May 30, 1997|EDWARD J. BOYER | TIMES STAFF WRITER

A judge on Thursday reversed the quarter-century-old murder conviction of former Black Panther Party leader Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, culminating Pratt’s prolonged struggle to win a new trial.

In a sharply worded opinion that was harshly critical of Los Angeles County prosecutors, Santa Ana Superior Court Judge Everett W. Dickey ruled that the district attorney’s office suppressed evidence favorable to Pratt at his 1972 murder trial–evidence the judge said could have led to a different verdict.

The judge’s ruling forces prosecutors to decide–possibly as early as next week–whether to free the 49-year-old Pratt, retry him or appeal Dickey’s ruling. The district attorney’s office Thursday would say only that it was reviewing the ruling, but staffers had acknowledged privately two months ago that they expected Dickey to rule against them.

Pratt’s protestation of innocence has echoed through the last two decades as a bridge to a turbulent era in which law enforcement agencies carried out a war to “neutralize” members of the Black Panthers and other radical organizations.

His case became a cause celebre for a range of supporters, including Amnesty International, elected officials, celebrities and a who’s who of Los Angeles clergy.

Despite that support, four previous efforts by Pratt’s attorneys to win a new trial were unsuccessful. This time, bolstered by new evidence about the key prosecution witness, they won a full hearing on whether Pratt had been unfairly convicted.

Such hearings are nearly impossible to obtain and harder to win, but on Thursday, Dickey ruled that the prosecution had wrongly withheld from defense lawyers evidence involving witness Julius “Julio” Butler and his activities as an informant for law enforcement.

Had Pratt’s lawyers been aware of Butler’s role, they “could have put the whole case in a different light” by more effectively challenging the credibility of the case against Pratt, Dickey ruled. The only witness to the shooting was the murder victim’s husband, who was wounded.

“Failure to timely disclose it undermines confidence in the verdict,” Dickey wrote of the informant’s role.

He ordered that Pratt be released from Mule Creek State Prison in Ione and transferred to the Los Angeles County Jail in preparation for the district attorney’s disposition of the case.

San Francisco attorney Stuart Hanlon, who has volunteered his services to Pratt for 24 years, was left grasping for words by Dickey’s decision.

“It’s too early to put the decision into perspective,” Hanlon said in a telephone interview. “The immediate rush is that we won. The thing that keeps running through my head is that we win in Orange County, the heart of conservatism,” where the case was transferred after all Los Angeles judges were disqualified. “It blows my mind.”

Hanlon said Pratt was overwhelmed when informed of Dickey’s decision, insisting that Hanlon read the judge’s one-paragraph order releasing him from prison line by line.

When Pratt regained his composure, he told Hanlon: “All I want to do is to go home and see my kids and my grandkids.”

Attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., who has represented Pratt since his original trial, called Dickey’s 13-page decision “one of the greatest moments of my life and the greatest moment of my legal career. It represents a 25-year fight for justice, which now is within reach for a man who has suffered for more than half his life for a crime he did not commit.”

Jeanne Hamilton, a juror who helped convict Pratt but who now is convinced of his innocence, was overjoyed by Dickey’s decision.

“Oh, my God, I just can’t believe it, I can’t believe it,” she said.

Lay minister Jim McCloskey, who championed Pratt’s cause, was exultant. “Justice has finally come for a man who has deserved it for 27 long hard years,” McCloskey said from his residence in New Jersey. “It’s fantastic and I can’t wait to be in Los Angeles to see him walk out of those doors a free and vindicated man.”

Dickey’s decision did not deal with whether Pratt was guilty of slaying schoolteacher Caroline Olsen and critically wounding her husband, Kenneth, during a robbery that netted $18 on a Santa Monica tennis court in December 1968. The only question before the judge, an appointee of Gov. Ronald Reagan, was whether Pratt was denied a fair trial.

Pratt has long maintained that he was in Oakland attending Black Panther meetings at the time of the killing.

Pratt’s supporters saw him as a political prisoner who had been framed by the FBI. That view was supported by retired FBI agent M. Wesley Swearingen, who has maintained that agents knew Pratt was in Oakland when Olsen was killed because the bureau had him under surveillance.

Hanlon and Cochran said they will be in Los Angeles Superior Court on Monday seeking Pratt’s release on bail while Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti decides whether to appeal.

“This decision is overwhelming in its attack on the Los Angeles district attorney’s office,” Hanlon said. “The decision attacks what prosecutors allowed to happen at Pratt’s trial.”

Butler, a former Panther and former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, testified that Pratt had confessed the crime to him. Also, Butler denied that he had ever been an informant for law enforcement.

Dickey called that denial “false testimony,” writing that for at least three years before Pratt’s 1972 trial, Butler had been “providing information about the Black Panther Party and individuals associated with it to law enforcement agencies on a confidential basis.”

The judge noted that the district attorney’s records listed Butler as a confidential informant in January 1972, six months before Pratt’s trial.

Butler’s relationships with the FBI, the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles district attorney’s office “were obviously relevant to his credibility as a witness,” and that information should have been provided to Pratt’s defense team, Dickey wrote.

An investigator in the district attorney’s office considered Butler his confidential informant, Dickey wrote. Another district attorney’s investigator gave Butler $200 to buy a gun several months before Pratt’s trial–a violation of state law because Butler was a convicted felon, the judge said.

Law enforcement officers, prosecutors and then-Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard P. Kalustian, who prosecuted Pratt, “were aware that Butler was carrying the weapon without any official sanction, even though it was a violation of state law punishable by up to 15 years in prison.”

Dickey also noted that Butler had turned over a submachine gun to Los Angeles police, and that he had been given probation with no jail time after pleading no contest to four felonies.

None of that information was turned over to Pratt’s defense.

Citing a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Dickey wrote: “Even without request from the defendant, either intentional or negligent suppression by the prosecution of substantial material evidence favorable to the accused denies the accused of a fair trial and requires reversal.”

Dickey’s decision left the credibility of Butler–clearly the most important prosecution witness at Pratt’s trial–in shreds.

Butler first tied Pratt to what became known as the “tennis court murder,” and he later tied Pratt to a weapon that could have been used in the crime.

Should Garcetti decide to retry the case, prosecutors will face a daunting task in trying to rehabilitate Butler as a witness.

Dickey also questioned the reliability of trial testimony by two eyewitnesses: Kenneth Olsen, who identified Pratt as the man who shot him and his wife, and the owner of a nearby hobby shop, who identified Pratt as one of two suspicious men who had come into the shop shortly before the slaying.

Noting that Kenneth Olsen had identified Pratt more than two years after the crime, Dickey wrote: “The possible unreliability of such cross-racial identifications of strangers based on a brief period of observation under stressful conditions has become so well known in the years since [Pratt’s] trial that judges now almost always specially instruct a jury on the subject.”

Neither Pratt’s lawyers nor the jurors were aware that Kenneth Olsen had earlier identified another suspect as the killer. ◼︎

Times staff writers Tim Rutten, Greg Krikorian and Ted Rohrlich contributed to this story.