Patty Hearst never should have gone to prison.

The newspaper heiress is in the news again as former President Jimmy Carter is pressing President Clinton to give her a pardon.In a rather bleak episode of U.S. judicial history, Hearst received a seven-year sentence for her part in a bank robbery in San Francisco in April 1974. She served nearly two years before Carter commuted her sentence in January 1979. But without a pardon she can't vote -- hence the plea to Clinton.

I was living in California when Hearst, granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped the night of Feb. 4, 1974, from her Berkeley apartment by a bunch of wackos known as the Symbionese Liberation Army. Hearst was 19.

As a journalist, I was uncomfortable with the way my brothers and sisters in the media hounded Hearst's parents. Microphones and cameras became constant and unwelcome companions. The pain felt by Randolph and Catherine Campbell Hearst as they fielded question after question, day after day, was palpable through the TV set.

As a human being, I was saddened by the whole episode -- the kidnapping, the brutal treatment of Hearst, her coerced involvement in crime and her trial and sentencing.

The prosecution contended she "converted" to the Symbionese Liberation Army's cause (which was a vague form of socialism and included violence as a means to overthrow capitalism).

Hearst was defended by F. Lee Bailey, who she said seemed more interested in a book deal than in her defense. His rambling final summation doomed her, she believes.

Bailey's blunderings notwithstanding, how a jury could convict her is something I didn't understand then or now. Yes, she participated in a criminal activity. But willingly?

Oh, please.

Here are the facts: Her life is shattered when two gunmen and a woman forced their way into her apartment, severely beat her fiance, Steven Weed, and dragged Hearst from her living quarters in her underwear and forced her into the trunk of a waiting car.

The next 57 days were spent in a closet where she was bound and blindfolded -- except when she was raped. Repeatedly. She was allowed to leave the closet only to use the bathroom and to bathe.

As Hearst explains in "Every Secret Thing," a book about her ordeal,

"My thoughts at this time were focused on the single issue of survival . . . There was no point in objecting to anything anymore, not even in my thoughts. I would have to do anything they wanted in order to survive. At the same time I could not think of any further humiliation to which they could subject me. I did not want to think anymore at all."

When they sensed her will was weakening, and after having told her she could either join them or die, they gave her another "choice:" Be released and go home or join them. Does anyone believe had Hearst chosen to "go home" her suddenly benevolent rapists would have allowed her to do so?

"The choice caught me totally off guard but only for an instant . . . I knew that the real choice was . . . to join them or be executed. They would never release me. They could not. I knew too much about them. He (SLA leader Donald DeFreeze) was testing me, and I must pass the test or die . . . 'I want to join you,'" Hearst responded.

A few days later Hearst "joined" her "friends" in the San Francisco bank robbery, being caught on a bank camera in that classic pose with an automatic weapon.

She was guilty all right. Of wanting to live.

Yes, there was that infamous statement she made denouncing her parents and "the corporate ruling class" while professing allegiance to the SLA.

A doctor called by the defense team, Dr. Robert J. Lifton of Yale University, said her situation was similar to that of a coerced prisoner of war, which, of course, she was.

Hearst had been brutalized and brainwashed, which is why she didn't try to escape from her SLA associates before she was captured by the FBI in September of 1975.

But a convert to the SLA? Not unless one believes being raped and held captive in a closet while blindfolded are tools of conversion.

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Patricia Hearst Shaw is now 44, married for 20 years and has two teenage daughters.

A pardon would at least be an acknowledgement of the injustice that was done to her. It's long overdue.

Deseret News editorial writer John Robinson can be reached by e-mail at

jrob@desnews.com

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