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From: Michael Eisenscher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: USA: FBI-Framed Black Panther spent 27 years in jail
Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2000 22:20:11 -0600 (CST)
Reuters
October 23, 2000
Framed Black Panther spent 27 years in jail
By Dan Whitcomb
LOS ANGELES - He spent years in solitary confinement talking to
the ants crawling across his prison cell floor, convinced they were
bringing him food. Now he chats by cell phone with Marlon Brando.
Geronimo Pratt does not brood about his 27 years behind bars -- or
about the evidence his lawyers found showing he was framed for a
crime he never committed, possibly because late FBI director J.
Edgar Hoover wanted the Black Panther leader "neutralized."
Pratt shrugs off talk about Hollywood movie deals -- actor Sean
Penn is interested in his story and Brando is a frequent caller --
and his mantle as America's so-called Last Political Prisoner, a
status he earned in 1997 when a judge threw out his murder conviction
and set him free.
"I don't know if you call it bitterness, it's water under the
bridge," Pratt said in an interview with Reuters.
"Like we say, it 'done happened.' But, yeah, you wouldn't want it
to happen to no one else's child, so you try to come out and expose
the true culprits who make money and make fun, make all kind of
things in their silly minds, their sick minds, by putting someone
in prison for the rest of their lives or messing up someone's
family."
Pratt has come a long way since 1972, when a jury found him guilty
of murdering 27-year-old teacher Caroline Olsen in Santa Monica
two years earlier, unaware of evidence that the FBI had him under
surveillance at a Panther meeting 333 miles away at the time she
was shot to death.
He was represented at that trial by Johnnie Cochran, now best known
for winning an acquittal on murder charges for O.J. Simpson but
then a young defense attorney. The two discussed the case and its
aftermath to help promote a new book about the case, "Last Man
Standing, the Tragedy and Triumph of Geronimo Pratt" (Doubleday)
by writer Jack Olsen.
Naive Lawyer Confesses
"I was very naive at the time of the trial. I felt I was going to
win this case because I felt this was an innocent man," Cochran
said in an interview with Reuters.
"Geronimo always said: 'They're out to get me, they're out to get
me,' and I would always say: 'Who's they? Who you talking about?'
Well, I later learned 'they' was the FBI, the LAPD (the Los Angeles
police department) and the L.A. District Attorney's Office."
Pratt. now 53, was sentenced to life in prison and spent his first
eight years in solitary confinement alongside such neighbors as
cult murderer Charles Manson. He was cut off from contact with the
outside world after prosecutors branded him so dangerous that he
could seize control of the entire prison.
He survived a quarter century in California's toughest prisons with
mental toughness earned during a childhood in the Louisiana swamps
and two Vietnam War combat tours, he said.
"I never felt like I was going to break. I did feel like I was
going to check out -- die -- many a time. Then you end up escaping
mentally and all of a sudden you find yourself free. That is the
first time I experienced what I called true freedom," he said.
"I went to Manila (in my mind) and saw the 'Thrilla in Manila,"'
he said, referring to the famous 1975 boxing match between Muhammad
Ali and Joe Frazier. "I thought to myself: 'I'm in the deepest hole
there is, and I'm free.' I couldn't believe that I actually saw
that fight. I later learned that was an eastern discipline called
Astral Projection."
With no human contact aside from the guards, whom he considered
"straight up, the enemy," Pratt became desperate for any distraction,
eventually turning to the ants that crawled through his cell and
bit him regularly on the arms and legs.
"I learned that the most intelligent living creatures that I've
ever ran into were those ants. They would bite me and I would slap
them and get mad and then they would bite me some more. Then you
realize: 'What am I fighting for? This is their territory, their
turf, they outnumber you,"' he said.
"So I stopped killing them and I just submitted to them. And then
I noticed that one day they began to come in and pile their crumbs
in the corner and they had stopped biting my legs. And I started
meditating and concentrating and focusing on that. And I started
to get messages back,"
he went on.
"I don't talk to most people about this because they don't have
the mind to comprehend, but those (ants), they are so intelligent,
after we started doing that they never bit me again. What they were
doing was, they were bringing me food. They were actually bringing
me food."
Pratt was finally moved out of solitary after his long-time attorney
Stuart Hanlon challenged his treatment as unfair. But he would
spend another 19 years in prison, his appeals rejected by judges
at every level, before Orange County Superior Court Judge Everett
Dickey set him free.
Water Under The Bridge
He said he came away from his experience determined to change the
U.S. criminal justice system but at the same time showing little
bitterness about his years wasted in prison.
"I want to expose this evilness that's set in place, that's
institutionalized, that includes everything they call the criminal
justice system," he said. "The prison industrial complex is very
evil. It's like a doomsday machine."
And Pratt, who since his release has moved home to Louisiana, said
he has no regrets about his days as a revolutionary, despite the
terrible price he paid.
"Well, you know, we were young and naive and everybody was just
fired up back in that day, trying to make a change. But the difference
was, we were trying to do what was right. We weren't out here raping
and robbing and killing people like ... all this crime today. We
were not criminals," he said.
Cochran remembers the day Pratt was freed as the best in his long
career as a lawyer and insists that he would rather be defined by
this case than by Simpson -- a man whose picture dominates the
entry of Cochran's law firm.
"It's terrible. I don't want my epitaph to be: 'Here lies Johnnie
Cochran, he once defended O.J. Simpson,"' Cochran said, sitting in
his office under a framed copy of the New York Times front page
from the day that Simpson was acquitted.
"If you want to talk about my career, this case defines my career,
Geronimo Pratt. And that's very important to me. This is a story
they ought to hear."
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