Sara Jane Olson

Kathleen Soliah was born on January 16, 1947, in Fargo, North Dakota, the daughter of Elsie Soliah (née Engstrøm) When she was eight, her conservative Norwegian Lutheran Soliah attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she initially majored in English. In college, she participated in theater and was cast in a production of J.B. ==Symbionese Liberation Army==

After graduating with a bachelor of arts degree in theater, Soliah moved to Berkeley, California, with her boyfriend, James Kilgore. She met Angela Atwood at an acting audition where they both won lead roles. They became inseparable during the play's run. Atwood tried to sponsor Soliah as a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a leftist group she had joined. Soliah, Kilgore, and Soliah's brother Steve and sister Josephine followed the SLA closely without joining. Atwood and five other core members of the SLA, including leader Donald DeFreeze, were killed in May 1974 during a standoff and shootout with police at a house near Watts, Los Angeles. They were being pursued for armed robbery of banks, the November 1973 murder of Oakland school superintendent Marcus Foster, and the 1974 kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst. The Soliahs organized memorial rallies for the SLA victims, including one in Berkeley's Willard Park (called Ho Chi Minh park by activists), where Soliah spoke in support of Atwood and was covertly filmed by the FBI. She said that SLA members had been: Soliah asserted that Atwood "was a truly revolutionary woman ... among the first white women to fight so righteously for their beliefs and to die for what they believed in". Police later searched Soliah's room at the SLA safehouse on Precita Avenue in San Francisco. They found several rounds of 9 mm ammunition on the floor and in a 9 mm Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic pistol in Soliah's dresser drawer. Manufacturing marks appeared to match similar cartridges found in Opsahl's body during the autopsy. Los Angeles Police Department bombs On August 21, 1975, a bomb that came close to detonating was discovered where a Los Angeles Police Department patrol car had been parked earlier in front of an International House of Pancakes restaurant. After the bomb was discovered, all Los Angeles police were ordered to search under their cars and another bomb was found in front of a police station about a mile away. Soliah was accused of planting the bombs in an attempt to avenge the SLA members who had died in 1974 in the shootout with LA police. The pipe bombs were rigged to detonate as the patrol cars drove away. One police officer present that day described the first bomb as one of "the most dangerous pipe bombs he had ever seen" and said: Soliah and five other SLA members were indicted in 1976 for setting the police bombs. She vanished before the trial could start. When Soliah was brought to trial at the turn of the century, prosecutors did not believe the evidence against her was a "slam dunk" but did believe it was enough to convince a jury of her guilt. Two witnesses who testified in the 1976 grand jury indictment had died by the time Soliah (now known as Sara Jane Olson) was tried. At the grand jury, a plumber who had sold materials used in the bomb had picked Soliah out of a lineup as one of the buyers. A bomb expert had said the explosive could have been built in Soliah's apartment. Police could not identify any fingerprints on the devices other than those of the officers who had disarmed them. But Soliah's fingerprint, handwriting, and signature were identified on a letter sent to order a fuse that could only be used for bomb-making. Components matching those used in the police car bombs were found in a locked closet at the Precita Avenue house where Soliah lived with the other remaining members of the SLA. ==Underground life, capture, and prosecution==

