Sara Jane Olson re-arrested

The former member of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army had been paroled on Monday from a California women's prison after serving about six years for her role in a plot to kill Los Angeles police officers by blowing up their patrol cars.

Officials from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said at a news conference this afternoon that they had miscalculated the amount of time she should serve in a separate case in which she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for participating in a Sacramento bank robbery in which another SLA member killed a customer.

"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," said Scott Kernan, the correction department's chief deputy secretary of adult operations. "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."

When news organizations reported her release on Friday, law enforcement officials reacted with dismay and raised questions about whether she had been released too early. Corrections Department officials acknowledged that they began an intensive review of their internal calculations about the sentence after those concerns were raised, but they denied that they had bowed to pressure.

Shawn Chapman Holley, the attorney for Olson, who had changed her name from Kathleen Soliah, said her client called her Friday night and told her that prison officials had detained her at Los Angeles International Airport when she was about to board a plane for Minnesota and that she had then been taken to her mother's home in Palmdale.

Holley said that on Saturday morning, she called an official of the Corrections Department and was told that there might have been "a computation error" regarding the amount of time Olson was supposed to serve.

Holley said Olson's husband and an official from the Corrections Department told her that her client was being taken to a prison in Frontera. She said she was outraged by the action and asserted that her client had been illegally arrested and is now being "illegally imprisoned."