SACRAMENTO -- — Sara Jane Olson's premature release from state prison last week was the result of a clerical error made three years ago, officials said Monday.
The mistake occurred in early 2005, when a worker updated the former Symbionese Liberation Army member's prison file and inadvertently cut two years off her term.
Olson was freed March 17, then rearrested Saturday after being detained at Los Angeles International Airport as she prepared to fly home to Minnesota. She will have to serve only one more year if she works and remains free of discipline while in prison.
Olson, formerly known as Kathleen Soliah, had been given a 16-year term for two crimes by the state parole board in 2002. She received 14 years for a 1975 plot to kill Los Angeles police officers by blowing up their patrol cars, and two years for second-degree murder in a Sacramento bank robbery during which a customer was killed by another SLA member.
The SLA was best known for kidnapping newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. After the crimes, Olson, now 61, spent 24 years as a fugitive before being apprehended in 1999 in St. Paul, Minn.
After she was sent to prison, her lawyers challenged the sentence in the Los Angeles case. Based on a ruling by a state Superior Court judge, the parole board held a hearing in 2004 and ordered Olson's sentence in that case reduced from 14 to 13 years, said Alberto Roldan, chief deputy general counsel for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Counting the two years she received in the Sacramento case, Olson's sentence should have been 15 years, according to Roldan, who said he reviewed her file Saturday. But a correctional case records worker read the minutes of the parole board hearing and, in updating the file, reduced Olson's sentence too much.
The employee "inadvertently entered it in, reducing the overall term . . . to 13 years," Roldan said.
He said that error occurred Jan. 18, 2005, most likely at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, where Olson was incarcerated.
From that point on, the mistake was codified in Olson's case file. Last year, based on another court challenge by her lawyers, the state knocked another year off her sentence in the Los Angeles case.
With credit for good behavior and work she performed in prison, she was released last week after serving six years. Olson worked on a maintenance crew that swept and cleaned the main yard of the Chowchilla lockup, according to prison officials.
