{"id":28813,"date":"2022-11-17T17:37:15","date_gmt":"2022-11-17T17:37:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/evaggelatos.com\/?p=28813"},"modified":"2022-11-17T17:49:25","modified_gmt":"2022-11-17T17:49:25","slug":"%ce%b7-%ce%b4%ce%af%ce%ba%ce%b7-%cf%84%ce%b7%cf%82-%cf%80%ce%b1%cf%84%cf%81%ce%af%cf%84%cf%83%ce%b9%ce%b1%cf%82-%cf%87%ce%b5%cf%81%cf%83%cf%84-%ce%b1%ce%b3%ce%b3%ce%bb%ce%b9%ce%ba%ce%ac-%ce%ba%ce%b1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/evaggelatos.com\/?p=28813","title":{"rendered":"\u0397 \u0394\u03af\u03ba\u03b7 \u03c4\u03b7\u03c2 \u03a0\u03b1\u03c4\u03c1\u03af\u03c4\u03c3\u03b9\u03b1\u03c2 \u03a7\u03b5\u03c1\u03c3\u03c4 \u0391\u03b3\u03b3\u03bb\u03b9\u03ba\u03ac"},"content":{"rendered":"

Patty Hearst Trial (1976)<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/b>by Douglas<\/p>\n

Writer O. Linder (2007)<\/p>\n

The security camera of the Sunset District branch of Hibernia Bank in San Francisco showed Patricia Hearst holding an assault rifle as members of the Symbionese Liberation Army carried out the midday robbery.\u00a0 Was the rich heiress, kidnapped two months earlier, acting in fear of her life?\u00a0 Was she brainwashed?\u00a0 Or did she participate in the robbery as a loyal soldier in “the revolution”?\u00a0 That was the issue a California jury had to decide in the 1976 trial of Patty Hearst.<\/p>\n

On the evening of February 4, 1974, three armed members of a group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) burst into the Berkeley, California apartment shared by Patty Hearst and her fiance, Steven Weed.\u00a0 Hearst, the daughter of Randolph Hearst (managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner<\/i>) and the granddaughter of the legendary William Randolph Hearst, screamed when the men assaulting Weed with a wine bottle.\u00a0 The SLA members carried Hearst, clothed in a nightgown, out of her apartment and forced her into the trunk of a white car.\u00a0 Hearst’s abductors fired a round of bullets as they sped away, followed by a second vehicle.<\/p>\n

The SLA released a communique in which it called the kidnapping the “serving of an arrest warrant on Patricia Campbell Hearst.”\u00a0 The communique warned that any attempt to rescue Hearst would result in the prisoner being “executed.”\u00a0 The statement ended with the capital letters: “DEATH TO THE FASCIST INSECT THAT PREYS UPON THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE.”<\/p>\n

Eight days later, the SLA sent a audiotape to a local radio station, KPFA, tape recording from “General Field Marshall Cinque” demanding that Randolph Hearst fund a multi-million dollar food giveaway “as a good faith gesture.”\u00a0 “Cinque” was actually Donald DeFreeze, who–following his escape from a California prison in March 1973–organized a group of Berkeley area activists that hoped to spur a revolution.\u00a0 The SLA established as\u00a0 its goals closing prisons, ending monogamy, and eliminating “all other institutions that have made and sustained capitalism.” The tape included the frightened voice of Patty Hearst.\u00a0 She is heard telling her parents: “Mom, Dad, I’m okay.\u00a0 I’m with a combat unit with automatic weapons.\u00a0 And these people aren’t just a bunch of nuts….I want to get out of here but the only way I’m going to do it is if we do it their way.\u00a0 And I just hope that you’ll do what they say, Dad, and do it quickly…”\u00a0 The package received by the radio station also included a photograph showing Hearst, brandishing a carbine and wearing a beret, in front of the SLA’s seven-headed cobra symbol.<\/p>\n

In response to the SLA demands, Randolph Hearst created the People in Need program and donated about $2 million.\u00a0 The food giveaway program was fraught with problems.\u00a0 In some distribution locations, rioting and fraud hampered efforts,\u00a0 On February 22 at a distribution site in West Oakland, rioting led to dozens of injuries and arrests.\u00a0 In a March audiotape released by the SLA, Patty criticized her father’s food distribution efforts: “So far it sounds like you and your advisers managed to turn it into a real disaster.”<\/p>\n

The public heard the most shocking audiotape from the SLA in April, fifty-nine days after Patty’s kidnapping.\u00a0 On the tape, Hearst says: “I have been given the choice of being released…or joining the forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army and fighting for my freedom and the freedom of all oppressed people.\u00a0 I have chosen to stay and fight.”\u00a0 Hearst further announced that she had accepted the name “Tania,” after a “comrade who fought alongside Che in Bolivia.”<\/p>\n

The Hibernia Bank robbery occurred shortly afterward, on April 15.\u00a0 The robbery, which netted the SLA $10,692, resulted in two bystanders being shot, one fatally.\u00a0 Security camera tapes of the robbery were played on television and closely analyzed by authorities.\u00a0 Different conclusions were drawn from the tapes as to whether Hearst seemed to be a completely willing participant.\u00a0 She can be seen announcing, “I am Tania” and ordering customers to the floor.\u00a0 “We are not fooling around,” she warned.\u00a0 In an audiotape released by the SLA after the Hibernia robbery, Hearst says: “Greetings to the people, this is Tania.\u00a0 Our actions of April 15 forced the Corporate State to help finance the revolution.\u00a0 As for being brainwashed, the idea is ridiculous beyond belief.\u00a0 I am a soldier in the People’s Army.”<\/p>\n

A month later, Hearst is at another crime scene, this time at Mel’s Sporting Goods Store in Englewood, California.\u00a0 Store employees spotted SLA member William Harris, along with his wife Emily, attempting to shoplift an ammunition case, and a scuffle ensued.\u00a0 From a van parked across the street from Mel’s, shots were fired in the direction of the store.\u00a0 The shooter was identified as Patty Hearst.<\/p>\n

The “Gotterdaemmerung” came the next day.\u00a0 One hundred Los Angeles police officers mounted an assault on a home at 1466 54th Street, a place determined to be an SLA hideout.\u00a0 The event was captured on live television.\u00a0 Police ordered the home’s occupants to “Come on out.\u00a0 Hands up.”\u00a0 No one answered the call–except with automatic fire.\u00a0 The heavily armed SLA members succeeded in pinning down the police for a time.\u00a0 In the end, however, teargas grenades started a fire that consumed the house.\u00a0 Six\u00a0 SLA members–a majority of the group’s membership, but not included Emily and John Harris or Patty Hearst–died in the assault.\u00a0 Hearst responded by criticizing “the fascist pig media” for “painting a typically distorted picture” of her “beautiful sisters and brothers” killed in the assault.\u00a0 She said that “out of the ashes” of the fire she “was reborn”–and knew what she had to do next.<\/p>\n

The arrest of Patty Hearst came over a year later, after authorities following the trail of\u00a0 SLA member Kathleen Soliah (who had not long before organized a commemoration of the gun battle in a Berkeley park) were led to Emily and William Harris and Hearst.\u00a0 Hearst was arrested on September 18, 1975 at her apartment in the outer Mission District of San Francisco.\u00a0 Patty Hearst’s mother, Catherine, expressed confidence that her daughter would not face imprisonment: “I don’t believe Patty’s legal problems are that serious.\u00a0 After all, she’s primarily a kidnap victim.\u00a0 She never went off and did anything of her own free will.”<\/p>\n

