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 get him to give up the envelope. Rice was also uncooperative. The FBI threatened him with prosecution for obstruction of justice and withholding evidence. Even in the face of these threats, Rice held firm. He would neither open the envelope nor turn it over to the agents. It took the FBI another fourteen months, until October 20, 1970, under circumstances to which I will turn in a moment, to get Rice to give up the letter so that they could open it themselves and read Butler’s testimony that Geronimo Pratt had killed Caroline Olsen.
In addition to their accusations that Butler was an informer, Pratt’s defenders speculate that the prosecution of Pratt was the result of a “Cointelpro” conspiracy by the FBI to “neutralize” leaders of the Black Panther Party. Their references, typically vague, are meant to insinuate foul play. But they are irrelevant. By the time of the Pratt trial, the FBI’s “Cointelpro” program had been terminated. Moreover, Pratt was no longer even a Panther. He had been expelled three months earlier, in August 1970. (The official “declaration” of his expulsion, complete with the charge that he had threatened to assassinate Newton, was not made public until his arrest.)
On December 4, 1970, two months after the letter was opened, Pratt was indicted by a grand jury on one count of murder, one count of assault to commit murder and two counts of robbery. He was arraigned in April 1971 and was convicted a year later, on July 28, 1972. Throughout the trial, Pratt maintained that he was in Oakland at the time of the murder for a meeting with Panther leaders. During the trial, and for nearly twenty years thereafter, the Panther leaders—Bobby Seale, David Hilliard and Elaine Brown—denied Pratt’s story and left him to his fate. It was their decision to change their story that led to the new and successful appeal.
In the 1980 court opinion denying Pratt’s original appeal, the conspiracy theory is succinctly refuted: “First, it is noted that Julius Butler did not give the letter to the FBI but to a trusted friend (Sergeant Rice) for safekeeping only to be opened in the event of his death. . . . Second, logic dictates that if the FBI with the aid of local law enforcement officers had targeted Pratt and intended to ‘neutralize’ him by ‘framing’ him for the December 18, 1968, murder of Caroline Olsen, they would not have waited over 14 months after the letter was handed to Sergeant Rice to have the contents of the sealed letter disclosed.”
The circumstances under which Butler’s letter was finally opened are actually even more troublesome for the conspiracy argument. The FBI agents who had observed Butler transferring the sealed envelope walked over to Sergeant Rice after Butler had left and demanded that he turn over the envelope to them. Rice refused. Then, as a precaution, he gave the envelope to yet another black police officer, Captain Edward Henry, who put it in his safe deposit box, still sealed. Rice told no one of this move, in order that the FBI would not know its location. What next transpired is best told in Sergeant Rice’s own
