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LOS ANGELES - The former Symbionese Liberation Army fugitive who hid for years by posing as an ordinary housewife has been released from prison after serving time for trying to bomb police cars, corrections officials said Thursday. Sara Jane Olson, formerly known as Kathleen Soliah, walked out of the Central Women's Facility in Chowchilla on Monday, said Bill Sessa, a state Department of Corrections spokesman. In 2001, Olson pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 14 years in prison for attempting to bomb police cars in 1975 with the SLA, the group best known for kidnapping newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. Olson...

Former SLA Member's Sentence Restored Saturday April 14, 2007 2:01 PM LOS ANGELES (AP) - The former Symbionese Liberation Army fugitive who hid for years by posing as an ordinary housewife had a year restored to the sentence she is serving for trying to bomb police cars. In 2001 Sara Jane Olson, formerly known as Kathleen Soliah, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 14 years in prison for attempting to bomb police cars in 1975 with the SLA, the group best known for kidnapping newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. The state Board of Prison Terms had reduced Olson's sentence by a...

Jerrold Nadler's Two Faces on Terror By Jacob LaksinFrontPageMagazine.com | June 13, 2005Last Friday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Patriot Act had already been adjourned, but Jerrold Nadler, the Democratic blimpish congressman from New York and one of the leftmost members of the House Judiciary Committee, was too wound up to care: “We are not besmirching the honor of the United States, we are trying to uphold it,” bellowed the hefty Nadler. By this, Nadler meant to defend his attacks on the alleged abuses of the (in fact) privileged  prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Thanks to the efforts of the...

<p>LOS ANGELES -- After publicly renouncing her guilty plea minutes after entering it in court last week, Sara Jane Olson restated the plea Tuesday to the satisfaction of the judge who had reprimanded her for the disavowal.</p> <p>During a packed 45-minute hearing, Olson appeared shaken and needed a 10-minute meeting with her lawyers before she could answer Superior Court Judge Larry Fidler. But she still momentarily flashed her characteristic vehemence.</p>

CHOWCHILLA, Calif. - A one-time member of the radical group that kidnapped Patricia Hearst had her sentence reduced by one year in the 1975 attempted bombings of two Los Angeles police cars. The 13-year sentence given Tuesday to Sara Jane Olson, a former member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, replaces the one handed down two years ago by the state Board of Prison Terms, which cited the potential violence and harm in the crime. A judge dismissed the term in July, saying the board "abused its discretion" by simply following a recommendation from prosecutors. Olson has already served more than...

A judge has asked prosecutors to justify in a hearing today why the prison sentence of a former member of the Symbionese Liberation Army should be more than doubled. The hearing, to be held in the Chowchilla prison where Sara Jane Olson has been held since October 2002, was ordered in July by Sacramento Superior Court Judge Thomas Cecil. He found that the state Board of Prison Terms did not adequately explain why Olson's original sentence -- five years and four months, earned after she pleaded guilty to planting pipe bombs under Los Angeles police cars -- should be increased...

Ex-SLA Member Could Get Reduced Sentence By LINDA DEUTSCH ASSOCIATED PRESS LOS ANGELES (AP) - Three decades after the Symbionese Liberation Army burst into the headlines with the violent abduction of Patty Hearst, a California parole board has been told to reconsider the sentence of a former SLA member in a related case. The center of the legal dispute is Sara Jane Olson, a housewife who lived in anonymity for 24 years before an episode of "America's Most Wanted" led police to her door in St. Paul, Minn. A Sacramento judge ruled Monday that the California Board of Prison Terms...

SACRAMENTO -- A Sacramento judge has thrown out the 14-year sentence former Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olson received, saying a new hearing is needed to decide how much prison time the former St. Paul woman should serve. Olson pleaded guilty in 2001 to taking part in two attempts to bomb Los Angeles Police Department cars in 1975, and originally received a five-year, four-month prison sentence. The Board of Prison Terms scrapped that sentence in October 2002 in exchange for a 14-year sentence, saying Olson's crimes had the potential for great violence and targeted multiple victims. The three-member board...

The state Board of Prison Terms has scheduled a Sept. 7 hearing to determine whether the 14-year prison sentence Sara Jane Olson received nearly two years ago should be changed. Olson, a former Symbionese Liberation Army follower once known as Kathleen Soliah, had been sentenced to 14 years after plea deals in Los Angeles for attempting to bomb two Los Angeles police cars and for her participation in a Carmichael bank robbery that killed Myrna Opsahl. Those cases had remained dormant for more than two decades while she was a fugitive living in St. Paul, Minn. After her 1999 capture...

<p>Olson, the one-time revolutionary who went underground and became a St. Paul homemaker, said nothing Friday morning when she was sentenced to serve six years in prison for her role in a 1975 murder. She was the only one of four former Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) members who did not speak when a Superior Court judge in Sacramento, Calif., handed down their sentences. That silence was a stark departure from her vocal defiant public posture from the time she was arrested in June 1999.</p>

<p>Whether people are good or evil can not be determined by their decision or ability to tell the truth. Sara Jane Olson's goodness is every bit as evident as Kathleen Soliah's transgressions. Is one of those women more real than the other? While I certainly do not excuse Olson's actions of nearly 30 years ago, I am offended by those who argue that her exemplary lifestyle since has been nothing more than a farce, a means to avoid the punishment she so richly deserves.</p>

<p>Doug Grow's smug Oct. 20 column about Sara Jane Olson, speculating about her hair and makeup and claiming that she alone was responsible for her fate, overlooked several salient points.</p> <p>The harsh reprisals by the state that have befallen Olson have swept thousands of others into a similar net. Since the passage of the Immigration Reform Act in 1996, thousands of legal immigrants who are not yet U.S. citizens have been seized from their homes and workplaces, carried to detention centers or jails, and left there for months or years to face deportation.</p>

<p>First she was Kathy Soliah, a California waitress caught up on the militant fringe of the 1970s. Then she was Sara Jane Olson, a St. Paul mother, gourmet, actress, activist and fugitive hiding in plain sight. Now, she's prisoner No. W94197, sharing one of four bunk beds in a 16-by-18-foot concrete dorm at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla. Every month, she gets to place one 15-minute phone call and gets up to $90 to spend on snacks or hygiene supplies at the prison canteen.</p>

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Defense lawyers in a 1975 Symbionese Liberation Army bank robbery-murder case received a setback Thursday when a judge promised to release tapes of their clients' prison phone calls and social visits to government investigators. The judge's oral decision applies to 21 telephone calls made by SLA defendant Michael Bortin from the Multnomah, Ore., County Jail earlier this year, tapes of social visits to three ex-SLA members in the Sacramento County Jail and a list of who visited them socially and when. The Sacramento County district attorney's office wants the calls and records for possible evidence against four...