Elmer G. Pratt, a Black Panther leader who was imprisoned for 27 years for murder and whose marathon fight to prove he had been framed attracted support from civil rights groups and led to the overturning of his conviction, died Thursday in a village in Tanzania, where he was living. He was 63.

Pratt, who was widely known by his Panther name, Geronimo ji-Jaga, had high blood pressure and other ailments, his longtime lawyer, Stuart Hanlon, said. Hanlon said he did not know the exact cause of death.

To his supporters — among them Amnesty International, the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union — Pratt came to symbolize a politically motivated attack on the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and other radical groups. But from the start, the grisly facts of the murder of a 27-year-old teacher dominated discussions of the case, including those of the parole board that denied parole to Pratt 16 times.

The teacher, Caroline Olsen, and her husband, Kenneth, were accosted by two young black men with guns on Dec. 18, 1968, in Santa Monica, Calif. They took $18 from Caroline Olsen’s purse. “This ain’t enough,” one said, according to the police, and ordered the couple to “lie down and pray.”

Shots were fired, hitting Kenneth Olsen five times and his wife twice. Caroline Olsen died 11 days later. Pratt was arrested.

The case against Pratt included evidence that both the pistol used as the murder weapon and the red-and-white GTO convertible used as the getaway car belonged to him. An informant wrote an eight-page letter asserting Pratt had bragged to him that he committed the murder.

The murder case

Fellow Panthers did not support Pratt’s alibi that he was in Oakland, more than 300 miles away, at the time of the killing. A witness identified Pratt as one of two men who tried to rob a store shortly before the murder. And Kenneth Olsen identified Pratt as the assailant.

Pratt was convicted of first-degree murder on July 28, 1972, and sentenced to life imprisonment a month later.

Information gradually surfaced that the jury had not known about when it reached its verdict. Kenneth Olsen had identified someone else before he identified Pratt. Documents showed that the informant who said Pratt had confessed to him had lied about himself. Wiretap evidence that might have supported Pratt’s alibi mysteriously vanished from FBI files.

A public debate erupted over the extent to which Pratt and the Black Panthers had been singled out by law enforcement agencies. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, called the Panthers a threat to national security, and an FBI report spoke of “neutralizing” Pratt. Others saw the Panthers and their leaders as a voice of black empowerment and as a service group that provided free breakfasts to the poor.

In an interview with The New York Times in 1997, John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League, said, “The Geronimo Pratt case is one of the most compelling and painful examples of a political assassination on an African-American activist.”

As Pratt languished in solitary confinement, his supporters shed light on his case by hanging a banner from the Statue of Liberty. His lawyers, led by Johnnie Cochran Jr. assembled ammunition for an appeal.

In 1997, a California Superior Court judge vacated Pratt’s conviction on the grounds that the government informant, Julius Butler, had lied about being one. Moreover, it was learned that the Los Angeles Police Department, the FBI and prosecutors had not shared with the defense their knowledge that Butler was an informant.