Justice: Evidence never presented to jury convinced her that ex-Black Panther was framed. Officials haven’t acted on her pleas.

By Edward J. Boyer

There are times when Jeanne Hamilton can think of little else than Elmer (Geronimo) Pratt, the man she helped send to prison.

She is convinced that Pratt, a former leader of the Black Panther Party, is innocent. But he has languished in California prisons for more than 23 years–the first eight in solitary confinement.

Back in 1972, when Hamilton was a 22-year-old college student, she was on the jury that found Pratt guilty of shooting to death a schoolteacher and critically wounding her husband during a 1968 robbery that netted about $18 on a Santa Monica tennis court. Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. was one of Pratt’s defense attorneys.

“Every time I turned on TV this summer and saw Johnnie Cochran, I found myself remembering that I spent a summer with him before,” Hamilton said, sipping coffee at the breakfast table in the comfortable San Gabriel Valley home she shares with her husband, an attorney, and her two teen-age children.

Since serving on the Pratt jury, Hamilton has become an activist seeking a new trial for him. Evidence never presented to the jury–that a key witness had lied, and that the eyewitness had earlier identified someone else–has convinced her that Pratt was framed by authorities in an all-out war against the Panthers.

Pratt has steadfastly insisted that he was in Oakland, 400 miles away, when the murder was committed. And retired FBI agent M. Wesley Swearingen says the bureau knows that because Pratt was under constant surveillance.

Swearingen has long maintained–most recently in his book, “FBI Secrets”–that Pratt was framed as part of the FBI’s infamous Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO)–a covert effort to “neutralize” organizations the bureau called “black hate groups.”

“You could say this all happened 23 years ago, J. Edgar Hoover was in power, we had a different D.A., the whole political climate was different,” Hamilton said. “But what about now? Why won’t they do anything now?”

She has fired off a flurry of letters to California’s Democratic senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, and to Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, only to receive what she sees as one “unresponsive” reply from Boxer.

“It’s infuriating not to be able to get the attention of officials with letters or phone calls,” Hamilton said, a fat file she keeps on the case spread in front of her.

Her frustration billows about her, creating long pauses in her comments.

“I’ve never been in jail,” she said. “I’ve never done anything wrong. I’ve voted in every damn election that comes along. I try to do the right thing and follow the laws, and it’s almost like I’m becoming . . . I get to the point. . . . We were taught when I grew up that there was justice in this life. Now I think that justice is the exception.”

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Deliberations in the Pratt trial began two weeks before her wedding. The jury was sequestered–“an absolutely miserable experience,” she said–and she was one of three panelists who went into deliberations believing Pratt was innocent.

Three days later, she changed her vote. The two other holdouts voted “not guilty” for seven more days before switching.

The accumulation of prosecution evidence helped change her mind, she said. A former Panther, Julius Butler, testified that Pratt had confessed to him. And the murder victim’s husband, Kenneth Olsen, identified Pratt as the man who shot him and his wife, Caroline, 27.

That evidence, along with other key testimony, “appeared to be pretty heavy” at the time, Hamilton said. But revelations since the trial have convinced her otherwise.

Seven years after Pratt’s trial, the FBI released documents showing that Butler, a former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy, had been an FBI informant for at least three years before the trial.

“The FBI information convinced me that Butler had lied,” Hamilton said. “I heard him testify that ‘never in the world’ would he be a snitch.”

Jurors also did not know that Olsen had earlier identified someone other than Pratt as the killer.

“What is really infuriating now as you go back . . . is that you’ve got Butler, who lied, and the husband who had identified someone else as the killer,” Hamilton said.

“I think Kenneth Olsen was the strongest witness in the whole trial,” Hamilton said. But she would never have voted to convict had she known of his earlier identification of another suspect.

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She said she remembers the jury foreman angrily approaching her at the hotel where they were sequestered, reinforcing the importance of Olsen’s identification.

“I can still remember him saying: ‘If someone shot your fiancé, don’t you think you’d remember that face?’ He looked me right in the eye. It’s one of those Kodak moments. I can still see his face. I was very intimidated.”

That dressing-down and what she saw as a major hole in the defense case tipped her toward a guilty verdict. Hamilton said she had been stunned on the last day of testimony by a prosecution rebuttal witness.

The defense had introduced a Polaroid photo supposedly taken in December, 1968, a week after the murder, showing Pratt with a goatee and mustache.

“It was key to the eyewitness identification because the husband {and another witness} had described the killer as clean-shaven,” she said.

But prosecutors brought in a witness from Polaroid who testified that the film had not been manufactured until the following March.

“The defense team never said one word,” Hamilton said. “Why didn’t Johnnie Cochran give us anything?”

Every witness had testified that Pratt always had a goatee and mustache, but the discrepancy concerning the photo undermined their credibility, she said.

Hamilton’s doubts about the verdict have haunted her almost since the day it was handed down.

“I thought it was just me,” she said. “I just thought: ‘You can’t resolve this. This is too definite for you. You can’t take responsibility.’ All these things I questioned about myself.”

But after CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes” contacted her for a 1987 report raising questions about the evidence against Pratt, she said, “All of a sudden there was some validation for all these feelings I had been having.”

Pratt has won support in the past from Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union, from members of Congress and a virtual Who’s Who of local politicians and clergy.

And they have been just as frustrated in their efforts to win a new trial for him as Hamilton has been in hers.

Two years ago, crusading lay minister Jim McCloskey submitted a report to Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti detailing evidence Pratt’s supporters say point to his innocence. The district attorney’s office said it is reviewing that report.

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McCloskey gained national attention in 1992 after winning the release of Clarence Chance and Benny Powell, two Los Angeles men who spent 17 years in prison after they were wrongfully convicted of murdering a sheriff’s deputy.

Hamilton wonders if the O.J. Simpson case has hurt Pratt’s chances for a new trial.

“On the day of the Simpson verdict, I was infuriated because I felt that Garcetti is now never going to do anything with Geronimo,” she said. “All I thought about all day long was Geronimo Pratt.”

She explained that she does not think Garcetti is apt to do anything that could be seen as helping Cochran.

And she fears that Angelenos have grown weary of developments such as the Rodney G. King beating, the trials of the officers involved, the riots, the Simpson case.

“It’s almost like our society has reached a saturation level,” she said. “They don’t want to hear about it anymore. It’s so uncomfortable that the attitude appears to be that if we ignore it, it will go away.”

People who don’t know her simply don’t believe her account of the Pratt case, she said. She can arouse interest by saying she was once on a sequestered jury in a case Cochran handled, she said, “but when I say the guy was framed by the FBI, you kind of see their eyes glaze over.”

When she shows her students at Bishop Amat High School in La Puente videotapes of news reports on the case, they don’t believe it could happen to them, she said.

Given what she sees as all the tainted evidence against Pratt, she cannot help but question whether powerful, unseen political forces are standing in the way of his getting a new trial.

“There’s something there we still don’t know,” she said. “We may never know. But it has just been too long. It just doesn’t make sense.” ◼︎

The former Jeanne Hamilton is now Jeanne Miller. She remained active in efforts to free Geronimo Pratt until his release in 1997. She has since married and has moved to Colorado.