim McCloskey, whose Princeton, N.J.-based Centurion Ministries specializes in exonerating those wrongly convicted.
It was largely due to McCloskey's report on the Pratt case that led District Attorney Gil Garcetti to agree to review the case in 1993.
Frustrated at no response, Cochran and co-counsel Stuart Hanlon filed a request to overturn the conviction, and a judge set a deadline for the district attorney to reply this week.
Prosecutors, however, have asked Superior Court Judge Michael Cowell for a three-month extension to gather FBI documents.
At Thursday's hearing, the two sides are expected to take up the request.
FBI spokeswoman Kiara Andrich refused to comment on allegations of an FBI frame-up of Pratt. And Deputy District Attorney Brentford J. Ferreira, who is reviewing the case, said, "We believe he had a fair trial."
While there's disagreement on the fairness of Pratt's trial, there's no dispute the case is deeply rooted in the political turbulence of the late 1960s.
In 1968, Pratt, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was attending University of California at Los Angeles when he joined the Black Panthers. He was quickly promoted in the party hierarchy after two leaders were killed by a rival organization. That promotion, according to McCloskey, led to a rivalry with fellow member Julius Butler.
It was Butler a few years later who became the prosecution's key witness against Pratt.
The Black Panthers, clad in their black berets and leather jackets, openly armed themselves and engaged in shootouts with police, leading FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to call the group the most dangerous threat to national security.
Pratt himself became a target of the FBI's COINTELPRO, aimed at undermining radicals, retired FBI agent M. Wesley Swearingen said in his 1995 book "FBI Secrets, An Agent's Expose." And, according to FBI memos, Butler was an FBI informant long before he accused Pratt of the murder, McCloskey said.
"It makes sense: The FBI wanted to get rid of Pratt, and Butler disdained him. So they hooked up to pin this unsolved crime on him," McCloskey said.
Butler, now a retired lawyer, is chairman of the First African Methodist Episcopal church in South Central Los Angeles, one of the city's most influential black congregations. He did not return calls for comment.
Jurors and defense attorneys were never told of any FBI involvement in the case during the trial, and FBI wiretap records that proved Pratt was in Oakland at the time of the murder could never be found, the defense says.
Pratt's case was further damaged because none of the Black Panthers came forward as witnesses.
Huey Newton, who co-founded the Panthers, had ordered members not to help Pratt because of a split within the party between Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. By the time Pratt came to trial, he had been expelled from the Black Panthers for siding with Cleaver.
Since Newton's death in 1989, six Panthers, including former chairman Bobby Seale, have given sworn statements saying Pratt was with them in Oakland.
Jurors also were never told that Olsen's husband, who has since died, identified another man as the killer before fingering Pratt two years later.
That particularly angers Hamilton because it was one of her strongest reasons to convict: "It was hard to doubt the husband of the victim."
She and two other jurors have signed affidavits saying that if they had known about Butler being an FBI informant and Olsen making a prior identification, they would have never voted guilty, the defense says.
"We were victims. We were pawns of the government. We were set up," Hamilton said. "It's so difficult to put into words. It's such an injustice."
"In my heart of hearts, I think he's innocent. There's no question in my mind," she said.
Pratt has been denied parole 16 times. It will be four years before he comes up for review again.
"I will not stop practicing law until Pratt is proven innocent," Cochran said. "It's a matter of integrity. This is my Waterloo."
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[posted March 30, 1996]
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