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Sara Jane Olson Re-Arrested
By Henry Weinstein and Andrew Blankstein
The Los Angeles Times
Saturday 22 March 2008
The former member of the SLA, paroled Friday,
is detained at LAX. Officials says she has to serve one more year.
California authorities re-arrested Sara Jane Olson at noon today as she was
about to fly to Minnesota from Los Angeles and said she must serve one more
year in prison.
The former member of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army had been paroled
on Monday from a California women's prison after serving about six years for
her role in a plot to kill Los Angeles police officers by blowing up their patrol
cars.
Officials from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
said at a news conference this afternoon that they had miscalculated the amount
of time she should serve in a separate case in which she pleaded guilty to second-degree
murder for participating in a Sacramento bank robbery in which another SLA member
killed a customer.
"Sara Jane Olson's case is extremely complicated, given the amount of
changes to the sentencing laws that have occurred over the last 30 years,"
said Scott Kernan, the correction department's chief deputy secretary of adult
operations. "Upon request for review, [Corrections Department] case records
staff immediately reevaluated this sentence calculation and, in coordination
with our legal affairs unit and the Board of Parole hearings, has revised the
sentence accordingly to ensure that all appropriate time is served."
When news organizations reported her release on Friday, law enforcement officials
reacted with dismay and raised questions about whether she had been released
too early. Corrections Department officials acknowledged that they began an
intensive review of their internal calculations about the sentence after those
concerns were raised, but they denied that they had bowed to pressure.
Shawn Chapman Holley, the attorney for Olson, who had changed her name from
Kathleen Soliah, said her client called her Friday night and told her that prison
officials had detained her at Los Angeles International Airport when she was
about to board a plane for Minnesota and that she had then been taken to her
mother's home in Palmdale.
Holley said that on Saturday morning, she called an official of the Corrections
Department and was told that there might have been "a computation error"
regarding the amount of time Olson was supposed to serve.
Holley said Olson's husband and an official from the Corrections Department
told her that her client was being taken to a prison in Frontera. She said she
was outraged by the action and asserted that her client had been illegally arrested
and is now being "illegally imprisoned."
Earlier in the day, Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman for the agency, said that
when she left her office Friday, she had been informed that department officials
had cleared an out-of-state parole transfer for Olson, "and she was going
to be traveling to Minnesota."
Olson had lived in Minnesota for a number of years before being arrested on
charges related to the 1975 plot to plant pipe bombs beneath police cars in
retaliation for a shootout with Los Angeles police that left six SLA members
dead.
Holley said she had told Olson goodbye Friday at the home of a Southern California
friend. "She met with her parole agent earlier in the day," Holley
said. "He told her she was free to go to Minnesota and told her to tell
her Minnesota parole agent to call her Los Angeles parole agent on Monday as
a formality."
But about 11:15 Friday night, Holley said, she received a call from Olson,
who told her that law enforcement officials at LAX "were telling her her
travel pass was rescinded and they would escort her back to her mother's home
in Palmdale."
After midnight, Holley said, she got another call from Olson, telling her that
she had been taken to her mother's home in a law enforcement convoy and that
although she was not under arrest, law enforcement officials had stationed a
car in front of the house and told her she would be followed if she left.
Like most California inmates, Olson earned credit against her sentence for
working while in prison. She served on a maintenance crew that swept and cleaned
the main yard of the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, according
to prison officials.
Law enforcement officials express outrage last week after news reports of Olson's
release.
Holley scoffed at the suggestion that there had been "a computation error."
"We received an order from the state parole board more than a month ago
informing us that she would be released on March 17," Holley said. "The
idea that suddenly they discovered an error is untrue," Holley said.
"What appears to be the truth is they are bowing to pressure from the
Police Protective League or someone else.
"We have researched the law, and she is officially on parole," Holley
said. "The only way someone on parole can be taken into custody is if they
have violated parole and it has been determined at a hearing that they have
violated parole. There is no allegation that she violated parole."
Police Protective League President Tim Sands issued a statement today after
learning that Olson had been prohibited from leaving the state: "Justice
is not served if convicted murderer Kathleen Ann Soliah can simply wander back
to Minnesota after having only a token sentence for murder and attempted murder.
Her prison sentence is not completed until her time on parole has been served.
She was a flight risk 30 years ago and she is a flight risk now."
Holley said she was contemplating filing a habeas corpus petition seeking Olson's
release.
A source at the Los Angeles Police Department said the local airport police
had helped state Corrections officials detain Olson at the airport without incident
Friday night.
After the 1975 incident, Soliah legally changed her name to Olson and married
Gerald Peterson, an emergency room physician. The couple lived for a while in
Zimbabwe before settling in St. Paul, Minn. Olson lived the quiet life of a
homemaker and mother of three daughters in an upscale neighborhood and appeared
in local theater productions.
Olson was apprehended in 1999 after being featured on TV's "America's
Most Wanted." Her case was moving toward trial on Sept. 11, 2001. After
the terrorist attacks, she struck a plea deal in the bombing attempt, saying
she feared she would not get a fair trial.
For the murder conviction, she received one-year sentence. For the botched
bombings, she was initially sentenced to five years and four months, but that
term was extended to 12 years by a state prison board after the board designated
her a serious offender.
Santa Clara University law professor Gerald Uelmen said he found it "hard
to imagine" that state officials could have made a mistake in calculating
the amount of time Olson was supposed to serve. Uelmen, executive director of
the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, said he had
never heard of an instance when a prisoner was erroneously released early.
However, he added, "if she was erroneously released they can take her
back into custody until she serves her sentence" in full.
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henry.weinstein@latimes.com
andrew blankstein@times.com
Times staff writer Joel Rubin contributed to this article.
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