Whether or not it would ultimately prove to be the "trial of the century," as some headlines proclaimed, Case No. 74-364: The U.S. v. Patricia Campbell Hearst promised to be one of the most powerful court dramas of recent years. As Federal Judge Oliver Carter opened the proceedings in his San Francisco courtroom last week, Patty Hearst's trial for armed bank robbery was already shaping up as not only the climactic episode in her still pulling personal story of kidnaping and radical politics, but also as a kind of peculiarly American legal Super Bowl. Some 200 reporters representing news organizations from as far away as Australia and West Germany were in town for the event. Court groupies and Hearst case buffs arrived from all over the country; some had taken leaves from their jobs to see as much of the six-to eight-week trial as possible.
Would-be spectators lined up before dawn in order to be among those allowed to pass through the weapons-screening device set up outside the cramped courtroom. The trial, said one lawyer-spectator, had all the elements of theater—"a script, actors, wardrobe, props." The trial should clear up at least some of the mysteries still shrouding Patty's 19½ months with the Symbionese Liberation Army as Captive Patty and Comrade, willing or not, Tania Hearst. But unless and until Patty takes the stand, the overwhelming presence in the legal drama will not be the Hearst heiress herself but the man who will press her case in court: Boston Attorney F. (for Francis) Lee Bailey.
Bailey is nothing if not confident.
"The fact is it's not a difficult case," he told TIME Correspondent Joseph Boyce.
Perhaps. Patty, 21, is on trial for her part in the S.L.A.'s April 1974 robbery of $10,600 from a Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco. In his effort to convict her of armed bank robbery—which carries a sentence of up to 25 years—Prosecutor James Browning, 42, plans to prove that she was there willingly. In response, Bailey will try to convince Patty's mostly middle-class jury of five men and seven women, only five with children of their own, that she took part in the holdup only because she had in effect been brainwashed by her S.L.A. captors during the twelve weeks since they had kidnaped her from the Berkeley apartment that she had shared with Steven Weed. If Bailey is successful, it will be the first time in the U.S. that a jury has ever been persuaded that a defendant did not have criminal intent because of having been brainwashed.
When the trial opened, the courtroom was jammed with 100 reporters in a box facing the jury, some 90 spectators and assorted attorneys, aides and badge-wearing U.S. marshals posted along the walls and aisles. Patty Hearst, wearing a beige pin-stripe pantsuit and salmon nail polish, sat near Bailey at the defense table.
Prosecutor Browning rose to make his opening statement.