Battle over Patty's Mind

Turning to the jury one day last week, Judge Oliver J. Carter summed up the essence of Patty Hearst's trial: whether or not the celebrated defendant was telling the truth. "You and you alone," he told the jurors, "have to make this ultimate decision and no psychiatrist, no lawyer or anybody else should invade that province."

From the first, of course, the opposing lawyers have been invading the jury's "province." Last week, as the trial entered a crucial new phase, it was the turn of the psychiatrists to tell the jury what to think. As Patty listened intently, the experts began to describe what they thought was really in her mind on April 15, 1974 when, armed with a sawed-off carbine, she took part in the robbery by the Symbionese Liberation Army of a branch of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco. After the defense and prosecution experts finish their debate over Patty's mind, the case is expected to go to the jury this week.

The week began with a dramatic ruling by Judge Carter on a key question that he had been mulling over for four days: Should the Government be allowed to introduce evidence and question Patty about her activities during the year before her capture?

U.S. Attorney James L. Browning Jr. had argued that Patty's life before her arrest showed she was an accomplice of the S.L.A. and hence had a bearing on whether she had willingly taken part in the robbery. In rebuttal, Defense Attorney F. Lee Bailey claimed not only that the defendant's actions did not bear on the robbery, but that the material might be used to try to connect her with other crimes--a violation, he said, of her basic rights.

With the jury out of the room, Carter ruled in favor of Browning, citing the fact that Patty had voluntarily taken the stand. By testifying about her activities before and after the mysterious year under question, she opened herself up to cross-examination on the entire period.

His face flushing, Bailey leaped to his feet. Claiming that Carter was "clearly in error," he pointed out that Patty had testified about certain events after the robbery, such as her stay with S.L.A. Members William and Emily Harris in a Pennsylvania farmhouse, only because Carter had permitted the prosecution to enter such evidence in the first place.

"Now, Mr. Bailey," said Carter, "nobody made her take the witness stand. She did not have to take the stand."

His voice rising, Bailey said that if Patty were to respond to the prosecution, "she would name people still on the street capable of homicide who would retaliate against her [and her family]." Alluding to threats that had recently been made against Patty and her parents, Bailey hotly told Carter: "I do not think that you can in good conscience, as a human being--that you can require her to sit up here and invite someone to carry out those threats." Bailey then said he would ask the judge to suspend the trial while the defense appealed his ruling to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

"Mr. Bailey," said Carter, "I deny your motion. You can go to the 9th Circuit if you desire. Have at it." (Bailey is holding his appeal pending the outcome of the trial.)

Demurely chic in a rust-colored brushed-corduroy pantsuit and green blouse, Patty settled herself calmly on the witness stand after the jury came back into court. Bailey took up a protective stance beside her. Prosecutor Browning then started to ask Patty about 20 documents taken from her and the Harrises' apartments after she was seized. The documents, Browning had said, showed that the defendant had spent the missing year "casing banks." The cache included a floor plan of a bank, a list of banks and a yellow spiral notebook containing what the prosecution said were notes by Patty, which amounted to "a laundry list of how to rob a bank."

When the prosecutor began to inquire into the "missing year," Patty replied: "I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may tend to incriminate me and cause danger to myself and my family." During the next 45 minutes, Patty took refuge no fewer than 42 times in the Fifth Amendment protection against selfincrimination. Carter ruled, however, that she had to answer questions about the year because of her previous testimony. He warned: "If you persist to refuse to answer, Miss Hearst, it will be necessary to cite you for contempt."

Bailey was clearly worried about the impact that Patty's repeated citing of the Fifth and Judge Carter's warning would have on the jury. "The Government got what it wanted," he said later in bitterness. "They embarrassed her. The damage is done."

Patty's case also appeared to be damaged by Carter's decision to allow into evidence another controversial item: a tape made by the authorities of a jailhouse conversation between Patty and a visiting friend shortly after the defendant was captured on Sept. 18. Bailey argued that making the tape was an invasion of Patty's rights to privacy. Carter cited the "basic rule" that there was no right to privacy in jail.

During the chat with her visitor, Patty made a number of statements that undercut her basic defense that she had cooperated with the S.L.A. out of fear alone. Patty said she had been "pissed off' by her capture and that she had "a revolutionary feminist" viewpoint. She added: "My politics are real different from way back when." Questioned by Bailey, Patty said she had made the statements because of her fear of the Harrises. At the time, Emily Harris was assigned the cell adjoining hers.

Violent Transition. In the battle of the psychiatrists that followed, the defense led off with a respected authority on thought control: Dr. Louis Jolyon ("Jolly") West, 51, chairman of the psychiatry department at U.C.L.A. and director of the university's Neuropsychiatric Institute. West was certainly an eye-filling witness--a husky 6 ft. 4 in., he looked like a veteran pro linebacker and handled himself with assurance. Much of West's expertise in what is commonly called brainwashing came from studying 59 Air Force officers captured during the Korean War and subjected to a full thought-conversion process (see box page 26). More than half had participated in anti-American activities.

