The Master of Acquittals

It came as no surprise to anyone who has ever opposed him in a courtroom that F. Lee Bailey emerged as Patty Hearst's top lawyer last week, shortly after joining the defense team. One of the best, toughest and most flamboyant criminal lawyers in the nation, Bailey, at 42, is a loner, a leader who could no more be a second-stringer than Joe Namath could be a back-up quarterback.

Before Bailey was hired by the Hearsts, he had to be accepted by Patty, who gave her quick approval after talking to him in jail. At the time, the defense was headed by Vincent Hallinan, 71, long a successful defender of radicals. But the elder Hallinan was in the process of relinquishing his position to his son, Terence Hallinan, 38, who is cut in Bailey's aggressive mold.

Then young Hallinan quit.

"I'm swept off my feet by this vortex," he said. "My whole practice is going out the win dow, and the case is beyond my control."

The first case that Bailey will defend probably will be the federal charge that Patty took part in the armed robbery of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco. So far, at least, he has shown no signs that he will urge Patty to cop a plea -- testify against her Symbionese Liberation Army comrades in an effort to get off easily. Bailey says he will argue that the Hibernia Bank case was "a matter of simple coercion" -- that Patty was forced to take part in the robbery by her companions. One problem he will have to explain away is the taped message from Patty, delivered to the police nine days after the robbery, in which she calmly declared that she will ingly took part in the raid.

The trial on the state charges, which is expected to take place early next year, poses more difficult problems for the defense. One of the charges is kidnaping, and the victim--Thomas Dean Matthews--has testified that Patty not only seemed totally at ease but boasted about her nascent criminal career. A second state charge is that Patty took part in the armed robbery of a sporting-goods store, shooting up the fac,ade to help in the getaway. Bailey will have trouble proving coercion because witnesses have placed Patty alone in the car outside the store with plenty of opportunity to escape.

Looking ahead to the state case, Bailey told TIME: "We don't expect to go to trial with an amnesia defense. Classic insanity is definitely out. This is something quite different--a human being is put through a shattering experience and is recovering. Brainwashing will probably be our defense, but it's going to take us some time to work it all out."

Bailey, who has represented clients on more than 100 murder charges and had only three convicted, caught the headlines by defending Dr. Sam Sheppard and Albert DeSalvo (the "Boston Strangler"). In 1971 Bailey got Army Captain Edward Medina acquitted of charges that he was among those responsible for the My Lai massacre of civilians in South Viet Nam.

In a sense, Bailey needs Patty Hearst as much as she needs him. He has not had a big winner since Medina. Recently his career ground to a virtual stop when he became a defendant himself, accused of conspiring to defraud investors in a conglomerate organized by a client, Florida Entrepreneur Glenn W. Turner. By the time the charges were finally dismissed in August, after 26 months of legal maneuvering, Bailey acknowledged that his practice had been reduced 80%. That is quite a cut for a man who drives a silver Mercedes, flies his own turboprop, and pilots his own helicopter (manufactured by his own company) from his comfortable home in Marshfield, Mass., to his Boston office, 25 miles away.

As the struggle quickens, he is beginning to affect the studied nonchalance of a man who is used to the headlines and remains unawed by the challenge of defending Patty Hearst. "When you get up onto a certain high shelf of cases," says F. Lee Bailey, "the 'Boston Stranglers,' the Sam Sheppards, the cases begin to look pretty much the same."

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