Reviewed by Lisa Stansky
The world would be a less frightening place if Jack Olsen's Last Man Standing were a novel.
Through the real-life story of Black Panther Elmer G. "Geronimo" Pratt, Olsen shows us just how turbulent life was during the years when America was at war abroad and at home.
The Raiding Party
Part courtroom thriller, part mystery, part political polemic, Last Man Standing is above all a biography. The political and spiritual strife of the nation reveals itself through the travails of Pratt, who spent nearly 27 years behind bars for a murder he vows he did not commit. In 1997, Orange County (Calif.) Superior Court Judge Everett Dickey (a Reagan appointee no less) freed Pratt, declaring that governmental machinations robbed him of a fair trial.
With J. Edgar Hoover at the helm, the FBI is a constant and ghostly presence in Olsen's narrative. Chilling words excerpted from FBI documents chronicle the bureau's foiled attempt to recruit the young Panther as an operative back in 1970: "No consideration is being given to reinterview PRATT for the purpose of development as a PRI [informer]."
Plan B, according to the FBI memo, was "the utilization of counterintelligence measures with efforts being directed toward neutralizing PRATT as an effective BPP [Black Panther Party] functionary."
The FBI succeeded in "neutralizing" Pratt, Olsen argues, when a grand jury indicted the young Panther for murdering Caroline Olsen, who was gunned down during a robbery on a Santa Monica tennis court in 1968.
Olsen interweaves milestones in American history with pivotal events in Pratt's life, taking us through some 50 years in nearly 500 pages. There is Pratt's birth in 1947, and a peaceful childhood in a sleepy Louisiana oil town in the 1950s. Pratt matures under the tutelage of his father, an indefatigable drayman, and his devoutly religious mother, from whom he absorbed the spiritual incantations he chanted to stave off insanity while locked in "the hole" at San Quentin.
Then Pratt's life, like the life of the nation, spins out of control. He shatters his mother's dreams and his youthful innocence, shunning college for a military career. Returning from Vietnam with a Purple Heart and bowels laced with shrapnel, Pratt encounters as much turmoil at home as he saw overseas. He enrolls in both UCLA and the Black Panther Party. The latter choice influences the course of his life for three decades.
Some might accuse Olsen of portraying the Black Panthers as Cub Scouts with munitions. Yet the book describes the good, the bad and the ugly among the Panthers, plagued by turf wars and rifts.
An ousted Panther named Julio Butler turns out to be the catalyst behind the legal machine that put Geronimo Pratt behind bars. Butler becomes a police informant. He pens a letter pinning the tennis court murder on Pratt, and hands it over to a Los Angeles detective. The missive winds up in the hands of--you guessed it--a pair of FBI agents.
You'll understand why Olsen previously won kudos from the Mystery Writers of America when reading the account of Pratt's trial and the dogged efforts of his lawyers to overturn the conviction. Early in the murder case, Pratt could not persuade his own dream team, including Johnnie Cochran Jr., that he was the victim of a vast governmental conspiracy.
Olsen reveals in exhausting detail a quarter-century of sleuthing by Pratt's lawyers, joined by a small battalion of assistants, volunteers and politicians.
Meanwhile, Pratt endures a grisly eternity of prison life, including eight years in solitary confinement within a closet of a cell with a floor hole for a toilet.
While his lawyers are fighting for him on the outside, Pratt fights to survive on the inside, fending off jailhouse hit men and the specter of insanity. Then he mellows, along with the nation.
By 1996, his attorneys have unearthed damning information about Pratt's murder trial, and the habeas corpus petition lands before Judge Dickey, lamented as a "redneck judge in fascist country" by defense attorney Stuart Hanlon, who worked on Pratt's case from his student days of the 1970s.
Dickey comes through for Pratt, overturning the murder conviction. Pratt thereby earns the freedom that eluded him through countless legal petitions and more than a dozen parole board hearings. The Los Angeles district attorney gives up on the idea of a retrial. Just last April, Pratt secured a multimillion dollar settlement on false imprisonment and other claims. Some $2.75 million came from the city of Los Angeles and $1.75 million from the federal government.
What swayed these minds and hearts? Read the book. *****
***** The Associated Press State & Local Wire December 15, 2001, Saturday, BC cycle SECTION: State and Regional HEADLINE: Judge who said Black Panther member got unfair trial dies DATELINE: LONG BEACH, Calif.
George William Dunn, a judge who once wrote a dissenting appellate opinion stating a Black Panther member received an unfair murder trial, has died. He was 71.
Dunn, a retired Long Beach Municipal Court judge, died Dec. 12 in a convalescent hospital of complications from a stroke several months ago. In 1980, while Dunn was on temporary assignment to the state Court of Appeal, he wrote his opinion in which he said Black Panther Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt had not received a fair trial.
The only black on the panel, Dunn wrote in part: "A trial which is not fundamentally fair is no trial at all. It is a non sequitur to argue that a defendant is obviously guilty if it is an established fact that the defendant was not afforded a fair trail."
Pratt was convicted in 1972 of killing a schoolteacher during a robbery on a Santa Monica tennis court. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison and was released in 1997 after another judge reversed the conviction.
Dunn was born and raised in New York City. He began his working career at age 10 in a grocery store, one of many jobs held over the years including working as a tailor, a waiter and a carpet cleaner.
During the 1950's, Dunn earned bachelor's degrees in science and history, as well as a master's degree in French history from Ohio State University.
After graduation, he moved to Los Angeles and taught science at a Pacoima junior high school while he worked on his law degree at the University of Southern California, where he was graduated in 1965.
He began as a Long Beach Legal Aid Foundation lawyer and was a lawyer while he taught business law at California State University, Long Beach.
Dunn retired from the bench in 1999.
He is survived by his wife; two daughters; two sons; two grandchildren; and a brother. ***** -- Yoshie
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