During 23 hours of interviews with Patty, the psychiatrist said, he became convinced that she was telling the truth. West was one of the four experts appointed by Judge Carter in September to determine if Patty was stable enough to go into court. In a 135-page document that he wrote with Margaret Singer, a Berkeley psychologist, West raised doubts that Patty was then competent to stand trial. He also concluded that she was so thoroughly influenced by her captors that she had no choice but to go along on the bank robbery. Backing up Bailey's claims, West said that Patty had experienced "a classic example of 'coercive persuasion.' It was a case of be accepted [by the S.L.A.] or be killed."

Lecturing the jury like an amiable college professor, West emphasized the traumatic effects of Patty's kidnaping. At one time, said West, Patty was a girl "whose most important preoccupations" were minor doubts about her upcoming marriage and worries about selecting a silver pattern. Then she was abducted from her own apartment and confined in tiny closets for 57 days. The change, said West, "was about as violent a transition as I have ever seen."

The psychiatrist drew a close analogy between Patty's experience and that of the Air Force officers he had examined. Not only did she live in constant fear, but she was isolated for long stretches and harangued with polemics. Her personality, said West, "became acutely regressed," and she "developed a childlike dependency upon her captors."

West characterized Patty's reaction as the "survivor syndrome," saying that she felt her only hope of living "lay in winning acceptance by or becoming part of the S.L.A." Patty was forced to adopt in part the psychological defense mechanism of "dissociation"--separating her acts from her true personality. West said he found no evidence that Patty actually believed any of the S.L.A. views she advocated--"the phrases she mouthed" were simply things she had to say. As "Tania," said West, Patty did what the S.L.A. asked.

In West's view, Patty exhibited symptoms of dissociation when he brought up the subject of the bank robbery. She spoke about it like someone "trying to reconstruct a dream." What about the shoplifting fracas at Mel's Sporting Goods store, in which Patty helped the Harrises escape by firing weapons over their heads? West explained it away by saying that she performed exactly as she had been conditioned to do. He made much of Patty's first remark to the Harrises: "Did I do it right?" Patty, said the psychiatrist, was seeking their approval as though she were "a child."

After Patty was captured, her signing into jail as an "urban guerrilla" and giving a clenched-fist salute were symptomatic of her condition. There is, said West, a kind of "hanging on for a few days until you're really sure you are not in dangerous territory."

Childlike Level. Bailey let West talk on and on, a tactic that angered Assistant U.S. Attorney David Bancroft. Carter agreed with Bancroft, telling Bailey to stick to questions and answers. But in time Carter grew irritated with Bancroft's protests and said: "If you say he [Bailey] doesn't have the right to object I'll tell you to go soak your head." (Albert Johnson, Bailey's assistant, later gave Bancroft a bottle of shampoo.)

West said that Patty's IQ had dropped to 109 from a score of 129-130 on school tests, which had placed her, the psychiatrist said, in the top 5% of the nation in intelligence. Standard psychological tests revealed a person with a "childlike level of functioning," one with a "lack of self-esteem and shattered pride." The stories she made up were "sad, hopeless, with nostalgia about the past." Describing human characters in one test, she tended to use such words as "dutiful and compliant"--a common response, West told the jurors, among former prisoners of war. (One sharp judgment made by Patty: asked to finish a sentence that began "Most men," she added, "are assholes.")

West said that Patty was recovering, that her IQ was back up to 129 and that "she understands better now what's been happening to her." But West also testified that Patty still trembles at the mention of the Harrises, and that her pulse rate increases by 50% and she grows pale and sweaty when she remembers the closets.

Prosecutor Bancroft, 38, a husky, tenacious man, tried the psychiatrist's temper during cross-examination but failed to shake his testimony or to attack his credentials successfully. Oddly, the prosecution did not bring up one bizarre episode in West's career: killing an elephant with an overdose of LSD. West was trying to find out why elephants have periods of madness. Bancroft also tried to no avail to show that West was habitually soft on defendants. West did add one interesting point: after Jack Ruby was convicted for killing Lee Harvey Oswald, the psychiatrist was called in to examine him. West said he found Ruby to be mentally ill and recommended treatment.

Bancroft had little more success in trying to show that West was an ally of the Hearsts. West did admit that he had sent the parents a sympathetic letter before the arrest advising them that their daughter "might turn out to be in a condition to be helped and possibly defended." West added that he wrote the letter "as one parent to another. I got no reply and didn't expect one."

