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AP. 17 January 2002. Another SLA Trial Looming, Perhaps With Patricia
Hearst as Exhibit.
LOS ANGELES -- Nearly three decades after she was kidnapped, Patricia
Hearst may be forced to relive her past by serving as the star witness
in the murder trials of five former members of the Symbionese Liberation
Army.
Any trial would not be pleasant for the married mother of three now
known as Patricia Hearst Shaw: She would be called a liar by defense
attorneys and forced to dredge up her kidnapping by the revolutionary
group she later joined in its 1970s heyday of crime.
She is believed to be the only former SLA member still alive who can
implicate the others in a 1975 bank robbery that left a customer dead in
Carmichael, outside Sacramento. It is a crime in which prosecutors say
Hearst was driving one of the getaway cars and one she described in her
1982 book. She was granted immunity from prosecution years ago.
"I don't know of any way they can try this case without making Patty
Hearst exhibit A," Loyola University Law School professor Laurie
Levenson said.
If that happens, she will face Sara Jane Olson, who was among those
charged Wednesday with the deadly holdup. She would also face Bill
Harris and Emily Harris, the former couple who were among the kidnappers
who snatched Hearst from her Berkeley apartment on Feb. 4, 1974.
Hearst has made it clear she wants to leave the past alone.
"I'm at the end of my rope," she told Talk magazine in June 2000 when
she was named as a key witness in another SLA case against Olson. "I
keep trying to forget these people. And they keep dragging me back into
it."
In the article, she implicated Olson in the Carmichael case. She also
complained that Olson's then-pending trial - she later pleaded guilty to
plotting to blow up Los Angeles police cars - would evoke bad memories
and invade her privacy.
"It has turned into my trial," Hearst said. "And I'm not going to play
dead anymore."
Should Hearst end up testifying, it would be another twist in a long,
strange tale in which she went from kidnap victim to one of the FBI's
most wanted and, ultimately, to convicted bank robber.
When she was kidnapped, Hearst was a 19-year-old heiress to her family's
publishing empire. Within days, the ragtag revolutionary group sent
messages and photos showing their captive transformed into the
revolutionary "Tania," wearing a beret and showing off a machine gun.
Hearst herself sent many messages in support of her captors' cause and
was photographed by a security camera during a 1974 robbery of San
Francisco's Hibernia Bank.
She was captured after 18 months on the lam, a period in which she and
the Harrises were involved in a shootout at a Los Angeles sporting goods
store in which she wielded two machine guns and fired shots.
She would claim at her own trial that she was brainwashed into all of it
by the SLA, but was convicted and sentenced to seven years.
She served two years before President Carter granted her clemency, and
she received a pardon last year from President Clinton.
Before this week, only Olson's brother - Steven Soliah - had been tried
in the Carmichael case. He was acquitted of bank robbery charges in
1976.
Many have wondered why prosecutors at the time did not call Hearst as a
witness. Olson's lawyer, Shawn Snider Chapman, said the answer is found
in the more than 27,000 pages of documents she has reviewed.
"There is a memo in there from the original district attorney in the
case saying that Patty Hearst was not believable," Chapman said. "They
thought the case was unprosecutable."
Levenson agreed. She attended the Hearst trial as a law student in 1976
and wasn't impressed with the young woman's testimony.
"She was not an effective witness," she said. "Of course, now she's
older and wiser" [nod to immortal Phil Ochs line].
PHOTO ATTACHMENTS. Those were the days: Classic SLA pose; Hearst as
Tania.
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