By Lookout Staff

June 7, 2011 – Elmer Geronimo Pratt, the former Black Panther member convicted of killing a Santa Monica schoolteacher in 1972, died Friday of unknown causes in Tanzania. Pratt was 63.

After serving 27 years for the murder of Caroline Olsen, 8 of them in solitary confinement, Pratt's conviction was vacated in 1997.

In 2000, Pratt won a $4.5 million false imprisonment and civil rights suit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Los Angeles Police Department.

Pratt claimed that, as a Black Panther leader, he had been the subject of harrassment by the FBI's COINTELPRO program, and that the agency destroyed wiretaps that would have proven his innocence. He said he was in Oakland at the time of the murder, and the FBI knew it.

His conviction was overturned when a key witness was found to have been a felon and an FBI informant.

After winning his multi-million dollar settlement with the help of attorneys Johnnie Cochran, Jr. and Stuart Hanlon, Pratt, who took the name Geronimo ji Jaga, moved to his home town in Louisiana before emigrating to Tanzania.

"He had no anger, he had no bitterness, he had no desire for revenge,” Hanlon told blackvoicenews.com upon Pratt's death. “He wanted to resume his life and have children. He would never look back."

Pratt is survived by his wife and son.