D.A. to Appeal Reversal of Pratt’s Conviction

Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti said Friday he will appeal a judge’s decision overturning the 25-year-old murder conviction of Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, but will not oppose releasing the former Black Panther Party leader on bail.

That decision means that as early as Tuesday, Pratt could walk out of jail for the first time in 27 years. Orange County Superior Court Judge Everett W. Dickey has scheduled a bail hearing at 10 a.m. Tuesday in Santa Ana Superior Court.

Declining to say on what grounds he would base his appeal, Garcetti said Pratt’s conviction has been upheld through many appellate proceedings. “Despite this history,” he said, “over the years some have questioned the validity of Mr. Pratt’s conviction.”

He said his office conducted an “exhaustive” review of the case and did not discover any new evidence pointing to Pratt’s innocence.

Attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., one of Pratt’s lawyers, called Garcetti’s decision to appeal “sickening” and “ridiculous.”

“They can’t retry this case for a lot of reasons because of their own impropriety,” Cochran said. “So why appeal it? It’s an act of folly. Once again Mr. Garcetti has succumbed to people in his own office who are from a different era--maybe the Pleistocene era.”

San Francisco attorney Stuart Hanlon, who also represents Pratt, issued a challenge to Garcetti.

“If you’re so convinced Mr. Pratt is guilty, then you get in there yourself and retry the case,” Hanlon said. “Let’s forget about the appeal. Let’s go to trial in 60 days.”

At a news conference Friday, Garcetti hinted that he would not attempt to retry the case if his appeal is unsuccessful.

“I am very well aware that any case that is nearly 30 years old has exceedingly difficult problems built in,” Garcetti said. “Add the fact that the accused has already spent approximately 27 years in prison and that makes it obviously even more difficult.”

Asked why he would agree to bail for Pratt if he truly believes he is a murderer, Garcetti said bail was “the appropriate thing to do. [Pratt] has been in custody 27 years, [and] substantial issues have been raised.”

Pratt was convicted of shooting Los Angeles schoolteacher Caroline Olsen to death and critically wounded her husband during a 1968 robbery on a Santa Monica tennis court.

Sensitive negotiations aimed at giving Garcetti a face-saving way out of the Pratt case have been underway since Dickey reversed Pratt’s conviction May 29, according to several sources who asked not to be identified.

Moreover, a broad cross-section of Los Angeles’ elected and civic leaders has contacted Garcetti, advising him to drop the Pratt case, those sources said. The stumbling block to those negotiations, they said, are members of Garcetti’s staff who believe Pratt is guilty although they privately concede that they could not win a conviction today with the evidence presented at Pratt’s 1972 trial.

In reversing Pratt’s conviction, Dickey ruled that prosecutors had suppressed “substantial material evidence” favorable to Pratt.

Dickey said Butler, a former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy and a rival of Pratt in the Panthers, lied on the witness stand when he testified that he was not a law enforcement informant.

Butler had provided information to various law enforcement agencies--including the FBI and Los Angeles police--for three years before Pratt’s trial, and a retired LAPD captain said Butler had acted as an agent provocateur.

Butler was the witness who first told law enforcement that Pratt had shot Olsen and that Pratt had confessed the crime to him, an allegation Pratt has always denied.

Pratt has steadfastly maintained his innocence, saying he was in Oakland attending a Black Panther Party meeting when the crime occurred. He said FBI agents knew he was in Oakland because the bureau had him under surveillance, an assertion supported by retired FBI Agent M. Wesley Swearingen.

Neither Pratt’s attorneys nor the jury that convicted him knew Butler was listed in the district attorney’s files of confidential informants. Nor did they know that someone in the district attorney’s office had given him $200 to buy a gun even though Butler was a convicted felon and prohibited by law from carrying a gun.

Garcetti said he was proud of the fact that his office discovered that Butler was listed in his office’s confidential informant files and turned that information over to the defense.

That new evidence formed the basis for Dickey’s ruling overturning Pratt’s conviction, the district attorney said.

Garcetti said he wanted to make it clear that “prosecutors who have handled this case over the years--from the trial attorneys to the appellate lawyers--acted appropriately and ethically in this case.”

To say that “is garbage,” Hanlon said. “That is a lie, and everybody knows it but him.”

Cochran said Pratt’s lawyers were told Butler was listed as a district attorney’s office confidential informant only after Pratt filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus seeking to have his conviction overturned.

“The only ones in the district attorney’s office who deserve any credit are [investigators] Brian Hale and Steve De Prima,” Cochran said. Hale found the confidential informant card on Butler, and De Prima elicited a comment from Butler that someone in the district attorney’s office had given him $200 to buy a gun.

“The fact is that they had a confidential informant card on Butler for 24 years and did not tell anybody,” Cochran said. “The fact is that Deputy Dist. Attys. Mike Carroll and Richard Kalustian (Pratt’s prosecutor) knew this man was given $200 to buy a gun and carry it in violation of the law. He could have gotten 15 years in prison for carrying that gun, and they didn’t tell anybody.”