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The William Tyree story is occasionally shown
on American Justice on A&E. After you read this you'll look
at his story differently. It has been suggested that the same
fate will befall him as did Elmer
"Geronimo" Pratt,
a Black Panther who did 27 years for a murder he did not commit
but rather than grant him a new trial, which would bring to light
embarrassing facts, they simply released him.
J.
J. Harper | LAPD
| Hurricane Carter | Dudley
George inquiry | Previous
from inquiry | Neil
Stonechild | Previous
reports | Geronimo Pratt: Black
Panther freed after 27 years for a conviction based on FBI informant
| The murder of Fred Hampton
| John Graham: All the evidence
says he did not kill Anna Mae Aquash
but U.S. is using lies to extradite him | 2004: Tasering
Randy Fryingpan | 2005: Shooting
Matthew Dumas |
Elmer "Geronimo"
Pratt
Good-bye,
Johnny Cochran
After Nearly 30 Years, a Black
Panther Case Challenges Los Angeles
By Don Terry, New York Times,
20 July 1997
 LOS ANGELES -- After 10 days of deliberations,
the jury said guilty and the convicted man jumped to his feet.
"You're wrong," he shouted, that summer day in 1972.
"I didn't kill that woman."
He told his lawyer he had been
framed for the murder by the authorities and by a police "snitch"
called Julio, all because he dared to stand up for his people
as the leader of the Black Panther Party in Southern California.
The lawyer, Johnnie Cochran,
thought his 24-year-old client, a Vietnam War hero, was being
paranoid. After all, this was the United States of America.
"I thought it was going
to be fair," Cochran said recently of the trial. "I
was naive."
The sentence was life. A quarter
of a century later, the young man is long lost. He has been replaced
by a bald 49-year-old who was recently walking through the Los
Angeles International Airport, on his way to his hometown to
hug his mother, when a woman rushed up to him, waving a pen.
She wanted his autograph.
"I'm not a movie star,"
the man protested. "I'm a revolutionary."
On June 10, after spending
nearly 30 years behind bars for the murder he has always insisted
he did not commit, Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt was released
on bail, ending, for the moment, a long and determined struggle
by many people to win his freedom.
Pratt's conviction in the murder,
that of a teacher, had just been reversed by a judge, who said
the prosecution had suppressed evidence that might have kept
him from being convicted.
Pratt could still face a new
trial, even though the husband of the victim who identified Pratt
has died and Julius "Julio" Butler, the man who said
Pratt had confessed to the killing, was labeled by the judge
who overturned the conviction as a liar and a government informer
with a grudge against Pratt.
But whatever the ultimate outcome,
the case has revived memories of a period that some in California
and the nation might prefer to forget, a time of bitterness and
bloodshed as an undeclared war raged between the Black Panther
Party and the police.
Now, today's generation of
politicians, particularly Los Angeles County District Attorney
Gil Garcetti, are being forced to grapple with 25-year-old issues.
The events have made Pratt a sudden celebrity and disgraced Butler,
who in the ensuing years had risen to become a lawyer and a lay
leader of one of Los Angeles' most influential black churches.
And, the case has reunited
two of the biggest names -- Cochran and Garcetti -- from the
case of O.J. Simpson. For Garcetti, the Pratt case presents new
pressures and a new set of decisions to make, decisions shrouded
in questions of justice, politics and race.
Garcetti's office, which says
it is convinced that Pratt is guilty, is appealing the reversal.
If the appeal fails, he may seek a new trial.
There is circumstantial evidence:
Pratt's car was used in the robbery and a gun to which he and
many other Panther Party members had access was identified by
the prosecution as the murder weapon. But few legal experts familiar
with the case expect the district attorney can prevail.
"Too many questions have
been raised now," said Laurie L. Levenson, associate dean
of the Loyola University Law School in Los Angeles. "But
it's very difficult for the DA to drop this case because Garcetti
and people working for him honestly believe that Geronimo Pratt
is a murderer, and I think they are a bit stunned about there
being unethical behavior in the first trial."
H. Eric Schockman, professor
of political science at the University of Southern California,
said: "Garcetti would be far diminished in the eyes of the
political elite of this state by giving up on this cause. His
ambition in this is more political than it is of a legal base."
Several prominent residents
have urged Garcetti to drop the matter. "Even if Geronimo
Pratt had committed the crime, which he did not, he's already
served 27 years in prison," said Danny Bakewell, chairman
of the Brotherhood Crusade, a black advocacy group. "Garcetti
should be man enough to say, 'Enough is enough.' "
The Origin: U.S. Warrior
Turns To Domestic Ills
Unlike the Simpson case of
murder and celebrity, the Pratt case, to his supporters, has
been about murder and politics, democracy and dissent. Pratt
and his supporters have always contended that it was his politics
and not his deeds that put him in some of the toughest prisons
in the state for so long.
"The Geronimo Pratt case,"
said John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League, "is
one of the most compelling and painful examples of a political
assassination on an African-American activist."
Pratt arrived in Los Angeles
from his native Louisiana in 1968, a decorated veteran with two
tours of duty in Vietnam, having left the Army as a sergeant.
