Freed SLA Figure Not Free for Long

By ANDREW DALTON

By Andrew Dalton

The Associated Press

LOS ANGELES

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 review of her sentence and the timing of her parole, said Chief Deputy Secretary Scott Kernan of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation .

Officials discovered a 2004 miscalculation that resulted in the former Symbionese Liberation Army member’s 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61, was detained at Los Angeles International Airport on Friday night and told her right to leave the state had been rescinded.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 not be eligible for release until March 17, 2009, he said.

Olson, f ormerly 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 – 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. She pleaded guilty in 2003 to second-degree murder in the 1975 shooting death of a customer during a bank robbery in Carmichael, near Sacramento.

After several adjustments, Olson’s sentences, to be served consecutively, included 12 years for the attempted bombings and two years for the bank slaying, said Seth Unger, a Department of Corrections spokesman.

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