I Signed A Birthday Card For William Harris Today

[I just finished watching Patty Hearst's interview on Larry King. As the faculty at school haven't ceased to remind us since the SLA Four were charged last week, the 70's were a very confusing time, especially in the Bay Area. My own memories of the era are those of a very young child: the Symbionese Liberation Army were on my TV from the very first, along with Jerry Ford, Jimmy Carter, Jerry Brown, George Moscone, Harvey Milk, Dianne Feinstein, Dan White, Jim Jones and on and on and on. I think one of the reasons San Francisco still retains its sense of self-importance (when it seems the rest of the country moved on in the Reagan years and after) is the endless media spotlight it endured in the mid-to-late 1970's. It's a time that I think about a lot, and not just because, apart from my family, those images from the tube form my earliest memories.]

[When asked about Bill Harris tonight, Patty Hearst described him as the leader of the SLA at the time of her kidnapping and the robberies in which she took part, including the one in which Myrna Opsahl was killed. I've never met Bill Harris, but his wife taught my Criminal Law course last semester, and will be teaching my Criminal Procedure course starting next Monday. (Irony lost on none of my classmates, believe me: we learned the felony murder rule from the wife of...) I've seen their children running around the halls of New College Law School, the same boys who were traumatized when the cops arrested their dad while he was taking them to school last week. That aspect of his arrest, for an incident that took place 27 years ago, has been a main bone of contention at a campus that has been wrestling already with the American political atmosphere in the wake of September 11th.]

[Larry King asked Patty Hearst whether people can change, whether Sara Jane Olson's and Bill Harris' attempts to put their deeds behind them (in a way that Tania obviously hasn't) means something. Patty said yes, people can change, but there was a steely anger behind her patrician demeanor that didn't let Larry take his questioning to its logical next step, even if he'd wanted to: given the fact that Bill Harris has already served time for crimes he committed as a member of the SLA, and given the anti-terrorist hysteria gripping the U.S. right now, is a 27-year-old felony-murder charge against these four what we should be concentrating on? Patty Hearst obviously thought so, but I'm not so sure.]

[My two professors, who are friends and colleagues of my Criminal prof and her husband, say that Bill Harris is a good man, who has attempted to put the past behind him, to live a quiet life not in hiding, and to raise two young sons who got to see their father hauled off last week. John and I had a long discussion about how I would feel if I were Myrna Opsahl's son; I really don't have an answer to that. I do have a feeling that these arrests came at a politically opportune time for the powers that be. There are hundreds of murder cases that are dragging slowly thru what is called our criminal justice system, and that, as painful as the last quarter century has been for the Opsahl family (not to mention the Hearsts, the Harrises and everyone else), this situation is coming to a head not out of the Sacramento County DA's miraculous new ability to interpret new evidence (even Patty Hearst seemed exasperated at how long this case has lain dormant), but because any remnants of the radical leftist legacy of the 1960s and 70s are targets too easy to pass up at this juncture.]

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