Patty Hearst Quietly Asks Reagan for Pardon

Kidnaped heiress and convicted bank robber Patty Hearst has quietly asked for a full presidential pardon and is hoping that President Reagan will act on the request before he leaves office in January.

Hearst, whose seven-year federal prison sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, submitted the pardon petition in Washington last August, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Thursday.

Apparently Hearst, 34, is counting on Reagan to act on the pardon before handing over the White House to George Bush, who is less familiar with her case. As governor of California, Reagan was among dozens of political leaders who called for executive clemency for Hearst a decade ago.

Reagan has granted 374 pardons since he took office.

Hearst maintains that she was brainwashed by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army after members of the group kidnaped her in Berkeley in 1974. She was arrested 19 months later after publicly announcing that she had joined her abductors and had assumed the revolutionary name “Tania.”

While a captive, Hearst took part in an armed robbery at a bank in San Francisco.

George Martinez, Hearst’s attorney, said Hearst is seeking the pardon because “she wants to put it all behind her. And she wants to get some indication that there is now complete understanding by the government of the extraordinary circumstances under which she participated” in the robbery.

Hearst was released from federal prison on Feb. 1, 1979, after serving 23 months of her sentence. She has since married and lives quietly in New England.