The evening Huey and I talked about Geronimo, he explained to me that Pratt, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was also psychotic (the word he used); he had not only committed the Santa Monica murder but actually enjoyed violence for its own sake. Huey attributed Pratt’s aberrant behavior to his war experience, although he had not known Pratt prior to his military discharge. And that was the way it remained for me for twenty-five years, as I was discovering that Huey himself was a cold-blooded killer and the Panthers a political gang that had committed many robberies, arsons and murders. By the time Johnnie Cochran brought Pratt’s case before the general public, I was almost ready myself to give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps some other Panther had killed Caroline Olsen and used Pratt’s car to commit the crime, as his supporters maintained. Perhaps the murder weapon, a distinctive .45 caliber model used in the military and identified by several witnesses as belonging to Pratt, had actually belonged to someone else, as he maintained.
But there was a detail from that conversation with Huey that I could never forget and yet never quite believe either. Pratt was so crazy, Huey told me, that “he couldn’t get an erection unless he was holding a knife in his hand.” This detail would surface in the aftermath of Pratt’s release last June by Orange County Superior Court Judge Everett Dickey. Dickey had agreed with Cochran that the prosecution had wrongfully concealed from the original jury the information that their key witness, a former Panther named Julius Butler, had acted as a police and FBI informant. It was Butler who had identified the .45 as Geronimo’s weapon and—even more damning—had claimed that Pratt boasted to him that he had killed Caroline Olsen. It was Butler—and the adroit use Cochran made of him—that led Pratt to be granted a new trial and be hailed by Cochran and a compliant press as a hero and a victim of injustice.
In the tapestry of Johnnie Cochran’s political career, the case of Geronimo Pratt forms a central thread. A young Johnnie Cochran, just setting out on his law career, had been Pratt’s counsel in the original trial. By his own account, it was the Pratt case that radicalized him, persuading him that America’s criminal justice system was unfair to black men. It showed him, too, that his failure to play the race card had led to the conviction of his client. He resolved never to make this mistake again. When decades later Cochran took on the legal battle that made him famous, he told O.J. Simpson, “I’m not going to let happen to you what happened to Geronimo Pratt.” After getting Simpson off, he recalled the solemn promise he had made to the imprisoned Pratt: that he would never rest “until you are free.”
As in the Simpson case, the indictment of law enforcement as a racist conspiracy was the heart of the Cochran appeal that eventually freed Geronimo Pratt. Of course, the public climate had already been so turned against law enforcement by the racial left that all Cochran had to show was that Julius Butler, the prosecution’s chief witness, had contacts with the police prior to the trial in order to taint the verdict. It was this use of the race card, along with that odd comment Huey had made to me over twenty years earlier, which led me to inquire into the decision to give Geronimo Pratt a new trial and free him.
To understand the flimsy construction of the argument that prompted Judge Dickey’s decision, one need only look at the court’s lengthy rejection of an almost identical appeal Pratt’s lawyers made in 1980. At that time, Pratt’s petition was supported by a blue-ribbon amici curiae list which included Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Congressman Pete McCloskey, San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, the ACLU, the president of the California Democratic Council, and the chair of the Coalition to Free Geronimo Pratt. The central claim made by Pratt’s defenders had not changed in twenty years:
A totally innocent man has languished in [prison] since mid-1972. . . . He was sent there as the result of a case which was deliberately contrived by agents of our state and federal governments. . . . [His] conviction was the result of a joint effort by state and federal governments to neutralize and discredit him because of his membership in the militant Black Panther Party . . .11
In Re Pratt, Docket No. 37534, Court of Appeals of California, Second District, Division One, Leagle, December 3, 1980, http://www.leagle.com/decision/1980907112CalApp3d795_1840.
This time the press bought the argument whole. But the facts, summarized in the earlier opinion from the court record, reveal this argument to be fiction. All the information that follows was easily available to reporters, but none of it made its way into the reams of newsprint that described the second trial and celebrated Pratt’s release.
In the judicial opinion that released Pratt, his accuser Julius Butler is dismissed as a police informer. But it was not until August 10, 1969, about seven months and three weeks after the murder of Caroline Olsen, and more than a month after he had been expelled from the Black Panther Party, that Julius Butler made his first voluntary contact with any law enforcement official. He then met with Sergeant Duwayne Rice of the Los Angeles Police Department and gave him a sealed envelope. The envelope was addressed to Rice and had the words “Only to be opened in the event of my death” printed on the outside. Butler did not reveal the contents of the envelope to Rice. The envelope was then put in a locked safe where it remained for 14 months after this meeting, while the murderer was on the loose.
When Butler’s envelope was finally opened, 14 months after his meeting with Rice and 22 months after the murder, the letter inside was for the first time read by police. It described a factional struggle in the Black Panther Party and said that the writer was fearful because of threats on his life made by Geronimo Pratt and other Panther leaders, including Roger Lewis, whose nickname was “Blue.” The letter offered “the following Reason I feel the Death threat may be carried out”—namely that Geronimo and the other Panthers “were Responsible for Acts of murder they carelessly Bragged about”:
No. 1: Geronimo for the Killing of a White School Teacher and the wounding of Her Husband on a Tennis Court in the City of Santa Monica some time during the year of 1968.
No. 2: Geronimo and Blue being Responsible for the Killing of Capt. Franco [a Panther leader] in January 1969 and constantly stating as a threat to me that I was just like Franco and gave them No Alternative but to “Wash me Away.”22
Ibid.
This was and remains the most important incriminating evidence linking Geronimo Pratt to the tennis court murder. Yet it is not even addressed as an issue in the Court’s decision to accept Johnnie Cochran’s appeal. In a recorded prison interview with attorneys for the state, Roger “Blue” Lewis also testified that Geronimo Pratt had killed Caroline Olsen and that the murder weapon was his. Eyewitnesses identified Pratt at the murder scene, and at an attempted robbery committed moments before. Neither Pratt nor his attorneys have denied that the car driven by the murderer belonged to Pratt. Still, no other piece of evidence is as incontrovertible and unimpeachable as the letter from Julius Butler contained in the sealed envelope.
Although Butler is accused by Cochran of being a police and FBI informant working with law enforcement to frame Pratt, he did not give this envelope to the FBI. In fact, he had never had a single contact with the FBI up to this time. Nor did he just give the envelope to the Los Angeles Police Department. He gave it to a friend—a policeman whom he trusted, and who was black.
When Julius Butler handed the envelope to Duwayne Rice on August 10, 1969, FBI agents observed the transfer. Three days later, on August 13, the FBI approached Butler and questioned him for the first time. Butler refused to answer their questions about what was in the envelope and told them nothing about its incriminating contents. The FBI then went to Rice to