In February 1976, a grand jury indicted Soliah in the bombing case. Soliah went underground and became a fugitive for 23 years. She moved to Minnesota, having assumed the alias Sara Jane Olson. Olson is a common surname in the state because of the large Scandinavian-American population. In 1980, she married physician Gerald Frederick "Fred" Peterson, with whom she had three daughters. Olson and Peterson also lived in Zimbabwe, where Peterson worked for a British medical missionary group. After their return, they settled in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where Olson picked up her acting career. She was active in Saint Paul on community issues. Shortly after her arrest, Soliah legally changed her name to Sara Jane Olson. She also published a cookbook, ''Serving Time: America's Most Wanted Recipes''. On October 31, 2001, she accepted a plea bargain and pleaded guilty to two counts of possessing explosives with intent to murder. As part of a plea bargain, the other charges were dropped. Plea controversy Immediately after entering the plea, Olson told reporters that she was innocent. She said that she had taken a plea bargain because, due to the political climate after the September 11 attacks, she believed that an accused bomber could not receive a fair jury trial: Angered by Olson's announcement that she had lied in court, Superior Court Judge Larry Fidler ordered another hearing on November 6. There he asked her several times if she was guilty of the charges. Olson replied, "I want to make it clear, Your Honor, that I did not make that bomb. I did not possess that bomb. I did not plant that bomb. But under the concept of aiding and abetting, I plead guilty." On November 13, Olson filed a motion requesting to withdraw her guilty plea, acknowledging that she understood the judge when he read the charges against her. Rather, she said: Sentencing in explosives charges On December 3, 2001, Judge Fidler offered to let Olson testify under oath about her role in the case. She refused. He said, "I took those pleas twice ... were you lying to me then or are you lying to me now?" and denied her request to withdraw her plea. Observers expected her to serve three to five years, but on January 18, 2002, she was sentenced to two consecutive 10-years-to-life terms. On February 14, 2003, she was sentenced to the maximum term allowed under her plea bargain, six years, to be served concurrently with the 14-year sentence she was already serving. ==Incarceration and release==

The state Board of Prison Terms had scrapped Olson's original sentence in October 2002 in exchange for a longer 14-year sentence, saying Olson's crimes had the potential for great violence and targeted multiple victims. She appealed, and in July 2004, a judge said there was "no analysis" of how the state Board of Prison Terms had decided 14 years was appropriate and threw the sentence out. Her sentence was converted to five years and four months. The state appealed and an appeals court panel restored her full 14-year sentence as of April 12, 2007. It ruled that a lower court did not follow procedure when it allowed Olson to appeal. Olson served her time at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla. Her custody status was "Close A", which is reserved for inmates requiring the most supervision. This status limited her privileges and required that she be counted seven times a day. It also prevented her from seeking relocation to a facility closer to her home. David Nickerson, Olson's attorney, said that her status reflected the Department of Corrections' view that she was a potential flight risk. In a 2007 interview with Marie Claire magazine (published by Hearst Corporation), Olson's 23-year-old daughter Emily Peterson dismissed her mother's radical past with the SLA. She said of her mother, "She lived in Berkeley. It was kind of normal... I always tell people she wasn't a terrorist. She was an urban guerrilla." Olson never publicly expressed remorse or regret for her actions. Release from prison and rearrest Olson was released on parole from the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla on March 17, 2008. For five days, she stayed at her mother's home in Palmdale and spent some time hiking with her husband. On March 21, 2008, she was rearrested when it was decided that she had been mistakenly released a year early from prison due to a miscalculation by the parole board. Her attorney claimed that the action was politically motivated. Release and parole After serving seven years in prison, about half her sentence, Olson was released on March 17, 2009, to serve her parole in Minnesota. Police unions in both Minnesota and California protested the arrangement, saying that they believed her parole should be served in California, where her crimes were committed. In a letter to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty also protested Olson being allowed to return to Minnesota. ==Interstate 94 protest==

Years after her return to Minnesota, on November 4, 2020, Olson participated in a protest in Minneapolis called by the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression after the U.S. presidential election. Olson and several others marched onto Interstate 94, where they were met with a response from the Minneapolis Police Department and Minnesota State Patrol. Several hundred protesters were arrested. Olson was originally charged with creating a public nuisance, but the charge was lowered to a petty misdemeanor. She rejected a plea deal offered to most of the demonstrators. On December 3, 2021, after a trial by a judge, she was convicted and fined $378. Olson appealed the conviction on the grounds that the state lacked evidence to find her guilty of using a controlled-access highway as a pedestrian. On November 21, 2022, the judge in the appeal case said that the circumstances of the events did not support Olson's innocence and denied the appeal. ==References==