How does one celebrate the 39th anniversary of the day one was convicted of armed robbery and use of a firearm to commit a felony? Long walk with your prize-winning dog? A cake? A shot and a beer?
I'm sure that whatever Patty Hearst does today, it'll be done in style, for it's her conviction about which I'm talking. Yup, it was this day in 1976 when a jury of her peers (as much as anyone can be the peer of a wealthy socialite) came back from 12 hours of deliberation and delivered that verdict.
You know her story, of course. SF native and William Randolph Hearst's granddaughter Patricia Campbell "Patty" Hearst, now 61 years of age, was kidnapped, renamed "Tania," joined the Symbionese Liberation Army, and robbed a Sunset District bank (among other places) in April, 1974.
Hearst was arrested in her Mission District apartment in 1975.
(I'll pause here while you scroll down to make some comment about gentrification. Ha ha, that's a good one. You're so funny!)
Her trial kicked off on February 4, and here I'll let Douglas O. Linder take over:
The verdict came after twelve hours of deliberation. Many jurors ended their session in tears. On March 20, 1976, a jury of seven men and five women pronounced Hearst guilty of armed robbery and use of a firearm to commit a felony. In the end, jurors thought Hearst lied to try to shoehorn her actions into an untenable theory. One juror explained that [defense attorney F. Lee] Bailey forced him to either buy or reject "the whole package" and that Hearst's firing shots at Mel's "didn't jive" with her supposedly passive role in the SLA. Hearst was not the weak-willed puppet that the defense suggested she was. A female juror concluded Hearst was "lying, through and through," and that no woman would keep a love token from someone who raped and abused her. Other jurors described Hearst as "remote" and "baffling." We didn't know "whether we were looking at a live girl or a robot," one male juror said. Jurors seemed to blame the defendant for hiding behind Bailey's "mind-control" theory and not coming clean about her true feelings. Hearst's repeated taking of "the Fifth" also didn't sit well with jurors. One explained, "It was a real shocker. A witness can't just tell you what he wants to tell you and not tell you what he doesn't want to."
Hearst was eventually sentenced to seven years in prison, but then-President Jimmy Carter commuted that to time served in February 1979. All in all, she served twenty-two months. Years later, on his last day in office, Bill Clinton granted her a full pardon.
Read all of SFist's Patty Hearst coverage here
