L.A. Drops Plans To Retry Elmer `Geronimo' Pratt, Former Black Panther, In Murder Case

The three-decade-long legal battle of Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt recently ended with the district attorney's decision to drop further prosecution of the former Black Panther leader who spent 27 years in prison for a murder he said he didn't commit.

"The murder at issue in this case occurred over 30 years ago," said Gil Garcetti, Los Angeles County's top prosecutor. "Most of the witnesses are deceased. It would be virtually impossible to retry this case."

A day earlier, a California appeals court refused to reinstate Pratt's original conviction, agreeing with a judge who said he had been denied a fair trial.

The only eyewitness to the killing, the victim's husband, is deceased.

Pratt said he was relieved that the district attorney's office had "finally come to their senses."

"But I am not relieved in that they did not come clean all the way in exposing their complicity with this frame-up, this 27-year trauma," he said.

Pratt's attorney, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., said while he is pleased with the district attorney's decision, it did come late. "They took away the best years of his life," he noted.

Pratt was freed in 1997 when a judge ruled that he was denied a fair trial because the star prosecution witness concealed the fact that he was a police informant.

Pratt had been convicted of robbing and fatally shooting Caroline Olsen on a tennis court in Santa Monica, CA.

He claimed that he was in Oakland for Black Panther meetings at the time and that FBI agents and police hid and possibly destroyed wiretap evidence that would prove it.

Pratt blamed the arrest on a campaign by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI against the Black Panthers.

Attorney Stuart Hanlon, who spent 25 years seeking Pratt's freedom, said he has filed a false conviction lawsuit in federal court on Pratt's behalf, seeking damages from the district attorney's office, the Los Angeles Police Department and the FBI.