Full Circle for Patty

"In some ways she took it a good deal better than her lawyers." So said Albert Johnson, a leading member of Patty Hearst's defense team last week, after the 22-year-old publishing heiress was found guilty of armed bank robbery and use of a firearm to commit a felony. The prisoner had visits from her parents and spent several hours talking to probation officers who will issue recommendations on her sentence. The rest of the week she read, watched TV and ate her meals with other inmates. Though she could draw as much as 35 years in prison when Federal Judge Oliver J. Carter sentences her on April 12, Patty coolly told Johnson: "I can accept the verdict, because unless someone had lived through it they could never understand what I went through."

The jurors, by their own accounts, tried hard to understand but kept colliding with Patty's own words and actions. Her performance on the stand affected them most. "I really believed her, even when she took the Fifth Amendment," said one juror. But the evidence patiently brought out by Prosecutor James L. Browning Jr. led them to believe that Patty was lying, despite the efforts of Defense Attorney F. Lee Bailey and his staff. There was the photograph of Patty on the day of her arrest, defiantly flashing the clenched fist signal of the revolutionary. There was the testimony of Zigurd Berzins, the electronics technician who said he saw Patty retrieve two dropped ammunition clips and one or two cartridges for her carbine as she entered the Hibernia Bank--an act that conflicted with her testimony that she was carrying no live ammo.

Finally, there was the Olmec monkey trinket that the prosecution said had been given to her by S.L.A. Member Willie Wolfe. It was found in her purse when she was arrested--a fact that led jurors to wonder about her claim that Wolfe had raped her and that she could not stand him. "I believe she really did love Willie Wolfe," said a woman juror.

This week Patty will be taken to Los Angeles to be arraigned on the same charges ihat face S.L.A. Members William and Emily Harris: eleven counts of assault with a deadly weapon, armed robbery and kidnaping growing out of the 1974 shootout in front of Mel's Sporting Goods in Inglewood. Los Angeles County District Attorney John Van de Kamp plans a joint trial that will demand the most intense security since the Manson trial: spectators will be frisked and will watch the proceedings through a bulletproof partition. Nonetheless, Van de Kamp says he is open to plea bargaining by Patty's attorneys, but only if she pleads guilty to the armed robbery and kidnaping charges.

Nor do her legal difficulties stop in Los Angeles. Federal authorities in Sacramento are currently trying Steven Soliah, a former S.L.A. hanger-on, for a bank robbery in which a bystander was killed; Patty's testimony could be sought in that proceeding. Government officials in Pennsylvania want to call her as a witness before a grand jury looking into allegations that Sports Radical Jack Scott, his wife Micki and others helped harbor her for a time in a Pennsylvania farmhouse. And Patty may be a witness at hearings that could lead to indictments of the Harrises in connection with the Hibernia Bank robbery (they are alleged to have been waiting outside in a back-up car)--and for their role in Patty's own kidnaping in February 1974. In a crucial sense, Patty's ordeal at that point will have completed a full, ironic circle.

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