Professor Erik Loomis Lauds Elmer 'Geronimo' Pratt, Black Panther Leader Convicted for 1968 Murder of Schoolteacher Caroline Olsen

After a while progressivism is just a cesspool of ideological hatred and stupidity. And as recent blogging has shown, the moral degenerates at Lawyers, Guns and Murder take the cake for such mindless malevolence and mendacity. That said, new LGM blogger Erik Loomis goes above and beyond in his encomium for convicted murderer Geronimo Pratt, who died Thursday in Tanzania, at the age of 63. Here’s this, from Loomis:

As the surviving Black Panthers begin dying off, it’s worth revisiting their analysis of the 1960s inner city as a colonized space analogous to colonized Africa. The Panthers are popularly remembered for unnecessary violence (at least this is how most of my students interpret them) even if Malcolm X is a nice symbol we can deploy when we want. But given the conditions of the inner cities–police brutality, no social services, no jobs, no health care, no public transportation, no grocery stores, white flight and strictly segregated suburbs, etc., I am certainly not going to say the Panthers were wrong in their analysis. Given J. Edgar Hoover’s desire to kill them all, I might say they were quite right. One might criticize their methods, but that’s real easy to do in 2011 and I’m not going to attack them for arming themselves against the police. I’d probably think about picking up a gun in the same circumstances.

Even if Pratt did commit the murder, the justice system was so openly racist that it’s impossible to know. Today, we’ve really advanced on this front, having hidden just enough of the open racism and incorporated just enough black people into the machines of capitalism and the state to partially hide the fact that our spatially and racially unequal economic system combines with the courts to push as many African-Americans and other people of color into prison as possible.

And, well, here’s this from Pratt’s citation at Discover the Networks:

[In 1970] Pratt was arrested and charged with the December 1968 armed robbery and murder of Los Angeles schoolteacher Caroline Olsen. At his trial, witnesses identified Pratt as one of two men who had attempted to rob a local store shortly before Olsen was slain (also by two men, according to eyewitnesses). Olsen’s husband, who was wounded by the assailants, testified that Pratt was his wife’s killer. Pratt’s car, a GTO convertible with North Carolina license plates, was identified by witnesses at both crime scenes. His gun, a .45 automatic, was determined to be the weapon that had killed Olsen. Julius Butler, a member of the Panthers, testified that Pratt had boasted about the murder to him.

Pratt’s alibi was that he was allegedly attending a Black Panther meeting in Oakland at the time of Olsen’s murder. No Panthers stepped forward to corroborate his testimony. (Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, and Elaine Brown flatly denied it.) Pratt further claimed that his car was being used by other Panthers on the day of the murder; that the murder weapon, although it was later found in his apartment, wasn’t his; and that two other Panthers (who were already dead by the time of Pratt’s trial) had actually killed Olsen.

In 1972 Pratt was convicted of the Olsen murder. His counsel in the trial was a young Johnnie Cochran, who would eventually become widely known for his defense of O.J. Simpson in the latter’s 1995 murder trial. Cochran has written that it was the Pratt case that radicalized him and convinced him that the American justice system was systemically biased against African Americans. Cochran also believed that his failure to “play the race card” (i.e., depict his client as the victim of a racist justice system) caused him to lose the case, a mistake he vowed never to make again.

And see Matt Krasnowski’s piece, “Pratt isn’t Home Free in ’68 Slaying Case,” orginally appearing at the San Diego Union Tribune, July 1, 1999.

Well, that gives some added punch to the title at Lawyers, Guns and Murder.

Erik Loomis is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the College of Wooster. And now an ASFL.

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