But AuntPam, there’s a difference between telling your captors what they want to hear and doing what they tell you to try to save yourself, and brainwashing. In the first you are pretending. The the second, you have supposedly been convinced that what you are doing is right.
Yeah, Lemur866, you have a point. However, at the time of Ms. Hearst’s trial, there was a substantial amount of discussion about what’s called “Stockholm syndrome.” This is the tendency of most captives to begin to make allies and friends with some of their captors. If anyone you know has ever been the victim of a mistaken arrest by the cops, he or she can tell you that it takes only HOURS before one begins to identify the most sympathetic of the prison/jail guards and try to win them over. So even ordinary people who are merely “in the system”–not being tortured except insofar as being deprived of liberty and placed in a highly stressful situation is torture–begin to identify with the captors.
For persons who are actually being tortured, a phenomenon called “splitting” occurs. The captive begins to dissociate, sort of to have two personalities: the submissive one that doesn’t risk being killed for defying the torturers and the real one–the furious one–which is deeply buried. Victims of child sexual abuse frequently report this sort of reaction. “It was like I wasn’t there–I used to make my mind go blank and think about other stuff when IT was happening.”
Psychiatrists testified at her trial that some of this stuff happened to Patty Hearst. I think it’s accurate, and if “brainwashed” is sort of a pop-psychology tag for what happened to her, I also think that’s accurate. Finally, in these days of women’s liberation, it’s kind of humiliating for us to acknowledge that throughout history, captive women have exploited their feminine “wiles” to survive and even prosper in enemy camps. Think about Cleopatra. Who conquered who?
The problem is that legally, all this “dissociation” stuff just isn’t sufficient to escape from legal responsibility, and it’s not easy stuff to get across to a jury. She did hold a gun and shout revolutionary slogans during those bank robberies. And no matter how many shrinks testify, there’s a tendency to think: But once they trusted her, why didn’t she just run away? Well, she had already been dragged out of a “safe place” once, so maybe she couldn’t ever believe, at an emotional level, that there would ever BE any safe places again. Whatever. And we’ve all seen Steve McQueen do the Great Escape enough that we just expect that any red-blooded American will do that.
Whatever one thinks, TWO presidents agreed that Patty Hearst wasn’t as guilty as the courts found her. Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence, and Clinton outright pardoned her after she’d done a a couple decades of public service. I say, let her be.
Hearst’s pardon was long overdue. Although, while she was being held, a song called “Rich Girl” by Hall and Oats was quite popular. Some said it was written with her in mind. I’m not sure I agree, but when I hear the song, I wonder…
“Guilty but mentally ill” is not an option in most states, nor under the federal system barbitu8. And I apologize for implying (twice! :o)this was a question of state law–PH must have been charged with and convicted of federal crimes, or Clinton would not have been able to pardon her. Here’s what federal law is on the insanity defense: 18 U.S.C. section 17(a).
As I understand it, PH thought she was doing the right thing at the time by helping out the SLA, but most probably had the capacity to understand that robbing banks is a crime and generally considered a bad thing. Hence, she may have been legitimately messed up in the head, but not enought to walk under the federal insanity defense.