‘Deceit, dishonesty, betrayal': The wrongful conviction that haunted Johnnie Cochran

Los Angeles Times

5 hours ago

He was an uncommonly dangerous man, in the FBI's eyes, a combat-toughened killer who had returned from Vietnam to wage war on the Establishment.
'We are going to drive the pigs out of the community,' Elmer 'Geronimo' Pratt, the 21-year-old leader of the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles, told a reporter in 1970.
Pratt was stout, compact and level-eyed, with a raspy drawl bespeaking his childhood on the Louisiana bayou. He envisioned a violent end at the hands of police, whom he cast as an occupying army in African American neighborhoods. 'The next time you see me, I might be dead.'
When he went on trial in 1972 — on charges he murdered a white schoolteacher, execution-style, during a robbery — he insisted he was being framed.
His defense attorney, a young Johnnie Cochran Jr., initially dismissed Pratt's talk as paranoia. But Cochran would later describe the case as 'a twilight zone of deceit, dishonesty, betrayal and official corruption.'
Pratt's conviction kept him behind bars for 27 years, and the case haunted Cochran, who believed Pratt was innocent and who had made a mistake at trial that prosecutors skillfully exploited. In the authorities' war against perceived subversives, it would be years before it became clear how brazenly they had cheated.
'It looked on the surface like a really straightforward murder case,' said Stuart Hanlon, now 76, the radical San Francisco defense attorney who took up Pratt's appeal as a law student and pursued it doggedly for decades.
The victim was Caroline Olsen, 27, who was with her husband on a Santa Monica tennis court in December 1968 when a pair of gunmen approached demanding money. The men ordered the couple to lie face down, then began opening fire. She was fatally wounded; her husband was struck but survived. The robbers got $18.
The investigation stalled, and Pratt was not a suspect until 1970, when Julius 'Julio' Butler, a beautician and former police officer, implicated him. Butler had been a Panther himself, and had resented Pratt's elevation as Los Angeles leader.
The state's star witness, Butler testified that Pratt had dropped by his beauty shop and announced he was going on a 'mission' and later pointed to an article about the Santa Monica shooting to confirm it was his doing.
Cochran asked Butler if he had ever been a police informant. Butler flatly denied it.
Devastatingly for the defense, Olsen's widower pointed to the defendant and said: 'That's the man who murdered my wife.'
Cochran argued against the reliability of cross-racial witness identification, particularly under conditions of stress, and put on the stand a witness who had seen Pratt in the Bay Area around the time of the killing. He also put on Pratt, who had been decorated for heroism during two tours in Vietnam with the Army, and who showed what Cochran called a 'soldier's contempt' for whomever shot the helpless Olsen in the back.
Cochran thought it was a winnable case, but he introduced an exhibit that backfired terribly. It was a Polaroid, given to him by Pratt's brother, who insisted it had been taken a week after the shooting. It showed Pratt with a beard, which contradicted the widower's initial description of the shooter as 'a clean-shaven black man.'
Prosecutors countered with a Polaroid employee who said the film had not even been manufactured until five months after the crime, a blow to the defense's credibility that left jurors doubting Pratt's other claims.
It took jurors 10 days to find him guilty of first-degree murder. The sentence was 25 years to life. 'You're wrong. I didn't kill that woman,' Pratt erupted. 'You racist dogs.'
Pratt spent the next eight years in solitary confinement. He was shuttled among prisons, and eventually allowed conjugal visits; his wife gave birth to two children. At a series of unsuccessful parole hearings, the panel waited for him to say he was sorry. He insisted he hadn't done it.
'The last person I killed,' he would say, 'was in Vietnam.'
There was much the authorities had not shared with Pratt's defense team. They did not reveal that Olsen's widower had previously identified another man as the shooter. (The man had been in jail at the time and could not have done it.)
Nor did they reveal the scope of the star witness' work as an informant for law enforcement officials. Based on FBI documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Pratt's lawyers pieced together a picture of Butler's intimate involvement with the FBI, the Los Angeles Police Department and the L.A. County district attorney's office in dozens of cases.
To FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the Panthers had been the most dangerous group in the country, homegrown terrorists with stockpiles of weapons and alarming Maoist rhetoric. His secret COINTELPRO program was a campaign of spying, wiretaps and sabotage aimed at crushing perceived subversives and thwarting 'the coalition of militant black nationalist groups.'
'Geronimo was targeted by the FBI because he was a natural leader,' Hanlon said.
