No negligence seen in Olson release
State prison officials said Friday that they have cleared five employees of wrongdoing in the early release of former Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olson.
The employees, three rank-and-file workers and two supervisors who are involved in calculating release dates at the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, were under investigation because they handled Olson’s case file at some point before she was freed March 17.
The inquiry found that none had deliberately contributed to her premature release.
“There was no negligence,” said Scott Kernan, the chief deputy secretary for adult operations. “While there was an error, it was just a very complex case.”
Olson was returned to prison after state officials discovered that she had to serve at least another year.
They traced the mistake to an update of her file in late 2005, during which a sentence for one of two crimes she was incarcerated for had been left out of the calculation of her release date. That crime was a 1975 bank robbery in Sacramento in which another member of the radical group killed a customer.
Union officials had accused the prison agency of trying to make their members scapegoats.
“They should never have been accused of wrongdoing in the first place,” Jim Hard, president of Service Employees International Union Local 1000, said in a statement.
--
Start your day right
Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
