U.S. & World

SACRAMENTO (AP) ― California corrections authorities on Monday began investigating the premature release of former Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olson, who was imprisoned for a murder committed by the radical group and attempted bombings of police cars in the 1970s.

State Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokeswoman Terry Thornton said the probe was being handled by the department's internal affairs division.

"The investigation was formally launched today, and it will be expedited," Thornton said.

Olson, 61, was released March 17, a year early. She was intercepted at Los Angeles International Airport Friday night and returned to prison on Saturday.

Her attorney, David Nickerson, said he intends to file a court motion Tuesday challenging the department's authority to re-arrest Olson.

In 2001, Olson pleaded guilty to attempted bombings of Los Angeles police cars in the 1970s. Two years later she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the 1975 shooting death of a customer during a bank robbery carried out by the SLA in Carmichael, near Sacramento.

Olson was not captured until 1999. She had changed her name from Kathleen Soliah and eluded authorities for 25 years, married a doctor and raised three children in St. Paul, Minn.

State corrections officials blamed a clerical error that was caught after the Sacramento County district attorney's office, the news media and top aides to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger began questioning Olson's release.

"There is a full investigation under way to make sure this doesn't happen again in the future. If the investigation reveals any misconduct or policies weren't followed, we will hold those people accountable," said Schwarzenegger spokeswoman Lisa Page.

The Service Employees International Union, which represents most prison clerks, denied Monday that a clerical error was to blame. Marc Bautista, the union local's vice president, said Olson's release date was properly set by records employees at the Central California Women's Facility and the decision to release her last week was made by the department's Board of Prison Terms.

"The whole process of setting release dates is melting down," Bautista said in a statement.

The Associated Press reported in December that the department was recalculating the release dates for 33,000 inmates because of recent court decisions affecting their sentences.

"If they've miscalculated 33,000 people's sentences, how do we know they haven't miscalculated hers in this case?" said Nickerson, Olson's San Francisco-based attorney. "They obviously realize they have a problem here."

The court motion he intends to file Tuesday will ask the department to explain how it determined Olson's release date. It will also challenge her re-arrest and ask that she be freed immediately because her due process rights were violated.

"What is the Department of Corrections' authority for doing what they did?" Nickerson said in a telephone interview. "They didn't revoke her parole. They didn't do any of the normal steps when somebody violates parole or they revoke parole. I can't even figure out the legal term for what they did."

Much of the confusion over Olson's release was because her crimes date from the days when parole boards determined when an inmate was ready for release, corrections spokesman Bill Sessa said.

In 2002, a special board changed Olson's old open-ended prison sentence from Los Angeles County into a 14-year sentence to conform to current law. A judge later reduced that sentence to 12 years.

Olson subsequently was sentenced to a six-year, open-ended term under a plea agreement in Sacramento County for the killing during the bank robbery.

Sessa said the parole board translated that sentence into an additional two years in prison, but it was erroneously entered into Olson's record as being served simultaneously with the prison term from the Los Angeles crime. It should have been entered as an additional two years, bringing Olson's total sentence for the two crimes to 14 years.

Prisoners typically serve about half their sentences. Olson served six years in prison, when she should have served seven, Sessa said.

"Somewhere along the way, it was overlooked that it was supposed to be consecutive," he said.

The resulting inquiries led to an examination of the record.

"Someone actually stayed up to four o'clock in the morning and read the entire (Sacramento County court) transcript after we got all the calls," Sessa said. "Obviously, because of her notoriety, a lot of questions were raised."

By Friday evening, corrections officials were convinced they had erred.

Olson was ready to board a flight to Minneapolis when she was reached by telephone about 11 p.m. Friday and agreed to cooperate by waiting for parole agents to take her back into custody, Sessa said.

On Saturday, Olson was returned to the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla.

"She has been very cooperative throughout this entire process," Thornton said.

Her new release date is March 19, 2009.

The SLA was an urban guerilla group started in 1973 when a handful of college-educated children from middle-class families with an ex-convict leader took up arms and nicknames and adopted revolutionary rhetoric.

The group took part in bombings and bank robberies, kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst and had a bloody shootout with Los Angeles police in 1974. Six members of the SLA died.

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In 1999, to raise funds for her defense, Olson published a 100-page cookbook titled, "Serving Time: America's Most Wanted Recipes.

 

 

(© 2009 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)