Two months following her kidnapping by the Symbioses Liberation Army in 1974, heiress Patty Hearst was pictured in surveillance footage toting a machine gun in the robbery of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco. She was arrested at an S.L.A. safe house in San Francisco a year later, convicted of her role in the bank robbery and sentenced to seven years in prison. Her sentence was commuted after 22 months by then-President Carter.
The jury selection for the Patty Hearst trial consisted of seven women and five men, all from very different. Ms. Hearst claimed she was brainwashed into committing the acts she was being charged with. In fact, the simulated personalities of Ms. Hearst played a major role in the trial and contributed the narrative guidelines and visual images used by the jury to evaluate her gestures, appearance, and testimony. Many considered this trial to be more of a "major dramatic-political theatrical event," but not a case with a heavy legal ramifications. ".
The evidence used in this case consisted of surveillance film, taped messages, and the "Tania interview" (a manuscript that was drafted by Harrises and Hearst during their year in hiding). The judge made it very clear that "statements made by the defendant after the happening of the bank robbery, whether by tape recording, or oral communication, or in writing, were made voluntarily. " .
While the prosecution aimed to convict Hearst based on stylistics," suggesting that Hearst's authorship of the Tania interview," or her taped messages, were not her own invention. Judge Carter ruled against the introduction of this testimony, dismissing the value of literary analysis, even though violation was a contested issue.
Patty Hearst's "mediated personality " was on trial, and the members of the jury, perhaps, found themselves drawn to interpret Hearst's culpability through her sexual behavior. The jury focused mainly on her "romance " with William Wolfe.