It was a time when the Black
Panther Party, whose members never numbered more than several
thousand around the country, was at its height. The group mixed
black nationalism and socialism, shotguns and free breakfast
programs for children, medical clinics, free schools, law books
and revolutionary rhetoric about power coming from the barrel
of a gun. Members included ex-convicts, former gang members and
college students.
The Panthers were also near
the top of the long list of enemies meticulously maintained by
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The director said the group was
a threat to national security.
By 1969, Pratt, admired for
charisma and warrior spirit, which earned him his nickname from
fellow party members, had become the leader of the Southern California
chapter of the Black Panther Party. He had also become a major
concern of the bureau's counterintelligence program, a campaign
of domestic spying, psychological warfare and dirty tricks known
as Cointelpro.
The program dogged the lives
of a wide cross section of American citizens, from actress Jean
Seberg to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., from 1956 to 1971.
In June 1970, the FBI sent
a report on Pratt, along with his picture, to FBI offices in
New York, New Haven, Atlanta, Chicago, Sacramento, Calif., San
Diego and San Francisco, "in view of the position held by
captioned individual in the Black Panther Party."
The report went on to say "that
constant consideration is given to the possibility of utilization
of counterintelligence measures with efforts being directed toward
neutralizing Pratt as an effective BPP functionary."
Pratt's lawyers assert that
the bureau's interest in Pratt led to his being charged with
the killing of the teacher, Caroline Olsen, in a robbery in Santa
Monica, Calif.
Two examples of the conflict
between law-enforcement authorities and the Black Panthers occurred
in December 1969. In Chicago, using a floor plan supplied by
a government informer, police raided an apartment and killed
two Black Panther leaders, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.
Four days later, in Los Angeles,
several Black Panthers embarrassed the police by holding off
dozens of officers and the department's SWAT team in a four-hour
shootout at the group's headquarters. Pratt, who was not in the
building, had been responsible for fortifying it. Three officers
and six Panthers were wounded.
The Slaying: $18 Didn't
Satisfy Two Holdup Men
Pratt had been in Los Angeles
a couple of months when Mrs. Olsen and her husband, Kenneth,
also a teacher, walked onto a tennis court in Santa Monica's
Lincoln Park. It was shortly after 8 p.m. on Dec. 18, 1968.
Mr. Olsen, 31, put some coins
into a meter box to turn on the court lights. Then he said he
noticed two young black men with guns striding toward him.
Police said the men took all
of Mrs. Olsen's money from her purse, $18.
"This ain't enough,"
one said, according to police, and ordered the couple to "lie
down and pray."
Soon, the bullets started flying,
hitting Mr. Olsen five times and his wife twice. A witness told
police that the two men had fled in a red-and-white convertible.
Mr. Olsen recovered from his
wounds. Mrs. Olsen, 27, died 11 days later. The couple had a
7-year-old daughter, Lisa, who said recently: "It has not
been easy for me. This case has never been quiet, from age 7
to 36. It keeps dragging me back."
The Case: A Secretive Letter,
An Indictment
There were no indictments in
the slaying until two years later, after the authorities got
their hands on a letter Butler said he had written Aug. 10, 1969.
At that time, he had just been expelled from the Panthers by
Pratt, who suspected him of being a police informer.
"Of all the people in
the Black Panther Party," said Roland Freeman, a former
party member, "Geronimo was the most effective. Julio wanted
to be the leader, but the rank and file wanted Geronimo."
Butler, who at 36 was much
older than the majority of the party members and had been wounded
as a marine in Korea, said he had written the letter because
he feared for his life from the Panthers. The letter, he said
at the time, was his insurance policy, and he wrote on the envelope
that it should be opened only "in the event of my death."
In the nine-page letter, Butler
told of threats against him by party members, and on the eighth
page he wrote that Pratt had bragged to him that he had committed
the tennis court murder.
Supposedly for safekeeping,
Butler gave the letter to a friend, police Sgt. DuWayne Rice.
Moments after Butler handed him the letter on a street corner,
Rice said, two FBI agents ran up to him and demanded the letter,
saying it was evidence.
Rice, now retired, refused
to hand it over. The agents went to Rice's superiors, who he
said forced him to surrender the letter to police department
officials months later. When Rice said he asked the agents how
they had known about the letter, they said that Butler had told
them about it.
In October 1970, police unsealed
Butler's letter. Two months after that, Pratt was indicted in
the murder of Mrs. Olsen.
The Trial: Vital Information
Was Suppressed
Pratt has always contended
that he was in Oakland, Calif., attending a Panther Party meeting
at the home of David Hilliard, the group's chief of staff, when
the murder took place.
Pratt said he had made several
telephone calls to Los Angeles, calls that should have been noted
in FBI files, his lawyers said, because the bureau had tapped
the party's headquarters on Central Avenue here. But no such
logs of telephone taps have been found.
A retired bureau agent who
worked in the FBI's office in this period, M. Wesley Swearingen,
said that in his 25 years with the agency he had never heard
of surveillance logs being misplaced.
