Carter Pushes for Pardon of Heiress Hearst

Former President Carter, who commuted Patty Hearst’s prison sentence 20 years ago, is pressing President Clinton to pardon the newspaper heiress for her part in robbing a bank after an urban guerrilla group had kidnapped and tortured her when she was 19.

In separate discussions with Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, Carter stressed that Hearst, now Patricia Hearst Shaw, has led an exemplary life as a wife and mother since her release from prison in 1979 in one of the century’s most bizarre and sensational criminal cases.

Carter, saying that “my heart went out to her when her case first came to me,” told The Times that he had kept up with her progress since her release and has a personal interest in her case.

“She’s been a model citizen in every way,” he said.

Shaw, 45, lives in Fairfield County, Conn., with her husband, Bernard Shaw, security director of the Hearst Corp., and their two daughters, Lydia, 14, and Gillian, 18, a freshman at Georgetown University.

She declined to comment on her pardon application but her longtime attorney, George Martinez of Tiburon, Calif., said: “She wants to express her gratitude for President Carter’s confidence in her. She is quite moved by his support. He has been her refuge in a sea of misunderstanding.”

But David Bancroft, a San Francisco attorney who as a federal prosecutor played a key role in convicting her of a 1974 bank robbery, has written the Justice Department a letter strongly opposing a pardon.

“She’s minding her p’s and q’s, but simply staying out of trouble doesn’t get you very much,” he said. He called her “a willing participant in some pretty horrible stuff” and added: “Her notion of having been a victim has been rejected by a jury and several judges on appeal.”

The Justice Department confirmed that the heiress has applied for a pardon, but sources indicated that no decision is expected soon on whether to recommend that Clinton grant her wish. With the matter still in the Justice Department’s jurisdiction, the White House declined to comment on the case.

A pardon is supported by several Carter administration officials, including former Atty. Gen. Griffin Bell, who said when her sentence was commuted in 1979 that she probably had been treated more harshly in the courts than most defendants because of her notoriety and her family’s wealth.

A year earlier, in a radio commentary titled “Hearst,” Ronald Reagan, then California’s governor, also suggested that Shaw had been imprisoned because of her family’s wealth and stressed that she had been kept bound in a cramped closet and “sexually abused, beaten, threatened over and over again with death.”

However, some Justice Department prosecutors, who were irritated when Carter commuted her sentence, are still opposed to a pardon, according to a prosecution source.

Shaw was an art student and aspiring academic when the Symbionese Liberation Army, a band of urban terrorists, kidnapped her from her Berkeley apartment on Feb. 4, 1974. During her 57 days of captivity in a closet, she was repeatedly raped.

Her father, William Randolph Hearst Jr., then publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, made numerous efforts to pay for her ransom, at one point arranging for the distribution of $2 million worth of food to the poor in compliance with the kidnappers’ demands. But Shaw, after being released from the closet and lectured, identified with her kidnappers, assumed the name “Tania” and denounced her wealthy parents as “pig Hearsts.”

Within two weeks, she helped rob a Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco. A surveillance camera photo that showed her clad in combat gear, wielding a rifle, was put on wanted posters and displayed around the world.

Later, along with some of her kidnappers, she sprayed a Los Angeles sporting goods store with machine-gun fire. Captured by the FBI in 1976 and put on trial in San Francisco for bank robbery, she maintained that her captors brainwashed her and forced her to participate in the heist.

Three psychiatrists, testifying on her behalf, swore that her experiences while being held captive had influenced her actions.

The prosecution, arguing that she had acted of her own free will, cited a tape recording of her as “Tania,” an avowed terrorist who said that she willingly took part in the bank robbery. The federal jury found her guilty of bank robbery and she was sentenced to seven years.

She had served 21 months and would have been eligible for parole in another 17 months when Carter approved her petition to commute her sentence in January 1979. At the time, he declared that except for her kidnapping and the “extraordinary criminal and degrading experiences that petitioner suffered as a victim of the SLA, she would not have become a participant in the criminal acts for which she stands convicted and sentenced.”

Carter told The Times that he had talked to Clinton and Gore and to Reno “several times” to urge that she be pardoned.

He said that he did not know Shaw when her case came before him, but that, when he read of her experiences, “my heart went out to her.” He said he was never pressured by her family to commute her sentence. But a diverse lobby of both liberal and conservative members of Congress called for her release, as did six of the jurors who had convicted her. Among those joining in a “Free Patty” movement were the Hearst newspapers and an FBI agent who was in charge of hunting her down.

Carter was “very pleased” when she married Bernard Shaw, her former bodyguard, two weeks after her release. “When she got married, I got an invitation to the wedding, and I sent her a little note,” he said.

He has met her only once--in 1986 at the dedication of the Carter Center in Atlanta. “She came through the reception line and we embraced,” he said. “She thanked me for letting her out of prison. I congratulated her on what a wonderful mother she had been, what a fine American citizen she had been, so I have a personal interest in her.”

“The fact is she deserves the pardon,” Carter said. “Her oldest daughter has just entered college. And all this time Patty has not been able to vote, she’s not been a full-fledged American citizen. And I think she’s one special case.”

A county prosecutor in Los Angeles has identified Shaw as a potential witness in the bomb-conspiracy trial of former SLA member Sara Jane Olson, once known as Kathleen Ann Soliah, which is to begin in January. Olson built a life as a physician’s wife and mother of three in St. Paul, Minn., during 23 years as a fugitive from the charges contained in a Los Angeles grand jury indictment.

“I have felt a lot of sympathy for Patty Hearst in terms in what she has gone through,” said Olson’s attorney, Stuart Hanlon. “I would hope that she’s not trying to sell her testimony for a pardon, as she previously sold her story for a book contract.”

Shaw publicly has expressed her reluctance to testify in Olson’s trial, saying she is a convicted felon who wouldn’t make a very credible witness. It was not clear Tuesday how a pardon would affect Shaw’s value as a witness.

Since her release, Shaw has led an active and sometimes public life, participating in charity work, co-writing two books and playing minor roles in several John Waters films.

In 1982, she co-wrote a memoir, “Every Secret Thing,” recounting how she was kidnapped, tortured and brainwashed. And in 1996, she co-wrote “Murder at San Simeon,” a novel based on the 1924 death of Hollywood producer Thomas Ince after a drunken party aboard the yacht of her grandfather, William Randolph Hearst, the legendary newspaper mogul.