Emily Harris

Emily Harris was paroled in February 2007 after having served four years in prison.

In 2003, she was convicted of murder in the second degree for being the shooter in a 1975 slaying that occurred while she and other SLA members were robbing a bank in California. She was sentenced to eight years in prison for the murder.

However, with new forensics techniques, the FBI was eventually able to link shotgun pellets removed from Opsahl's body to shotgun shells found in an SLA hideout. Additional evidence mounted. In January 2002 Harris and three other SLA members were charged with the Opsahl murder. Harris's bail was set at $1,000,000, which her supporters quickly gathered.

Facing a possible conviction, Harris and the others pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in November 2002. Emily Harris was sentenced to eight additional years in prison; Bill Harris was sentenced to seven years, and Kathleen Soliah and Michael Bortin were each sentenced to six years for their roles.

After her release from prison in 1983, Harris became a computer programmer. She began a successful computer consulting company. She worked at MGM Studios until her second conviction. She and her husband divorced.

During the robbery, customer 42-year-old Myrna Opsahl, a mother of four, was shot to death. Opsahl was depositing a church collection at the time. Hearst stated in her 1982 autobiography Every Secret Thing that Emily Harris was the shooter. Hearst stated that Harris said, "Oh, she's dead, but it doesn't really matter. She was a bourgeois pig anyway. Her husband is a doctor." Other SLA members had urged Harris not to bring the shotgun to the robbery, as it had accidentally discharged twice during preparations.

Hearst had become a participant in SLA crimes. Yoshimura, Patty's closest friend while underground, was a fugitive because explosives had been stored in a garage she rented. During that year the SLA committed a string of crimes, including an April 21, 1975, armed robbery of Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, California.

In February 1974 they kidnapped Patty Hearst, the college student heir to the Hearst newspaper chain.

After six other SLA members died on May 17, 1974 in a Los Angeles shootout with police and the house fire it triggered, Emily and Bill Harris took over the leadership of the SLA. They spent more than a year eluding the authorities with Hearst, who had joined the SLA, and new members Kathleen Soliah and her boyfriend Jim Kilgore, Soliah's sister Josephine Soliah and her husband Mike Bortin, their brother Steven Soliah, and Wendy Yoshimura.

She married William Harris, whom she had met at the university in Bloomington. They moved to Berkeley, California in 1973, traveling with friends Gary Atwood and Angela Atwood. They soon joined a left-wing group organized through the university in Berkeley that, among other things, visited inmates in prisons in northern California. Late that year the Harrises met an escaped prisoner, Donald DeFreeze, who was staying with white leftist activists in Berkeley.

Emily Harris (born February 11, 1947 as Emily Montague Schwartz) was, along with her husband William Harris (1945–), a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), an American left-wing terrorist group involved in murder, kidnapping, and bank robberies. In the 1970s, she was convicted of kidnapping Patty Hearst.