Since his retirement from the
bureau a few years ago, Swearingen has been saying of Pratt,
"He was framed." Swearingen has given sworn statements
on his view to Pratt's lawyers.
At the time of the trial, neither
the defense nor the jury knew that Butler was an informer for
the authorities, said Judge Everett W. Dickey of the California
Superior Court in Orange County, who overturned the verdict.
The information could have changed the course of the trial, Dickey
ruled.
While Olsen identified Pratt
as one of the gunmen, neither the defense nor the jury knew that
Olsen had earlier identified another man as the killer of his
wife, even though the man had been in jail at the time of the
crime. Olsen died of natural causes in 1980.
The getaway car used in the
killing had belonged to Pratt, but it was also used by more than
two dozen other Panthers and hangers-on, including Butler.
The prosecution said a .45-caliber
pistol that it identified as the murder weapon was recovered
from a house in a police raid in early 1969 in which 17 Panther
members, including Pratt and Butler, were rounded up. Pratt,
who was not inside the house, was not armed when he was arrested.
The police also could not match
the gun to the bullets that had killed Mrs. Olsen. Butler testified
that Pratt had also confessed to having changed the gun barrel.
Jeanne Rook Hamilton, who was
22 when she was selected to sit on the Pratt jury, said recently:
"We tried to be hung two times, but the judge said to go
back and deliberate some more. But if we had known about Butler's
background, there's no way Pratt would have been convicted. I
never really liked Butler. He always reminded me of a used car
salesman. He was slick."
The Missing Evidence:
Discovering File, Influencing a Judge
Butler, who became a lawyer
and a pillar of one of the city's most influential black churches,
the First African Methodist Episcopal, has declined to discuss
the case. He has always maintained that he was not an informer,
even though FBI records show he had been, from 1969 to 1972.
Then, in an internal review
of the case in the early 1990s, the Los Angeles district attorney's
office found in its own records a card with Butler's name on
it and turned the card over to the defense.
The date on the card showed
that it had been in the files since six months before Pratt's
trial in 1972. It proved to be the missing piece Pratt needed
to go home for the first time since he was arrested in 1970.
Four previous attempts by Pratt to win a new trial had been rejected.
He had been turned down for parole 16 times.
"Except for the card,"
said David L. Bernstein, a defense investigator, who has worked
on the case since 1979 without fee, "we had 90 percent of
the evidence way back in 1980. I was sure Geronimo was going
home then. This time around, I didn't have much hope."
There appeared to be good reason
for the pessimism. Dickey, who had been assigned the case, was
a conservative Republican in conservative Orange County who had
been named to the bench in 1970 by Gov. Ronald Reagan.
"That's another irony
of Geronimo's case," said Stuart Hanlon, who has represented
Pratt without charge for most of the last 25 years. "We
have been in front of many so- called liberal judges who were
afraid to act. Judge Dickey is a conservative man, but a fair
judge. He obeyed the law and that's unusual in such a politicized
case."
Dickey wrote, "It is the
court's conclusion that this was not a strong case for the prosecution
without the testimony of Butler, and certainly not an overwhelming
case in any event."
Hours after Pratt was released,
Butler resigned from the board of his church.
The Future: Cementing
Ties In Legal Quandary
Pratt says he would welcome
a new trial.
"But I shouldn't be the
defendant," he said in a recent interview. "The government
should be."
Pratt said a new trial would
open the coffin lid on the corpse of Cointelpro and the harm
it had caused.
Pratt considers himself to
have been a political prisoner, and at almost every opportunity,
he mentions the names of other inmates he says are victims of
politics, including Leonard Peltier, the American Indian advocate,
and Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Philadelphia radio journalist and
Black Panther.
"I haven't forgotten my
brothers just because I'm out," Pratt said. "I'm not
going to lie to you, prison bent my back a little, but it didn't
bend my principles."
Pratt said he had never had
much faith in the American justice system being fair to a black
radical. But he still believed that sooner or later he would
be released from prison, he said, because "I knew truth
would prevail."
His wife, Ashaki, whom he married
in prison in 1976, said, "We just didn't think it would
take this long."
A few years after they were
married, the Pratts had a daughter, Shona, conceived on a conjugal
visit.
The couple said they talked
about Pratt getting out of prison in time to watch Shona take
her first steps.
Shona, 18, recently gave birth
to a baby girl, and Mrs. Pratt said, "We're so thankful
that he got out in time to watch his granddaughter start walking."
Pratt was also able to return
to his home town of Morgan City, La., and see his 93-year-old
mother, Eunice.
And in the Oakland Bay area
where the Pratts live, he was able to watch his son, Hiroji,
14, stride across a stage and graduate from eighth grade. Hiroji
wore a suit that had belonged to Pratt's godson, the slain rapper
Tupac Shakur. The rapper died on Pratt's 49th birthday, his 25th
in prison.
"What causes me a lot
of pain," Pratt said, "is knowing that if I had gotten
out 15 or even 10 years ago, I could have done so much for my
kids. Now, that they're grown and Tupac is dead. You can't catch
up, You can't ever get those years back."
Copyright 1997 The New York
Times Company
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Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd.