The Verdict on Patty: Guilty as Charged

"Is this your verdict?" the clerk asked each member of the jury, one after another. Back came the answers: "Yes . . . yes . . . yes . . ." As the seven women and five men spoke, the defendant sat erect, pale but composed and dry-eyed, while her lawyers leaned toward her protectively. Last week, after only twelve hours of deliberation, a San Francisco jury ruled that Patricia Campbell Hearst was guilty of armed bank robbery and of using a firearm to commit a felony.

It was the climactic moment of a trial that had leaped from one emotional peak to another for eight dramatic weeks. "Oh, my God," gasped Catherine Hearst, when she heard her 22-year-old daughter declared guilty. Two of Patty's sisters began to weep, as did U.S. Deputy Marshal Janey Jimenez, the defendant's photogenic escort for most of the trial. As for Patty, she betrayed no emotion, but her face was drained of color. She whispered almost despondently to one of her lawyers: "I wonder if I ever had a chance."

Only minutes before the verdict was read, Defense Attorney F. Lee Bailey had told reporters that he was hopeful of a favorable outcome because the jury had been out for so short a time. Now he turned ashen. The verdict, he said bitterly, only fulfilled the prophecies of Patty's captors; he recalled that members of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army, who kidnaped Patty on Feb. 4, 1974, had warned her that "if you go back, society is going to be very harsh, and they are going to punish you."

U.S. District Court Judge Oliver J. Carter had a different view. The verdict, he said, was "well within the evidence presented in this case, and therefore has been accepted." In mid-April, Carter is scheduled to pass sentence on Patty. The maximum--but unlikely--penalty: 35 years in prison (25 for willingly taking part in the armed robbery of a branch of the Hibernia Bank on April 15, 1974; ten for the ancillary charge of use of a firearm while committing a felony). The minimum possible sentence: simple probation.

Whether Patty would actually go to prison remained uncertain. Bailey immediately announced that he planned to appeal, and some leading lawyers felt that he had solid grounds for his motion (see box page 28). But Patty has a good deal more to worry about than her eventual fate in this case. The jury had hardly pronounced her guilty in San Francisco than Los Angeles County District Attorney John Van de Kamp announced that "she'll be brought down as soon as possible" to face an entirely different set of charges on the state level. Patty stands accused of kidnaping, armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon--eleven counts in all--stemming from a shoplifting spree at a sporting-goods store outside Los Angeles on May 16, 1974. During the melee, Patty fired off bursts of shots to cover the retreat of S.L.A. Members William and Emily Harris, who face trial on the same charges. If found guilty of kidnaping "for the purpose of robbery," Patty could get a life sentence.

Whatever happens to her in Los Angeles, the reaction to last week's verdict in San Francisco showed that Americans are split in their feelings about Patty and whether she was lying when she insisted that she had been coerced into going along on the bank robbery. In his final instructions to the jury, Judge Carter said: "The law does not permit jurors to be governed by sympathy, prejudice or public opinion." Plainly, some Americans were still swayed by sympathy for Patty. "I'm really taken aback," said Sylvia Volin, an artist in Bergen County, N.J. "I thought everything was removed from her hands the moment she was kidnaped. My sympathies are with her." Patty's ex-fiance, Steven Weed, told TIME: "I was more surprised by the speed of the verdict than by the verdict itself. I can't see how any group of people could reach a conclusion beyond a reasonable doubt in something in which nothing is clear." But others felt that the defendant had got what she deserved. The reaction of James Strauch, a New York accountant, was typical: "After she was kidnaped, I suspect they persuaded her to join up, and she went along. Now she will suffer the consequences, just as anyone else would under the same circumstances."

The drama that reached a climax last week is precisely the kind of sensational story that Patty's grandfather, Publisher William Randolph Hearst, exploited so skillfully while building his communications empire. From the moment that Patty was hauled half naked and screaming from her Berkeley, Calif., apartment, the story became not only increasingly dramatic but increasingly improbable. Could a rich, attractive young woman bearing such a legendary name really join the violent social revolutionaries of the S.L.A.? Could she have been so alienated from society and her parents--"pigs," she called them--that in two months she could change, by some strange metamorphosis, into the revolutionary named Tania? And could she have gone along on the bank raid of her own free will, carrying a sawed-off carbine like a latter-day gun moll?

After the robbery. Patty escaped the holocaust of May 17, 1974, when six S.L.A. members died in the shootout with Los Angeles police. Along with millions of other Americans, she watched the death struggle live on television--the macabre media event of the year. There followed the 16-month chase as the FBI searched for her across the country while she traveled from the West Coast to a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania and back again. Then, on Sept. 18, 1975, two lawmen crept up the stairs of a small house in San Francisco and knocked on the door, which swung open. Petrified, Patty Hearst pleaded, "Don't shoot," and went along quietly.

To defend Patty, the Hearsts brought in the flamboyant Bailey, who could have used a big victory to revive his reputation as one of the shrewdest and most persuasive criminal lawyers in the nation. Opposing Bailey was U.S. Attorney James L. Browning Jr., who said his aim "was to try to neutralize the psychiatric testimony and to try the case basically on the facts" (see box page 24). In acrimonious duels with Bailey, Browning won important victories by getting Judge Carter to admit the tapes from Tania, as well as some of her papers that were confiscated at the Harrises' apartment. The prosecutor effectively cited this evidence to show that Patty not only extolled the S.L.A. but celebrated her role in the bank robbery. She had been acting, Tania said, as "a soldier in the people's army." Browning also produced a witness named Zigurd Berzins, who told the jury that Patty, for someone who supposedly was forced to go along on the raid, was unusually well prepared: she was carrying at least two clips of ammunition.

Faced with such damning evidence, Bailey chose to rely on the one witness who might have convinced the jury that the defendant had been brutally forced into taking part in the crime: he called Patty Hearst to the stand. It was a high-risk gamble. For although Patty performed well--vividly conveying the fears she said she experienced while with the terrorists--she was then open to Browning's crossexamination. At Bailey's urging, Patty took the Fifth Amendment 42 times when asked about her activities in the year before her capture. That badly damaged her credibility. Bailey himself admitted that the impact was devastating, especially when considered together with documents in Patty's own hand, or bearing her fingerprints, suggesting that she had been planning to rob other banks. Said the defense lawyer: "I can't think of anything that hurt her more."

Answered Prayer. In the final week of the trial, Bailey tried desperately--almost savagely--to damage the credibility of one of Browning's most important witnesses: Dr. Joel Fort, a San Francisco physician with psychiatric training, who maintained that Patty had been a willing member of the bank-robbing crew. Indeed, Fort had called the defendant the "queen" of the terrorists. Bailey put on the stand Dr. James Stubblebine, a San Francisco psychiatrist, who testified that Fort had a reputation for being "untrustworthy and not to be believed."

Having done his best to discredit one of the prosecution's most important figures, Bailey later called two witnesses who, he calculated, could hardly be said to be impartial but who could have had a favorable effect upon the jury: Patty's father and mother. Randolph A. Hearst, 60, president of the San Francisco Examiner, is a solemn-faced man these days, but he smiled warmly at his daughter as he settled into the chair. Hearst disputed Dr. Harry Kozol, a psychiatrist who testified for the prosecution that Patty was an incipient rebel before her abduction. She was "a very bright girl, pretty," Hearst said. "She was strong-willed and pretty independent. She was fun to be with."

When Catherine Hearst, 57, took the stand, her shining blonde hair elegantly coiffed, she looked as though she were planning to go shopping at Tiffany's. Steven Weed has claimed that there was "constant tension" between mother and daughter. In the S.L.A. "interview" with Tania, she called her mother "an incredible racist" and said that "my parents were the last people in the world I would go to to talk about anything." Yet Mrs. Hearst described Patty as "a very warm and loving girl," adding, "we always did things as a family." Bailey asked if the alienated girl described by Fort and Kozol had any resemblance to Patty before her kidnaping. "None whatsoever," Catherine Hearst assured the jury.

Browning had often looked inept against Bailey--a local plodder who was simply outclassed by the courtroom celebrity brought in from Boston by the wealthy Hearsts. Yet Judge Carter did not see it that way at all. While the jury was out deciding Patty's fate, Carter thought back over the long and emotional course of the trial and praised the skills of both Bailey and Browning. "I always say, 'God, please send me a couple of good lawyers,' " he told TIME. "I much prefer it to trying a case in which you have one good lawyer and a bum--you're always having to try to help the bum out." Added Carter: "I think the prayer was answered. I think they were both good lawyers."

Prosecutor and defender were at their best while giving their summations. Browning placed before him on the table the sawed-off carbine that Patty admitted carrying into the bank. Then the Government's man, a tall, spare, righteous figure, coaxed and exhorted the jury for nearly two hours, projecting a sense of deep moral outrage at what he claimed the defendant had done.

Full Share. What the case really boils down to, said Browning, is the matter of intent: "Whether the defendant was in that bank voluntarily and whether she acted ... with a general willful criminal intent." In making up their minds, Browning urged the jurors not to place too much weight on the psychiatric testimony--even that produced by the U.S. Rather, they should decide the case "on the facts . . . because that is, frankly, where it's at." The prosecutor said in effect that Patty had convicted herself with documents, tapes and various writings. Echoing Kozol, the prosecutor called Patty "a rebel in search of a cause" who had been a full-fledged member of the party that robbed the bank. He noted that the stolen $10,690 had been split nine ways--and that Patty had got a full share. Was it "reasonable," Browning asked, to believe that someone who had been forced to participate in the raid would subsequently be given an equal cut?

The most important piece of circumstantial evidence against Patty, Browning claimed, was her reaction when William and Emily Harris got into trouble at the sporting-goods store. Patty was waiting alone in a van outside. The defendant testified that she lived in terror of the Harrises, yet she fired off a fusillade of shots to cover their flight.

Patty's explanation was that she was so cowed by the Harrises that the firing was simply a reflex action. Some reflex, said Browning: she had fired one gun, dropped it, picked it up again, and squeezed the trigger until it was empty, then grabbed a second gun and fired several other shots. Browning asked the members of the jury if, "as reasonable people," they could believe that the

S.L.A. had forced Patty to rob the bank when, just one month later, she had gone to such lengths "to free the very people that she claims forced her to rob the bank. Can you believe that?"

Telltale Face. Browning also pointed out that Patty had been allowed to stand guard at night at the S.L.A. hideout while armed with a carbine. "Is it reasonable," he asked, "and again we are talking about what's reasonable in this case, to conclude that the captors would entrust their safety to their hostage, if that is what she were?"

Browning attacked Patty's credibility--a key issue--by dangling in front of the jury a small, stone figurine of a monkey. Patty was carrying the object in her purse on the day she was arrested last September. The prosecution claimed it was a gift from S.L.A. Member William Wolfe, who was killed during the shootout with police in Los Angeles. "She couldn't stand Willie Wolfe," said Browning, but she carried that stone with her to the day she was arrested. "Yet there is the little stone face that can't say anything but, I submit to you, can tell us a lot."

Patty's whole tale, the prosecutor said, was "just too big a pill to swallow." He asked the jurors if they would accept the "incredible story" of the robbery "from anyone but Patricia Hearst. If you wouldn't, don't accept it from her either." Browning concluded with a quote cited in several Supreme Court decisions that had a grim, Old Testament ring. He hoped, he said, "that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer."

When Bailey rose to deliver his summation, the benches were crowded with spectators expecting one of his famed histrionic displays. He did not disappoint them. Disdaining a microphone and speaking without notes, the Richard Burton of the courtroom kept the jurors--and Patty--spellbound for 46 minutes. He made no attempt to review the entire case, as Browning had. Instead, with his voice fading to a whisper and then rising to a shout, Bailey tried to win over the jurors' hearts, if he had not already won over their minds.

The defendant, he acknowledged, robbed the bank. "The question you are here to answer is: Why? And would you have done the same thing to survive? Or was it her duty to die to avoid committing a felony? That is all this case is about, and all the muddling and stamping of exhibits and the little monkeys and everything else that has been thrown into this morass doesn't answer that question."

Bailey admitted that some of the evidence was inconclusive: "It's riddled with doubt and always will be ... No one is ever going to be sure." He praised his team of distinguished psychiatrists for giving sensible explanations of Patty's conduct. By calling Kozol and Fort, said Bailey, the Government hoped to cause such confusion over the psychiatric testimony "that you'd fold the whole ball of wax and say, 'Well, they disagreed with each other,' and leave it there." Bailey singled out Fort for excoriation, calling him "a psychopath and a habitual liar."

One thing was clear, Bailey argued:

Patty had been coerced into joining the S.L.A. and coerced into taking part in the robbery. Every member of the jury, he said, would have participated in the raid, if so ordered by the S.L.A. What is more, said Bailey, the jurors might have gone along even if they had not been intimidated by being held in closets for 57 days, as Patty was. Putting the matter as bluntly as he could, Bailey said that the alternatives faced by Patty were easy "for the most simple-minded person to understand: 'Do what I say or I'll blow your head off.' "

"We all have a covenant with death," Bailey said in a voice that had grown husky as the trial went on. "We all are going to die, and we know it. We're all going to postpone that date as long as we can. And Patty Hearst did that, and that is why she is here and you are here."

The final word came the next day from Judge Carter. In his charge to the jury, he declared that the Government had to prove--beyond a reasonable doubt--that Patty had intentionally taken part in the bank robbery. "You are free to accept or reject the defendant's own account of her experience with her captors," Carter said. "Duress or coercion may provide a legal excuse for the crime charged against her. But a compulsion must be present and immediate . . . a well-founded fear of death or bodily injury with no possible escape from the compulsion."

In the first row of seats, Catherine Hearst--her face red and puffy from crying--suddenly rose as the judge talked on. Wiping her eyes with a tissue, she walked quickly out of the courtroom and stood hesitantly in the hallway until an official escorted her to an elevator. "I'm afraid I chickened out," Mrs. Hearst told a newsman. "I didn't do too well."

Then Patty Hearst was led out of the courtroom to wait while the jurors began to discuss and debate her claim that she had been compelled to commit the crime. It did not take the jury long to decide that Patty, alias Tania, was not telling the truth.

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