The Trial<\/b><\/p>\n

The trial of Patricia Hearst began on February 4, 1976 (two years to the day after the kidnapping) in the courtroom of U. S. District Judge Oliver J. Carter.\u00a0 The kidnap victim, who had spent fifty-nine days blindfolded and living in a closet where she was subjected to verbal and sexual abuse, was charged with armed robbery of the Hibernia Bank.\u00a0 In the days following her arrest three months earlier, Hearst had maintained her allegiance to the SLA.\u00a0 By the time of the trial, however, she had changed her tune.\u00a0 She claimed she had been brainwashed and feared that had she tried to return to her parents, she would have been killed.\u00a0 Carolyn Anspacher, who covered the trial for the San Francisco Chronicle<\/i>, offered this assessment of Patty Hearst:<\/p>\n

\u201c[T]he metamorphosis back to Patricia, if indeed there was one, took time and platoons of lawyers, as assembled in desperation by the frantic Hearsts…\u00a0 [T]he young woman usually referred to as \u2018the defendant\u2019 who will be brought into court to stand trial is a seeming replica of the original Patricia Hearst, the soft-voiced Patty who was wrenched from her familiar surroundings by such violence. . . . Her hair, dyed a brassy red when she was arrested, has been toned to a gentle chestnut and coiffed softly around her face.\u00a0 Her tight and revealing sweater and jeans have been replaced by tasteful slacks and jackets.\u00a0 She no longer lifts manacled wrists in black power salute and her eyes are, for the most part, downcast, as if she were sharing a secret with herself.\u201d<\/p>\n

The defense of Hearst was headed by F. Lee Bailey and his associate Albert Johnson.\u00a0 Bailey chose to adopt the strategy of attempting to prove that Hearst had been “brainwashed” and suffered from what has been variously called the “Stockholm Syndrome” or the “POW Survivor Syndrome.”\u00a0 (Although, somewhat inconsistently, Bailey suggested at various times in the trial that his client did only what she had to do to stay alive.)\u00a0 Stockholm Syndrome sufferers are captives who, after a period of being utterly dependent upon the captors, become sympathetic to their captors’ cause.\u00a0 Under Bailey’s theory, Hearst was never a free agent or voluntary member of the SLA, up to and including the time of her arrest.<\/p>\n

The defense strategy of claiming brainwashing and duress, critics pointed out, had several problems.\u00a0 First, the actions and statements of Hearst after the Hibernia robbery strongly suggested that she was acting freely and it was not necessary in the case, critics noted, to establish that Hearst remained brainwashed throughout the entire time up to her arrest–rather only that she was not a free agent at the time of the robbery. Second, brainwashing was not recognized as a defense to bank robbery under federal law, and Judge Carter’s instructions to jurors, telling them that Hearst had to have been acting out of an “immediate fear for her life” made acquittal on this theory difficult.\u00a0 Third, the strategy seemed to fly in the face of facts.\u00a0 “Why,” a juror might ask, “if Hearst was not a free agent, was she carrying in her purse, on the day of her arrest, a stone Olmec monkey face on a chain given to her by SLA member Cujo (William Wolfe)?”\u00a0 “Why did she have revolutionary books, such as Explosives and Homemade Bombs<\/i>, on her apartment bookshelf?” “Why did she not escape despite her numerous opportunities to do so?”<\/p>\n

Judge Carter’s ruling undercut the defense strategy by allowing the prosecution to introduce evidence of statements and events after the robbery to prove her state of mind at the time of the robbery.\u00a0 Thus the jury listened to Patty tell Americans on an audiotape, “‘The idea of brainwashing is ridiculous.”\u00a0 On cross-examination, Hearst faced numerous questions from prosecutors about her actions after the bank robbery, causing her to plead the Fifth Amendment forty-two times.\u00a0 She also had to listen to embarrassing expert testimony about her vulnerability and endure a humiliating cross-examination about a wide range of topics, including her sex life.\u00a0 The strategy, one commentator observed, “deprived Patty of the right to feel blameworthy and get on with her life.”<\/p>\n

