(5 of 6)
Classic Syndrome. West acknowledged to Bancroft that sometimes he found it a "significant" reflection of Patty's mental state when she protested her treatment by the S.L.A., and sometimes when she did not. Asked Bancroft incredulously: "You find it 'significant' when she does complain and 'significant' when she doesn't complain?"
Bancroft also succeeded in showing that Patty had had some problems of her own before she was abducted. He got West to acknowledge that Patty had attended five schools in six years, in part because of disciplinary problems. "Didn't you know that she was kicked out of Sacred Heart for telling a nun to go to hell?" asked Bancroft. Patty smiled; West admitted that he knew it. West also said that Patty had smoked marijuana with her fiancé Steven Weed—a point that stimulated Bailey to interject: "Is this to say anyone who 'toots' grass is a bank robber?" West also testified that, at Weed's urging, Patty seemed to have experimented with LSD and mescaline. At the mention of mescaline, Patty looked over at her family and mouthed silently: "I never took it."
Bailey's next expert was Dr. Martin Orne, 48, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania and a specialist in detecting when a subject is trying to deceive his questioners. Speaking with a slight Viennese accent, Orne said that he had actually tried to lead Patty into giving inaccurate answers to please him. Orne's considered opinion: "Miss Hearst simply did not lie." This flat statement evoked a strenuous objection from Bancroft and led Judge Carter to issue his caution to the jurors that they would have to make up their own minds on that basic issue.
Agreeing with West that Patty had been forced to go along with her captors, Orne also spoke of her being "dissociated" from reality. The portly psychiatrist said Patty was the victim of a traumatic neurosis that is "fortunately not something we see in civilian life. In fact, the only time I've seen it is in [prisoner of war] returnees." Orne admitted to Bancroft that Patty might be deceiving him and others, but he added that after weighing all the possibilities, he felt "the weight of the data is unequivocally that she was not simulating."
Orne was followed to the stand by Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, 49, a Yale psychiatry professor, prolific author (Revolutionary Immortality, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism) and, like West, one of the nation's outstanding experts on mind control. Lifton interviewed hundreds of P.O.W.s after the Korean War, as well as dozens of victims of Chinese Communist brainwashing; he also conducted a detailed study of survivors of the Hiroshima holocaust.