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(AP) - A judge has refused to free a former
1970s radical and longtime fugitive who was sent back to prison
days after state corrections officials released her by mistake.

      Attorneys for former Symbionese Liberation Army member Sarah
Jane Olson failed to show that corrections officials acted
illegally, and that Olson herself should have realized she was
being freed too soon, Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Thomas
Cecil said in a ruling released Tuesday.

      Olson's lawyers had argued that corrections officials had no
authority to re-arrest her after she was mistakenly paroled March
17 after six years in prison.

      Olson, 61, pleaded guilty to the attempted bombing of Los
Angeles police cars and to the killing of a customer during a 1975
bank robbery in suburban Sacramento. She had lived as a fugitive in
Minnesota for 25 years until her capture in 1999.

      Parole officials said they neglected to include the two years
she was supposed to serve for the Sacramento County murder on top
of her 12-year sentence for the Los Angeles County crimes. Inmates
typically serve about half their sentences.

      In his ruling, which was signed on April 21, Cecil said Olson
should have known that she had been released too early.


      "She has not shown that she was ignorant of the facts," he
wrote. "She was surely aware that she had been sentenced to a
consecutive two-year term for her conviction in Sacramento
County."


      Olson's attorney, David Nickerson, said he just learned of the
decision and must talk with Olson before deciding whether to file a
similar motion with an appeals court.

      Corrections Department spokesman Gordon Hinkle said the ruling
"fully supports the actions we took in this case."

      The judge ruled that Olson failed to prove that her release was
anything other than an error. He also dismissed her objection that
parole officials had failed to detail how they recalculated her
proper release date, which is March 2009.

      He also rejected Olson's claim that she was so severely harmed
by her release and re-arrest that she should be freed again.

      "She was paroled for four days before being re-incarcerated,"
Cecil wrote. "Although Petitioner had reunited with her husband,
she had not had steady employment and successful reintegration into
the community."


      Olson was notified of the mistake March 21 at Los Angeles
International Airport as she was about to board a flight home to
Minnesota.

      Objections from prosecutors and relatives of the woman slain
during the Sacramento-area bank robbery prompted the corrections
department to review her sentence.

      The SLA was an urban guerrilla 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.

Gallery

Calif. probes early release of Sara Jane Olson

Sara Jane Olson back in custody; officials blame math error

Former SLA member Sara Jane Olson released from Calif prison

Crime, Law and Justice

A judge has refused to free a former
1970s radical and longtime fugitive who was sent back to prison
days after state corrections officials released her by mistake.

Judge says Sara Jane Olson must stay in prison

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