Ex-SLA Radical Goes Back To Prison

Officials Say Error Freed Ex-SLA Radical

By ANDREW DALTON

LOS ANGELES (AP) â?? Just days after her release on parole, a former 1970s radical who hid as a fugitive for years was headed back to prison Saturday to serve at least one more year after what corrections officials called an "administrative error" resulted in her early release.

Criticism that followed Sara Jane Olson's release Monday spurred a thorough review of her sentence and the timing of her parole, Chief Deputy Secretary Scott Kernan said at a news conference. Officials discovered a 2004 miscalculation that resulted in the former Symbionese Liberation Army member being released a year too early, he said.

Olson, 61, was detained at Los Angeles International Airport on Friday night and told her right to leave the state had been rescinded. She was sent to stay with family in Palmdale, and was arrested Saturday without incident, Kernan said.

She will be returned to the same prison in Central California that she walked out of Monday and will not be eligible for release until March 17, 2009, he said.

Olson's attorney, Shawn Chapman Holley, called her return to custody "ridiculous."

"It's like they make up all new rules when it comes to her," Chapman Holley said. "It's like we are in some kind of fascist state."

Olson, who was formerly known as Kathleen Soliah, was charged in 1975 with attempting to bomb police cars with the SLA, a group best known for kidnapping newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. But Olson vanished soon after she was charged and reinvented herself as a housewife â?? changing her name to Sara Jane Olson, marrying a doctor and becoming a mother of three in St. Paul, Minn. She was arrested in 1999 after FBI agents acted on a tip from TV's "America's Most Wanted."

In 2001, Olson pleaded guilty to the attempted bombings and was sentenced to 14 years in prison. She later pleaded guilty in 2003 to second-degree murder in the 1975 shooting death of a customer during a bank robbery in Carmichael, near Sacramento. She was serving a concurrent, six-year sentence in that case.

The clerical error that resulted in her release came from a failure to properly factor the Sacramento sentence into her parole calculations, Kernan said.

"This is an extremely unusual situation," the department's General Counsel Alberto Roldan said.

Roldan said the long period between Olson's crimes and her sentencing made the calculations especially difficult.

The SLA started in 1973 when no more than a dozen white, college-educated children from middle-class families adopted a seven-headed snake as their symbol and an ex-convict as their leader. Their slogan: "Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people."

Besides kidnapping Hearst, the group claimed responsibility for the murder of a school superintendent and was involved in an armed bank robbery and other violent activities. Eventually those activities caught up with the SLA members, including Olson, who was charged in the attempted bombings.

The Associated Press: Officials Say Error Freed Ex-SLA Radical