Subject: M-I: Fwd: Geronimo ji Jaga Trial Witness' Reliability Questioned
From: jschulman-AT-juno.com (Jason A Schulman)
Date: Thu, 02 Jan 1997 22:09:43 EST


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   _______________________________________________________
> 
>          PRATT TRIAL WITNESS' RELIABILITY QUESTIONED
>________________________________________________________
> 
>   Los Angeles Times
>   Wednesday, January 1, 1997
>   
>   [IMAGE] Court: Prosecutor says police had 'little confidence'
>   in victim's husband, who testified against ex-Black Panther.
>   
>   By EDWARD J. BOYER, Times Staff Writer
>   
> 
>   SANTA ANA -- The eyewitness who identified former Black
>Panther Party leader Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt as a killer was
>considered unreliable by Santa Monica police, a veteran Los
>Angeles County deputy district attorney testified Tuesday.
> 
>   Ronald "Mike" Carroll said Santa Monica police had "little
>confidence" in Kenneth Olsen's ability to make an identification
>in the murder of Caroline Olsen, who was killed on a Santa Monica
>tennis court in December 1968.
> 
>   "Olsen was a little flaky," Carroll said. "I didn't like the
>man. We had a personality conflict."
> 
>   Carroll was the deputy district attorney who took the Caroline
>Olsen murder case to the grand jury that indicted Pratt in
>December 1970. Kenneth Olsen, who survived five bullet wounds
>from the robbery that claimed his wife's life, provided critical
>testimony at Pratt's trial in 1972.
> 
>   More than three years after he and his wife were robbed of $18
>and shot in cold blood, Olsen testified that Pratt was the
>gunman. Pratt's lawyers say neither they nor the jury knew then
>that Olsen had previously positively identified another suspect
>as his wife's killer.
> 
>   Carroll's testimony Tuesday came at a hearing in Orange County
>Superior Court on whether Pratt's conviction should be
>overturned. The hearing was moved to Orange County because Los
>Angeles County Superior Court Judge Richard P. Kalustian, the
>deputy district attorney who prosecuted Pratt, was a witness.
> 
>   Olsen's testimony was a key factor in getting Pratt juror
>Jeanne Hamilton to change her vote to guilty during deliberations
>nearly 25 years ago. Hamilton, who now believes Pratt is
>innocent, has said she will never forget when the jury foreman
>fixed her in his gaze and sternly asked: "If someone shot your
>husband, wouldn't you remember his face?"
> 
>   Pratt, 49, has steadfastly denied any involvement in Caroline
>Olsen's murder.
> 
>   Ex-Panther and former Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy
>Julius C. "Julio" Butler first implicated Pratt in the Olsen
>murder, saying Pratt had confessed the crime to him.
> 
>   Butler's credibility as a witness has been an issue in the
>Pratt case.
> 
>   At Pratt's murder trial, Butler testified that he had never
>been a "snitch" and had never informed on anyone. But FBI
>documents released seven years after Pratt's conviction show that
>Butler had provided agents with information for more than two
>years before Pratt's trial.
> 
>   Judge Everett W. Dickey, who is presiding over the hearing,
>raised his own questions Tuesday about conflicting testimony from
>Butler and another witness, retired Los Angeles County district
>attorney's detective Morris "Morrie" Bowles.
> 
>   "It is always unfortunate when the court has to conclude that
>someone is deliberately lying on the witness stand," Dickey said
>in open court. But there is no way to reconcile conflicting
>testimony from Butler and Bowles, Dickey said.
> 
>   Butler testified that he first met Bowles -- a district
>attorney's investigator in the Pratt trial -- during the late
>1950s, when Butler was a sheriff's deputy and Bowles was a Los
>Angeles police officer. Butler said he would see Bowles at
>popular restaurants and clubs in central Los Angeles.
> 
>   In late 1970, as the Olsen murder case was going to the grand
>jury, Bowles gave him $200 to buy a gun, Butler testified, saying
>he feared for his life then because Panthers had threatened him.
> 
>   When Bowles testified, he said the first time he had ever met
>Butler was when he served him with a subpoena in the Pratt case.
>Bowles said he had never known Butler when he was a sheriff's
>deputy.
> 
>   Other retired law enforcement officers have testified that
>Bowles lived in the San Fernando Valley and that they did not
>recall seeing him in the Central Los Angeles restaurants and
>clubs Butler said he frequented.
> 
>   "I don't see the possiblity that either is mistaken," Dickey
>said Tuesday of Butler's and Bowles' conflicting testimony. "If
>Mr. Butler is correct and had as much contact [with Bowles] as he
>suggests, there still might be people alive who would have
>observed them in public places."
> 
>   Dickey told prosecutors and lawyers for Pratt that finding
>such people would assist him to determine "who is lying and who
>is not. I don't think it is possible to reconcile their
>testimony. One of them has to be lying."
> 
>   Copyright Los Angeles Times

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