Why, then, did Bailey opt for the brainwashing theory?\u00a0 One reason is because that was the theory that Hearst’s parents wanted him to use–and they were paying for his defense.\u00a0 Randolph and Catherine Hearst seemed unwilling to accept that their daughter would voluntarily choose to become an SLA member.\u00a0 Another reason might have been Bailey’s fear that arguing in this case that Hearst’s voluntary conversion came after the Hibernia robbery would expose her to a future prosecution for her shooting outside Mel’s Sporting Goods store a month after the bank robbery.\u00a0 Bailey also had a psychiatrist ready to testify that Patty “was not responsible for her actions” and felt confident of his own ability to sway jurors on the brainwashing theory.\u00a0 Finally, it is possible that Bailey’s holding book rights to the Patty Hearst story influenced his decision; brainwashing, it might be assumed, would make for a good story line and boost his recently sagging criminal practice.<\/p>\n

In choosing to go forward with the brainwashing theory, defense attorneys rejected the offer of prosecutors to allow Patty to plead guilty to practically anything in return for a lenient sentence, possibly just probation as a first-time offender.\u00a0 Bailey, perhaps, thought he couldn’t lose.<\/p>\n

Opening statements for the two sides addressed the reality that the crime for which Hearst was being tried was captured on videotape.\u00a0 U. S. Attorney Robert R. Browning quoted from the words of Hearst’s April 17 communique: “My gun was loaded, and at no time did any of my comrades intentionally point their guns at me.”\u00a0 Bailey, on the other hand, suggested that the robbery was staged by the SLA to make Hearst appear to be an “outlaw.”\u00a0 Bailey told jurors, the SLA “positioned her directly in front of the cameras” like “a prized pig.”\u00a0 Bailey also argued, “Perhaps for the first time in the history of bank robbery, a robber was directed [by other robbers] to identify herself in the midst of the act.”\u00a0 Later, when the prosecution played the security videotape, Patty Hearst gazed disbelievingly at the screen, then began weeping.<\/p>\n

Psychiatrists played the central role in Hearst’s courtroom drama.\u00a0 Jurors listened to over 200 hours of expert psychiatric testimony.\u00a0 Before the psychiatric testimony began, according to Shana Alexander in Anyone’s Daughter: The Times and Trials of Patty Hearst<\/i>, most jurors thought Hearst was probably innocent–or, at least, not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.<\/p>\n

No psychiatrist had a bigger effect on the jury’s thinking that government psychiatrist Joel Fort.\u00a0 He told jurors to be skeptical of defense psychiatrists, who treat everybody as a patient,<\/i> not a defendant.\u00a0 He suggested that they have a strong interest in helping Hearst avoid hard time in prison.\u00a0 Moreover, he questioned the ability of defense psychiatrists to draw conclusions about Hearst’s state of mind at a time fifteen months before they first interviewed her.\u00a0 According to Fort, Patty Hearst was a prime candidate for radicalism even before her kidnapping.\u00a0 Fort described the young Hearst as basically “an amoral person” who thought rules did not apply to her.\u00a0 He noted that she lied to nuns at school about her mother having cancer in order to get out of an exam, engaged in sexual activity at an early age, and experimented with drugs such as LSD.\u00a0 Fort offered his “velcro theory” for aimless, lost souls such at Hearst: such persons, he said, float around in moral space and then find stuck to them the first random ideology they bump into.\u00a0 It is not at all surprising, Fort concluded, that Hearst would find the SLA appealing.\u00a0 Many of its members, including Cinque, came from educated, upper-class background similar to Patty’s–and all chose to become members without being brainwashed.\u00a0 Hearst, if the jurors believed Fort, signed on with the sociopaths as a form of self-hatred.<\/p>\n