As Hanlon pieced together documents, it became clear that Butler had been helping. Rejecting appeal after appeal, however, courts ruled that Butler had not been an informant — he had been 'a contact and nothing more,' according to one judge — and that Pratt did not deserve a new trial.
He was still considered dangerous. 'If he chooses to set up a revolutionary organization upon his release from prison, it would certainly be easy for him to do so,' a prosecutor said at one parole hearing. 'He does have this network out there.'
When defense lawyers brought their evidence to then-L.A. County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti in 1993, they presented it as a chance to undo the injustice his predecessors had sanctioned two decades earlier. But Garcetti's review dragged on for years, and the attorneys turned again to the courts.
This time, the courts granted a hearing. Because the L.A. County Superior Court bench was recused — the original prosecutor was now an L.A. County judge and a probable witness — the case was transferred to Orange County Superior Court. For Pratt's supporters, this provoked a chill. What hope did they have in a staunchly conservative county?
But Judge Everett Dickey surprised them.
'It's clear that this is not a typical case,' Dickey said. 'It cries out for resolution.'
This time, Pratt's team was armed with evidence never heard at the original trial. They had the testimony of a retired FBI agent who supported Pratt's claim that he had been in Oakland during the killing.
They knew that the D.A.'s office had allowed Butler to plead no contest to four felonies in exchange for probation, around the time he testified against Pratt.
And they had an index card, recently discovered by one of Garcetti's investigators in the office files, that listed Butler as a D.A. informant. It was filed under B; it had been there all along.
'It had never been turned over to the defense. How could they have not turned this over?' Garcetti said in a recent interview. 'I couldn't find anyone who would fess up to the fact that, 'Yeah, we had that document in the files.''
Still, Garcetti's prosecutors downplayed the card's importance. Butler was not an informant, they argued vehemently, but merely a 'source.'
In late 1996, Cochran finally got a chance to confront Butler. He had waited years. Butler had become an attorney and an official at a prominent Los Angeles church. He insisted he had been merely a 'liaison' between law enforcement and the Panthers.
Cochran asked him his definition of informant. He admitted he had told the FBI that Pratt had a submachine gun. He said his definition of an informant was someone who supplied accurate information.
'So under your own definition, you were informing to the FBI?' Cochran asked.
'You could say that,' Butler said.
Dickey threw out Pratt's conviction, concluding that Butler had lied and that prosecutors had hidden evidence that could have led to Pratt's acquittal.
Pratt was released on bail in June 1997, to the cheers of his supporters.
'The greatest moment of my legal career,' Cochran called it.
Pratt flew home to Morgan City, La., 'to see my mama and my homefolks,' he said. 'It wasn't easy getting here.'
He said he wanted to hear rain on the tin roof of his childhood home.
Pratt's legal ordeal was not over, however. Garcetti appealed, saying he had found no evidence pointing to Pratt's innocence. He did not drop the case until an appeals court sided with Pratt in February 1999. The following year, Pratt won $4.5 million in a false-imprisonment lawsuit against the city of L.A. and the FBI. He bought a farmhouse in Imbaseni, Tanzania, where he enjoyed the companionship of Pete O'Neal, a former Black Panther who had fled the U.S. in 1970.
O'Neal found him dead at home in May 2011. Pratt had been hospitalized with high blood pressure, a condition that had plagued him for years, but had torn out his IVs and gone home. He hated confinement. He was 63.
'We always say, 'The system works,' but no, the system only produced the right result because Geronimo and the community and a band of lawyers fought the system. The system doesn't work by itself,' said Mark Rosenbaum, one of the lawyers who helped with Pratt's appeal. 'They took away half of his life. And they couldn't break him.'
So, who killed Caroline Olsen? Hanlon believes the killers were other Black Panthers — a pair of heroin addicts known to feed their habit with armed robbery. They died violently in the 1970s, one by gunfire, the other impaled on a fence during a burglary.
In a recent interview, Garcetti, one of the defense team's primary antagonists for years, said that his views on the case have evolved. In retrospect, he regrets fighting to keep it alive.
'He was more likely framed than he was the person who actually committed the crime,' Garcetti said.
Since leaving office, he said, he has learned more about the U.S. government's tactics against disfavored groups in the 1960s and '70s.
'I have read enough to know the FBI, from the top down, were working to isolate any quote-unquote leader in the Black Panther movement, and it wouldn't shock me to learn that they went after people who really hadn't committed a crime that they were bent on removing from the scene.'