Turning Justice Upside Down for Kathleen Soliah

What, did J. Edgar Hoover come back from the dead and reclaim his old job while no one was looking?

How otherwise to explain the search-and-arrest by the LAPD and FBI of Kathleen Soliah, federal fugitive and accused planter of pipe bombs, 24 years after the fact?

Who was this Kathleen Soliah, anyway, to be worth the trouble?

She was a Palmdale girl whose family said the Pledge of Allegiance every day. Over time, she became just about the last missing member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a small radical cell that became notorious way out of proportion to its numbers and brains when it kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst in 1974.

Its biggest moment was its last, a blazing Gotterdammerung in South-Central L.A. that same year, when six of them died in a firefight with the LAPD. It was Soliah who the FBI had under surveillance when they instead found Hearst. And it was she, the cops say, who planted two pipe bombs under LAPD cars to retaliate for those half-dozen charred corpses of her fellow “soldiers.”

And who is she now, this Sara Jane Olson who found herself surrounded as she steered the family minivan down a street in St. Paul, Minn.? She is a 52-year-old wife and mother who reads to the blind, performs in community theater and makes miniature ceramic Christmas villages. She now awaits extradition to L.A. on charges that could put her in prison for life.

Now, maybe American justice was dramatically altered while I was out in the kitchen getting a snack, but if I’m not mistaken the chief goal of punishment is still rehabilitation. By all accounts, Sara Jane Olson’s conduct would be praiseworthy in someone coming out of prison. And now she could be sent into one? Well, prison can be so educational, can’t it? Perhaps behind bars, she could finally learn how to build those pipe bombs right, so they’ll blow up on schedule next time.

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Soliah’s extradition hearing is about three weeks off. I say we skip all that courtroom business and go right to deciding it man-to-man: Gov. Gray Davis versus Gov. Jesse Ventura, three falls out of five.

That’s hardly more absurd than the dramatics of the Soliah arrest. It came after “America’s Most Wanted’s” silver anniversary broadcast about the SLA and amidst sound bites recalling “G-men-never-sleep” Hooverisms.

Her arrest dumps into the crowded lap of the L.A. County district attorney’s office yet another groaner of a case, one as old as some of the D.A.’s fledgling attorneys:

* The police bomb expert has died, and his grand jury testimony is not admissible.

* Of physical evidence like fingerprints, there is said to be virtually none.

* Because one bomb was in the Hollenbeck Division, and the other outside an International House of Pancakes in Hollywood, where it evidently fell off its intended target, the case would be tried before a downtown jury.

And downtown juries, as we’ve heard, are not always kindly disposed toward police. Eyebrows might be raised at the news that the detective running the investigation is the son of the now-retired LAPD captain who supervised both the fiery SLA shootout and the inquiry into the pipe bombs. Is this, a smart defense attorney could suggest, only about an outstanding warrant, or winning one for the old man?

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The SLA killed two innocent people and six of themselves, a telling ratio for a radical group that could talk like Karl Marx and act like Harpo Marx.

It blew its cover here with parking tickets and shoplifted socks. With flourishes like cyanide-tipped bullets and a slogan too clumsy to catch on (“Death to the fascist insect that preys on the life of the people”), the SLA as guerrilla theater was off-off-Broadway.

But potentially lethal, nonetheless. Guns are guns, and pipe bombs are pipe bombs.

And bygones are bygones. Ford pardoned Nixon, Carter commuted Patty Hearst’s sentence.

Soliah probably has nothing that prosecutors want, deal-wise. Just about everybody else is in prison, or already out. What can she do--testify against her parents because they met their daughter in a Santa Clarita park in 1987 and didn’t drop a dime on her?

Perhaps her lawyer will call the authorities’ bluff: Go ahead and try her on 24-year-old evidence. But the D.A., caught between the LAPD’s long memory for wrongs done to its own and an albatross of a court case, would be wiser to entertain a plea bargain. Maybe a $10,000 fine to the police widows’ and orphans’ fund, inasmuch as Soliah could have created some of each. And community service--say, reading to the blind in the Twin Cities, for 20 years to life.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com