A couple of weeks after that, she brandished an automatic weapon in an SLA bank robbery. In a photo that become iconic, she posed with an automatic weapon. She took the offer and in a recording released to a radio station, denounced her family and declared her allegiance to the SLA. After being blindfolded for about two months, she was offered the chance to renounce her past and become a guerrilla soldier in the SLA. In 1974, when Patty Hearst was a 19-year-old college student at Berkeley, she was kidnapped by a small, armed revolutionary group called the SLA, the Symbionese Liberation Army, which had an incoherent ideology and unclear goals. Her grandfather, powerful newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, was the basis of the main character in the film "Citizen Kane." Patty Hearst was targeted because of her family and its fortune. His latest book, called "American Heiress," is about the kidnapping and trial of Patricia Hearst, which was a huge media story in the 1970s. Today's guest, Jeffrey Toobin, wrote the definitive book about the O.J.
I'm David Bianculli, editor of the website TV Worth Watching, sitting in for Terry Gross. Rarely have the benefits of wealth, power, and renown been as clear as they were in the aftermath of Patricia’s conviction.This is FRESH AIR. These unfortunate souls have no chance at even a single act of clemency, much less an unprecedented two.
But the United States is not such a country the prisons teem with convicts who were also led astray and who committed lesser crimes than Patricia.
If the United States were a country that routinely forgave the trespasses of such people, there would be little remarkable about the mercy she received following her conviction. To be sure, following her arrest in 1975, she was unlikely to commit these kinds of crimes again. Patricia participated in three bank robberies, one in which a woman was killed she fired a machine gun (and another weapon) in the middle of a busy city street to help free one of her partners in crime she joined in a conspiracy to set off bombs designed to terrorize and kill. “Patricia Hearst was a woman who, through no fault of her own, fell in with bad people but then did bad things she committed crimes, lots of them.
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