Hidden evidence and a wrongful conviction: The case that haunted Johnnie Cochran

In the eyes of the FBI, he was rarely dangerous man, a murderer who was fed by Vietnam to fight the organization.

“Geronimo” Pratt, the 21 -year -old leader of the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles, said in 1970, a reporter, “We will remove the pigs from the community.”

Pratt was fat, compact and flat -eyed, a Raspy drawer in Louisiana Bayou, who attracted his childhood. Afro -American neighborhoods as an invading army in the hands of the police designed a violent end. “I may have died when I saw me next time.”

When he began to be tried in 1972, he insisted that a white teacher killed the enforcement style-cherryewel during a robbery.

Defense lawyer, a young Johnnie Cochran Jr., initially rejected Pratt’s speech as Paranoia. However, Cochran would later define the case as “twilight, fraud, betrayal and official corruption zone”.

Pratt’s conviction kept him behind bars for 27 years, and the case made Cochran, who made a mistake in the trial that Pratt was innocent and that prosecutors were skillfully exploited by prosecutors. In the war against the perceived destructors, the authorities would have been years before they understood how ruthlessly cheats they had made.

Lawyer Johnnie Cochran would define Pratt’s murder prosecution as “twilight, fraud, betrayal and official corruption zone ..

(Jim Rummen / Pool Photo)

Stuart Hanlon, 76 -year -old, said, Radikal San Francisco Defense Lawyer Stuart Hanlon, who took the objection of Pratt as a law student and dragged for decades, said, “The surface seemed to be a really simple murder case.”

The sacrifice was Caroline Olsen, a 27 -year -old who was with her husband in a Santa Monica tennis court where a pair of armed people approached the demand for the demand for the demand for the sacrifice. The guys ordered the couple to lie down, then started to open fire. Deadly injured; Her husband was shot, but survived. The robbers received $ 18.

The investigation stopped and Pratt was not a suspicious of Julius, Julio, a beauty expert and former police officer until 1970, implied by Julio ”Butler. Butler himself had been a panther and was angry that Pratt rise as the leader of the Los Angeles.

In this series, Christopher Goffard, Los Angeles and the old crimes beyond the celebrities, forgotten, uncertainty, dive into the archives, and the memories of those there again visit.

The state’s star witness butler announced that Pratt had fallen by the beauty shop and went to a “mission ve and then pointed out an article to verify that Santa Monica was confirmed.

Cochran asked Butler if he had an informant. Butler clearly rejected it.

For the defense, Olsen’s widow’s wife pointed to the defendant and said: “This man who killed my wife.” He said.

Cochran opposed the reliability of intercreated witness identity, especially under stress conditions, and put a witness in the Gulf Region during the posture. He also wore Pratt, who was decorated for heroism during two rounds in Vietnam, and showed that Cochran said he said “the soldier despises the soldier”.

At a 1996 press conference by Los Angeles, Cochran and other lawyers, he calls for a new hearing for Pratt.

(Nick UT / Associated Press)

Cochran thought it was a acquired case, but he introduced a terrible backfire. It was a polaroid given to him by Pratt’s brother, who insisted that he had been taken a week after the shoot. Pratt showed Pratt with a beard that contradicts the first definition of the widow’s shooter as a “clean -shaved black man”.

The prosecutors faced a polaroid employee who said that the film was not produced even five months after the crime, and a blow to the reliability of the defense to the jury members of Pratt’s other claims.

It took 10 days to find guilty of first -degree murder. The sentence was 25 years for life. Uz You’re wrong. I didn’t kill that woman, Prat Pratt exploded. “You are racist dogs.”

Pratt spent the next eight years under cell imprisonment. He was served between the prisons and finally allowed marriage visits; His wife gave birth to two children. At a series of unsuccessful conditional evacuation hearing, the panel waited for him to say that he was upset. He insisted that he didn’t do it.

“The last person I killed,” he would say, “He was in Vietnam.”

Pratt Rally’s supporters to release the Los Angeles Courthouse in April 1996 outside the Los Angeles Palace.

(Susan Sterner / Associated Press)

There was a lot that the authorities did not share with Pratt’s defense team. They did not explain that Olsen’s widow was described as another man as a shooter. (The man was in prison at that time and could not do it.)

They did not put forward the scope of the work of star witnesses as informant for law enforcement officers. Based on the FBI documents obtained through the Freedom of Freedom of Information, Pratt’s lawyers brought together a picture of his close participation in dozens of cases with the FBI of Butler’s FBI, Los Angeles Police Department and La County Regional Prosecutor’s Office.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was the most dangerous group of Panthers, the host terrorists with arms stocks and worrying Maoist discourses. His secret Caintelpro program was the spying, telekaplar and sabotage campaign aimed at crushing perceived destructive destructives and preventing the “coalition of militant black nationalist groups”.

