Monday: Clerk's error freed Sara Jane Olson

A clerk calculating Sara Jane Olson's prison release failed to read the entire, voluminous transcript of her sentencing hearings and mistakenly dropped two years from the equation, a California prison spokeswoman said Monday.

That error led to the release last week of Olson, 61, the former 1970s radical who had lived quietly for years in St. Paul as a mother and an actress. Discovery of the mistake led to her return to prison over the weekend.

"The records staff doesn't have time to read the entire transcript, they just don't ... they saw the summary," said Terry Thornton, a California corrections department spokeswoman. "It is a mistake and people are human and people make mistakes."

Thornton said the department's internal-affairs division will investigate the situation. "The investigation was formally launched today, and it will be expedited," she said.

Olson's attorneys have vowed to challenge the legality of Olson's on-again, off-again parole. Her husband, St. Paul emergency room physician Dr. Gerald (Fred) Peterson, deferred the debate to lawyers.

"We're in a privacy-seeking mode," Peterson said Monday, referring to himself and the family's three grown daughters. "We don't want to bring any more attention and, as this thing spins, it's really important for people not to make inflammatory comments, except in the to and fro of the legal system."

Thornton said several factors make Olson's case especially complex, including the fact that California reviews 500,000 sentencing calculations a year and "hardly anyone working today in California, much less in the court system," was around to understand the state's pre-1977 sentencing rules that govern Olson's case.

Error found in review

Olson, then known by her birth name of Kathleen Soliah, was convicted as, part of the militant Symbionese Liberation Army, of attempting to blow up two Los Angeles police cars outside a pancake house in 1975.

In a separate case, she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for participating in a Sacramento-area bank robbery during which another SLA member killed a woman.

Olson's convictions and appeals spanned 2001 to 2007, when an appellate court took a year off her sentence for the botched pipe-bombing. That dropped her time for that conviction to 12 years, half of which she served.

When her released became known last week, the Los Angeles police union, the bank robbery victim's son and Sacramento prosecutors all questioned the timing. Thornton said a staffer stayed up nearly all night to go through the entire transcript.

That's when they learned the two-year sentence for the bank robbery, one year of which she still must serve, had been mistakenly dropped from the calculations, Thornton said. Her release date should have been March 17, 2009, Thornton said.

The Los Angeles-based case is considered her "controlling case" because it includes the most prison time. The second felony from the bank shooting calls for a sentence of one-third of the six years -- that is, two years with one year off for good behavior.

Thornton said other miscalculations have led to premature releases and "every time we find out about it, absolutely we go and bring them back into custody. If a person has more time to serve legally, they are brought back."

Curt Brown • 612-720-4778