[News] Parole board to reconsider Sara Jane Olson's sentence

[News at freedomarchives.org]

Parole board to reconsider ex-SLA member's sentence

By Linda Deutsch


LOS ANGELES - A California parole board said Monday it will hold a new 
"serious offender hearing" for former Symbionese Liberation Army member 
Sara Jane Olson in response to a judge's order overturning the 14-year 
prison sentence imposed by the board last year.

Superior Court Judge Thomas Cecil ruled last week that the state Board of 
Prison Terms "abused its discretion" by extending Olson's prison term 
without providing independent analysis of its decision.

He suggested that the board merely rubber-stamped a recommendation by Los 
Angeles prosecutors who asked for Olson to serve added prison time for two 
attempted bombings in the 1970s.

Board spokesman Tip Kindel said the hearing will take place Sept. 7 at the 
women's prison in Chowchilla, where Olson has been incarcerated since 2002. 
She is also serving a separate six-year sentence for her role in a 1975 
Sacramento bank robbery in which a woman was killed.

Olson's lawyer, Shawn Chapman, has said she hopes that Olson's sentence in 
the bomb case will revert to the original five years and four months 
imposed when she pleaded guilty in 2001 to taking part in two attempts to 
bomb Los Angeles police cars in 1975.

Los Angeles County district attorney's spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons said 
prosecutors will attend the hearing and will make substantially the same 
presentation they made previously.

"We will ask for the same amount of time," she said.

Two former police officers who were the intended victims of the attempted 
bombings will be at the hearing, Gibbons said.

Olson had been a fugitive since her radical days of the 1970s, eventually 
settling in St. Paul, Minn., and changing her name from Kathleen Soliah to 
Sara Jane Olson. She married a doctor and lived quietly until 1999, when 
the television show "America's Most Wanted" featured the case in a broadcast.




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