His voice heavy with sarcasm, Bancroft tried to show that West had jumped to some conclusions while examining Patty. The prosecutor recalled that West testified that the defendant had been deprived of sleep--a classic brainwashing technique--although his report stated that she had been awakened at night only once. How did West decide that Patty had really lost sleep, Bancroft wanted to know. "An educated guess," responded the psychiatrist. "So," Bancroft shot back, "you made an 'educated guess' on one of the most important parts of the deprivation concept."

Classic Syndrome. West acknowledged to Bancroft that sometimes he found it a "significant" reflection of Patty's mental state when she protested her treatment by the S.L.A., and sometimes when she did not. Asked Bancroft incredulously: "You find it 'significant' when she does complain and 'significant' when she doesn't complain?"

Bancroft also succeeded in showing that Patty had had some problems of her own before she was abducted. He got West to acknowledge that Patty had attended five schools in six years, in part because of disciplinary problems. "Didn't you know that she was kicked out of Sacred Heart for telling a nun to go to hell?" asked Bancroft. Patty smiled; West admitted that he knew it. West also said that Patty had smoked marijuana with her fiance Steven Weed--a point that stimulated Bailey to interject: "Is this to say anyone who 'toots' grass is a bank robber?" West also testified that, at Weed's urging, Patty seemed to have experimented with LSD and mescaline. At the mention of mescaline, Patty looked over at her family and mouthed silently: "I never took it."

Bailey's next expert was Dr. Martin Orne, 48, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania and a specialist in detecting when a subject is trying to deceive his questioners. Speaking with a slight Viennese accent, Orne said that he had actually tried to lead Patty into giving inaccurate answers to please him. Orne's considered opinion: "Miss Hearst simply did not lie." This flat statement evoked a strenuous objection from Bancroft and led Judge Carter to issue his caution to the jurors that they would have to make up their own minds on that basic issue.

Agreeing with West that Patty had been forced to go along with her captors, Orne also spoke of her being "dissociated" from reality. The portly psychiatrist said Patty was the victim of a traumatic neurosis that is "fortunately not something we see in civilian life. In fact, the only time I've seen it is in [prisoner of war] returnees." Orne admitted to Bancroft that Patty might be deceiving him and others, but he added that after weighing all the possibilities, he felt "the weight of the data is unequivocally that she was not simulating."

Orne was followed to the stand by Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, 49, a Yale psychiatry professor, prolific author (Revolutionary Immortality, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism) and, like West, one of the nation's outstanding experts on mind control. Lifton interviewed hundreds of P.O.W.s after the Korean War, as well as dozens of victims of Chinese Communist brainwashing; he also conducted a detailed study of survivors of the Hiroshima holocaust.

Facing the jury and speaking forcefully, Lifton reinforced the views of West and Orne that Patty was coerced into taking part in the bank robbery. When he interviewed her in January, Lifton said, Patty "had a classic post-survivor's syndrome--feeling that she should not have done those things she did, that she should have been stronger, feeling very ashamed." Asked if there was any way a human being could defend himself against coercion-persuasion, Lifton said: "There is none. If one's captors are sufficiently determined and motivated, they can break down anyone."

Lie Detector. The psychiatrist said that Patty--"not yet formed as an adult, vulnerable to every kind of fear"--was less prepared to face the coercion than the former P.O.W.s and that in some ways her experience was worse than theirs. He noted that none of the men he had examined had been blindfolded the length of time she had, and that they had been confined in larger cells. "Patty Hearst was dehumanized," Lifton said. "She told me, 'I felt like a thing in the closet.' " When she visited the closets where she had been held prisoner, Lifton testified, "she said, 'My God, how could they do that to me?' "

This week the prosecution gets its chance to present expert witnesses of its own. One psychiatrist who is expected to challenge Patty's story is Dr. Harry L. Kozol, 69, director of a treatment center in Bridgewater, Mass., for sexually dangerous people. A second likely Government witness is Dr. Joel Fort, 46, a San Francisco physician and criminologist who specializes in drug and mental-health problems. He has appeared as an expert witness at some 270 trials, including those of Charles Manson, Timothy Leary and Lenny Bruce. An unorthodox figure, Fort last week gave newsmen a letter requesting that his appearance in court be kept secret because he did not want to contribute to sensationalizing the event. Curiously, the same letter included background material on himself.

Bailey plans to end his defense of Patty this week, abandoning plans to introduce the results of a lie-detector test taken by his client. Although the defense counsel claims that the polygraph test supports Patty's veracity, he is unwilling to put it in the record, fearing that the prosecution would then get a chance to question Patty further about the missing year.

Once the jurors get the case, with all its conflicting and confusing testimony, they essentially will have to decide--as Judge Carter pointed out--whether or not Patty was telling the truth. However the jury finds, the debate is sure to continue. If Patty is convicted, the verdict is likely to be appealed. If she is acquitted, she still faces the prospect of a state trial in Los Angeles on charges--armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon and kidnaping--stemming from the melee at Mel's Sporting Goods store. Patty Hearst's long day in court may be just beginning.

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