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Just days after her release on parole, former 1970s radical Sara Jane Olson was headed back to prison Saturday to serve at least one more year after what corrections officials called an "administrative error" resulted in her early release. Criticism that followed Olson's release Monday spurred a thorough review of her sentence and the timing of her parole, Chief Deputy Secretary Scott Kernan said at a news conference. Officials discovered a 2004 miscalculation that resulted in the former Symbionese Liberation Army member being released a year too early, he said. Olson, 61, was intercepted at Los Angeles International Airport on Friday night and told her right to leave the state had been rescinded. She was sent to stay with family in Palmdale, Kernan said. On Saturday, a warrant for her arrest was issued and she was taken into custody without incident. She will be returned to the same prison in Central California that she walked out of Monday and will not be eligible for release until March 17, 2009, Kernan said. Olson's attorney, Shawn Chapman Holley, called her return to custody "ridiculous." "It's like they make up all new rules when it comes to her," Chapman Holley said. "It's like we are in some kind of fascist state." In 2001, Olson, formerly known as Kathleen Soliah, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 14 years in prison for attempting to bomb police cars in 1975 with the SLA, the group best known for kidnapping newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. Olson vanished soon after she was charged in the attempted bombings and reinvented herself as a Minnesota housewife. Olson later pleaded guilty in 2003 to second-degree murder in the 1975 shooting death of a customer during a bank robbery in Carmichael, near Sacramento. She was serving a concurrent, six-year sentence in that case. The clerical error that resulted in her release came from a failure to properly factor the Sacramento sentence into her parole calculations, Kernan said. "This is an extremely unusual situation," the department's General Counsel Alberto Roldan said. Roldan said the long period between Olson's crimes and her sentencing made the calculations especially difficult. The Associated Press Related: Riverside doctor angered over release of woman radical who killed his mother |
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