The decision to go with the brainwashing theory meant that Hearst would have to take the stand to describe in some detail how the brainwashing took place.\u00a0 Unfortunately for her case, the jurors didn’t believe a lot of what they heard from her.\u00a0 For example, after Hearst described being “raped” by SLA\u00a0 member William Wolfe (or “Cujo”) and telling jurors “I hated him,” the prosecution produced the love trinket, the so-called Olmec monkey, found in her purse after arrest, that Wolfe had given her.\u00a0 Asked to explain why she would keep a gift in her purse from a rapist that she hated, Hearst answered lamely that she “like art” and took classes in art history.\u00a0 If the love trinket wasn’t enough to explain, there was also Patty’s own words in her June 7 communique, in which she called Cujo “the gentlest, most beautiful man I’ve ever known.”\u00a0 In his cross-examination of Hearst, Browning repeatedly turned to the defendant’s own writings, in the form of the “Tania Interview” (personal reflections written during Patty’s so-called “missing year” with the SLA), to undercut her testimony that she was something other than an enthusiastic radical.<\/p>\n

The verdict came after twelve hours of\u00a0 deliberation.\u00a0 Many jurors ended their session in tears.\u00a0 On March 20, 1976, a jury of seven men and five women pronounced Hearst guilty of armed robbery and use of a firearm to commit a felony.\u00a0 In the end, jurors thought Hearst lied to try to shoehorn her actions into an untenable theory.\u00a0 One juror explained that Bailey forced him to either buy or reject “the whole package” and that Hearst’s firing shots at Mel’s “didn’t jive” with her supposedly passive role in the SLA.\u00a0 Hearst was not the weak-willed puppet that the defense suggested she was.\u00a0 A female juror concluded Hearst was “lying, through and through,” and that no woman would keep a love token from someone who raped and abused her.\u00a0 Other jurors described Hearst as “remote” and “baffling.”\u00a0 We didn’t know “whether we were looking at a live girl or a robot,” one male juror said.\u00a0 Jurors seemed to blame the defendant for hiding behind Bailey’s “mind-control” theory and not coming clean about her true feelings.\u00a0 Hearst’s repeated taking of “the Fifth” also didn’t sit well with jurors.\u00a0 One explained, “It was a real shocker.\u00a0 A witness can’t just tell you what he wants to tell you and not tell you what he doesn’t want to.”<\/p>\n

Epilogue<\/b><\/p>\n

Hearst was sentenced to seven years in prison.\u00a0 President Jimmy Carter commuted Hearst’s sentence to time served in February 1979.\u00a0 Hearst gained her release from prison after just twenty-two months.\u00a0 On January 20, 2001, the last full day of his presidency, Bill Clinton granted Patricia Campbell Hearst a full pardon.<\/p>\n

Commentator George Will, reflecting on the Hearst story, saw it as a demonstration of “the fragility of the individual’s sense of self.”\u00a0 Will observed that\u00a0\u00a0 Arthur Koestler’s classic political novel Darkness at Noon<\/i> featured a sinister figure named Gletkin who was a master mind bender.\u00a0 Will worried:\u00a0 “The disturbing thought is not that the SLA had some cunning Gletkin who destroyed Tania’s sense of her former self.\u00a0 The disturbing thought is that no Gletkin was needed.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Patty Hearst Trial (1976) by Douglas Writer O. Linder (2007) The security camera of the Sunset District branch of Hibernia Bank in San Francisco showed Patricia Hearst holding an assault rifle as members of the Symbionese Liberation Army carried out the midday robbery.\u00a0 Was the rich heiress, kidnapped two months earlier, acting in fear of … <\/p>\n

\u03a3\u03c5\u03bd\u03ad\u03c7\u03b5\u03b9\u03b1 \u03b1\u03bd\u03ac\u03b3\u03bd\u03c9\u03c3\u03b7\u03c2<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-72","item-wrap"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/evaggelatos.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/evaggelatos.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/evaggelatos.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evaggelatos.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evaggelatos.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28813"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/evaggelatos.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28818,"href":"https:\/\/evaggelatos.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28813\/revisions\/28818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/evaggelatos.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evaggelatos.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evaggelatos.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}