Massachusetts Law Enforcement Network

Massachusetts Police News, Information and Discussions on MassCops

Posted by: kwflatbed

California authorities say 'administrative error'
responsible for early release – 1 more year to go

Sara Jane Olson – 1999 mugshot


The strange saga of Sara Jane Olson – aka Kathleen Soliah – the former member of the '70s paramilitary group that kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst, continues.
The Minnesota soccer mom, who was arrested in 1999 after over 20 years as a fugitive and who was released last Monday from her 12-year prison sentence that began in 2003, found herself arrested again Friday night at the Los Angeles Airport after California correctional authorities concluded she had been erroneously released due to an administrative error.
Olson, whose birth name is Kathleen Soliah, pleaded guilty in 2001 to placing pipebombs under Los Angeles police cars in 1976 and made the same plea in 2003 to participating in a Sacramento, Calif., bank robbery in April 1975 where customer Myrna Opsahl was killed by a SLA shotgun blast.
Olson, who was staying with family in Palmdale, Calif., 40 miles northeast of Los Angeles, was detained last night at Los Angeles International Airport as she prepared to board a flight to Minneapolis-St. Paul, where she lives with her husband and daughters.
Initial reports were unclear about Olson's detention but a spokesman for a police union, which had protested her early release, had indicated she may have been violating her parole by leaving California.
At a news conference this afternoon, officials from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation held a news conference and announced they had miscalculated the amount of time she was supposed to serve for the second-degree murder of Myrna Opsahl.
"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," Scott Kernan, the correction department's chief deputy secretary of adult operations, told the Los Angeles Times. "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."
Olson was being held at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla until her Monday release. She had been granted early release based on good-behavior credits earned by doing jobs at the prison.
Olson will now be returned to the same prison and will not be eligible for release until March 17, 2009, Kernan said.
Olson's attorney, Shawn Chapman Holley, blasted her client's return to prison, calling it "ridiculous" and scoffing at the claim 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, according to Associated Press reports. "The idea that suddenly they discovered an error is untrue."
"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."
"As far as we're concerned they're bowing to political pressure and they are wrong," Holley said. "It's like they make up all new rules when it comes to her. It's like we are in some kind of fascist state."
Kernan acknowledged the review was ordered "after many concerns raised in the media." The Los Angeles police union and the son of the woman killed in the 1975 bank robbery had expressed opposition to the release.
"She's out of prison too soon by far," said Jon Opsahl, son of the murdered bank customer. "It's another in a series of slaps in the face of victims by the justice system."
Opsahl lobbied a reluctant Sacramento district attorney to prosecute Olson and other former SLA members after the 1999 arrest in Minnesota. In her 1978 book, "Every Secret Thing," Patty Hearst had described the robbery in detail and who was involved. New forensic analysis of the SLA arsenal, captured in September 1975, convinced the district attorney to pursue the murder case.
Opsahl told Sacramento's KXTV he learned of Olson's early release when his daughter turned on the television set in Southern California and saw the news.
"There it was on TV: 'Sara Jane Olson has been released from prison.'" said Opsahl. "That's a good four years before when I thought she would be released. It was a surprise," he said.
The police union in Los Angeles issued a statement calling Olson "a convicted murderer, who murdered an innocent bank customer and attempted to murder LAPD officers by bombing two police cars."
"Parole shouldn't even be an option for terrorists who are convicted of murdering innocent bystanders and attempting to murder police officers," said the group's president Tim Sands. "Anyone who tries to kill police officers should get significant jail time and serve their full sentence."
Kernan said calculations for early release are made when a prisoner enters the system, not when he or she is ready to leave. The double sentencing and the long period that had lapsed since the crimes contributed to the mistake.
"The department is sensitive to the impact such an error has had on all involved in this case and sincerely regrets the mistake," Kernan said.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.p...w&pageId=59690

---

Posted by: Delta784

It simply infuriates me that people like Soliah/Olson and Katherine Ann Power want to be able to simply wash their hands and walk away from their criminal pasts once they were done playing the anti-establishment radicals.

They need to rot in prison for the rest of their lives and think about all the innocent people's lives they've ruined, and not get a credit because they managed to escape capture for decades.

---

vBulletin Copyright ©2000 - 2008, Jelsoft Enterprises Limited.
vB Easy Archive Final ©2000 - 2008 - Created by Stefan "Xenon" Kaeser