“Geronimo was targeted by FBI because he was a natural leader, Han said Hanlon.

Hanlon brought together documents, butler understood that he helped. However, rejecting the appeal after the appeal decided that the courts were not an informant – according to a judge, it is not “a contact and anything else – and decided that Pratt did not deserve a new hearing.

He was still accepted as dangerous. In a conditional evacuation hearing, a prosecutor said, ı If he chose to establish a revolutionary organization after being released from prison, it would be easy to do so, ”he said. “This network has.”

Defense lawyers’ evidence La County Dist. Atty. In 1993, Gil Garcetti presented the injustice that their predecessors imposed sanctions twenty years ago. However, Garcetti’s review lasted for years and the lawyers returned to the courts.

Old La County Mountain. “He was more framed than the person who committed the crime”. Atty. Gil Garcetti said Pratt lately.

(Ken Lubas / Los Angeles Times)

This time the courts held a hearing. Since the La County Supreme Court’s counter was rejected – the original prosecutor was now a LA district judge and a possible witness – the case was transferred to the Orange County Supreme Court. For Pratt’s supporters, this is a chill. What hope was in a conservative district?

But the Judge Everett Dickey surprised them.

“It is clear that this is not a typical situation, Dic Dickey said. “He’s whipping for the solution.”

This time, Pratt’s team was armed with evidence that it was never heard at the original hearing. There was a statement of a retired FBI agent who supported the claim that Pratt was in Oakland during the killing.

They knew that Da’s office was not able to compete for four crimes in exchange for probation during the period when Butler witnessed Pratt.

And recently there was a directory card that listed Butler as informant by one of Garcetti’s researchers in office files. Filed under B; He’s been there from the beginning.

“He had never been delivered to the defense. How could they not reverse it?” Garcetti said in the last interview. “’Yes, we had this document in the files.’

Nevertheless, Garcetti’s prosecutors underestimated the importance of the card. Butler was not an informant, they strongly argued, just a “source”.

At the end of 1996, Cochran finally had a chance to confront Butler. Years had waited. Butler was a lawyer and authorized at the leading Los Angeles Church. He insisted that it was only a “connection” between law enforcement officers and panthers.

Cochran asked him about the definition of informant. He admitted to FBI that Pratt was a sub -machine gun. He said that an informant definition is someone who provides accurate information.

“So under your own definition, do you inform the FBI?” Cochran asked.

“You can say that,” he said.

Pratt rays after being released from Orange County prison in June 1997.

(Kim Kulish / Getty Images)

Dickey concluded that Butler was lying and that prosecutors had evidence that Pratt was acquitted by Pratt’s conviction.

In June 1997, Pratt was released on bail to the cheers of his supporters.

“The biggest moment of my legal career, Cochran said.

Pratt, Morgan City, La. It wasn’t easy to come here.

He said he wanted to rain on the tin roof of his childhood house.

However, Pratt’s legal ordeal was not over. Garcetti objected to Pratt’s innocence, saying he could not find any evidence. In February 1999, he did not stop the case until he became a appeal court with Pratt. The following year, Pratt won 4.5 million dollars in the case of misrepresentation against La and the FBI City. In 1970, he bought a farmhouse in Tanzania’s Imbaseni, where he enjoyed the friendship of Pete O’neal, a former black panther who escaped from the United States.

O’neal died at home in May 2011. Pratt was hospitalized with high blood pressure, which has disturbed him for years, but tears his IVs and went home. He hated it without imprisoning. He was 63 years old.

Mark Rosenbaum, one of the lawyers who helped to appeal Pratt, said, “Always the ‘system works’, but no, the system only produced the right result because Geronimo and the community and a group of lawyers fought the system. The system does not work on its own.” “They took half of their life. And they couldn’t break it.”

Who killed Caroline Olsen? Hanlon believes that the killers are other black panthers – a pair of heroin addicts who are known to feed their habits with an armed robbery. In the 1970s, they died violently, one was engraved on a fence with a gunshot and the other during theft.

In an recent interview, Garcetti, one of the primary antagonists of the defense team for years, said that his views on the case developed. Looking back, he regrets fighting to keep him alive.

Garcetti, “probably more frame than the person who committed the crime,” he said.

He said he had learned more about the US government’s tactics against discontent groups in the 1960s and 70s since he resigned.

“I read the FBI enough to know from top to bottom, I was trying to isolate any quote in the black panther movement-Quote leader, and it would not shock me to find out that people who did not commit a crime away from the scene.”