Patty Is Free And Older

Carter commutes her sentence

When all legal efforts failed to overturn the conviction of Patty Hearst for armed robbery, her lawyers and friends mounted a campaign to persuade President Carter to commute her sentence. They argued that Patty had suffered enough and indeed had been treated with special severity by the law because of the wealth and social prominence of her family. Thousands of calls and letters poured into the White House urging her release.

Carter and the Department of Justice agreed with those pleas, and last week after a presidential commutation, Patty Hearst was freed from a California prison, five months before she was eligible for parole. She had served 22 months and 17 days of her seven-year sentence for her part in the Symbionese Liberation Army bank robbery in April 1974.

Noted the Justice Department in its recommendation for clemency: "It is the consensus of all those most familiar with this case that but for the extraordinary criminal and personal offenses that the petitioner suffered at the hands of the S.L.A. she would not have become a participant in the criminal acts ... and would have not suffered the punishment and other consequences she has endured." That raised the question of whether she should have been brought to trial in the first place.

But for Patty Hearst, the commutation was the chance to start again. "This is what we all wanted," she said, waving her release papers before being driven to her family's posh home in the San Francisco suburbs for a catered champagne breakfast with her now legally separated parents, her four sisters and a crying and cheering group of friends.

"I've gotten a lot stronger and a lot more self-confident," Patty said as she chatted easily with the hundreds of reporters gathered at the house. "I take a lot of things in stride that make other people fall apart, and I think mostly that I've learned a lot about people. I was 19 years old when I was kidnaped and I'll be 25 in a couple of weeks."

She seemed to have learned even to joke about her ordeal. She opened a bulky ski parka to show a T shirt bearing the words PARDON ME. She pointed to a large round pendant hung around her neck with the inscription SURVIVOR, 2-4-74, the date she was dragged screaming from her apartment by the S.L.A. "Now I'll get the other date on at the bottom," she vowed. "Today's date."

Some time in April, Patty plans to marry San Francisco Policeman Bernard Shaw, 33, her bodyguard while she was free on bond pending her appeals, but she has not decided whether to take his name. "I don't anticipate anyone calling me Patty Shaw," she said. Asked where she could go to escape being Patty Hearst, she replied with a tough edge to her voice: "I don't see anything wrong with being Patty Hearst."

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