Remembering Elmer Geronimo Pratt

Democracy Now!:

We look at the life of former political prisoner, Geronimo Jijaga Pratt, who died in Tanzania on Thursday. In 1972, Pratt was wrongfully convicted of the murder of Caroline Olsen for which he spent 27 years in prison, eight of those in solitary confinement. He was released in 1997 after a judge vacated his conviction. The trial to win his freedom revealed that the Los Angeles Black Panther leader was a target of the FBI’s counter-intelligence program, or COINTELPRO. We play an excerpt of a Democracy Now! interview with Pratt and one of his attorneys, Johnnie Cochran Jr. in 2000. We also speak with his friend and former attorney, Stuart Hanlon, and with Ed Boyer, the Los Angeles Times reporter who helped expose his innocence. "The FBI followed Geronimo every second almost of his life. They knew he was in Oakland at the time of the homicide," says Hanlon. "When we started litigating this, rather than turning it over, for the first time anyone can remember, FBI wiretaps disappeared. Of course they knew where he was. It did not matter what the truth was, because he was the bad guy. The truth had to take second place, even in the courtroom." Pratt ultimately won a $4.5 million civil rights settlement against the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department.