News
Law Practice
Nov. 1, 2001
Olson Pleads Guilty to 1975 Bombing Plot
LOS ANGELES - Former Symbionese Liberation Army associate Sara Jane Olson pleaded guilty Wednesday to possessing pipe bombs that were placed under Los Angeles Police Department vehicles 26 years ago.
She then walked out of the Los Angeles Superior Court and announced that she was innocent.
"I pleaded to something of which I'm not guilty," Olson told reporters.
A little later, Olson appeared to backtrack, saying, "I didn't lie when I pled guilty. I acknowledge that there was a factual basis for the case."
No Continuance
Olson claimed she was forced to plead guilty because the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington made it virtually impossible for her to receive a fair trial.
Earlier this month, Judge Larry Paul Fidler denied a defense request to delay Olson's trial to allow the devastating images of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon to fade from potential jurors' minds.
"Given the tenor of times [and] the fact that we were not able to get a continuance on this case ... I had to accept the possibility of the uncertainty of the jury verdict," Olson said outside court. "This is something that, until Sept. 11, I really refused to consider.
'Overwhelming Evidence'
"But since the minute that that happened, after my initial shock, it became clear to me that [the] incident was going to have a remarkable effect on the outcome of this trial. And I think that it's unfortunate, but the effect was probably going to be negative."
Prosecutors dismissed the notion that the recent terrorist attacks would prevent Olson from getting a fair trial, although they readily admitted that they planned to label her a "domestic terrorist" in court.
"The evidence against her was overwhelming," Deputy District Attorney Latin said outside court.
Olson pleaded guilty to two counts of possessing an explosive device with intent to murder. Prosecutors say she placed large pipe bombs underneath both a police cruiser parked outside an International House of Pancakes on Sunset Boulevard and a department van parked at the LAPD's Hollenbeck station in 1975 to get retribution for a police shootout in South Los Angeles that left SLA members dead.
Under a plea agreement, the district attorney's office agreed to drop three other charges against her. She is expected to be sentenced to 10 years to life in prison on Dec. 7.
Under pre-1977 law, defense lawyers said, Olson would be eligible for parole after serving five years and four months behind bars because she no longer poses a threat to society. Prosecutors dispute that assertion and said they plan, if allowed, to petition the state Board of Prison Terms for a stiffer penalty.
Such a hearing has not been held in more than two decades, and prosecutors acknowledged Wednesday that they were unsure how they would go about requesting one.
Olson, who changed her name from Kathleen Soliah, was arrested two years ago by the FBI in a Minneapolis suburb where she had been living the quiet life of a doctor's wife with their three teen-age daughters. Although she lived on the lam for nearly 25 years, Olson was a high-profile figure in her community, active in the local theater and her church.
An episode of the TV show "America's Most Wanted" on the 25th anniversary of the unsolved attempted bombings generated the tip that led to her arrest.
Soon after Olson's arrest, Latin publicly fretted about the prospects for prosecuting such a stale case, in which many of the witnesses were dead or had disappeared along with much of the evidence.
The case, he said, was "not a slam dunk by any means."
In the intervening months, Latin and his colleague, Deputy District Attorney Eleanor Hunter, steadily pulled together what they and defense lawyers both described as a mountain of evidence in the case. At a news conference after Olson's guilty plea, Latin and Hunter refused to detail all of the evidence they had against Olson.
They said they had proof she ordered fuses like the ones used to build the bombs, the largest pipe bombs ever found in the United States, prosecutors said.
The FBI built a replica of the bombs - about 18 inches long and 3 inches in diameter and filled with gunpowder and cement screws for shrapnel - and investigators photographed a police cruiser being blown up with a similar device to show jurors at trial.
Prosecutors also compiled what they described as significant evidence linking Olson to other SLA crimes, including a Sacramento County bank robbery in which a customer depositing the previous day's church offerings was shot dead.
Meanwhile, Olson's defense strategy seemed to lurch from delay to delay. Two San Francisco Bay Area attorneys she initially hired, Stuart Hanlon and Susan Jordon, bowed out, citing family conflicts and health problems, and were replaced by a succession of three other attorneys.
Hanlon and Jordan, who continued to advise the defense, portrayed Olson as a "Soccer Mom" who had lived an exemplary life for a quarter-century after briefly partaking of the radicalism of the 1960s.
"An entire generation it seemed was in revolt against the values they had been raised with," Hanlon and Jordan stated in court papers. "Fresh in the memory of Sara Jane Olson, who was 27 years old in 1974, and the others of her generation were the shootings in 1970 of students at Kent State by the Ohio National Guard, Napalm bombing of children and civilians by the military in Vietnam and of utmost significance to Sara Jane Olson the deaths of six SLA members in a televised firebombing of the house they were hiding out in, in Los Angeles."
After Hanlon and Jordon left the case, the prominent San Francisco attorney J. Tony Serra, who has defended a string of left-leaning radicals over the years including other SLA members, and Shawn Snyder Chapman, a protégé of Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., took over the case.
Chapman appeared to carry much of the pretrial caseload and relied on delay tactics as a trial strategy. Serra admitted Wednesday that he planned to "parachute in" when the actual trial began.
The defense was granted seven trial continuances over the two-plus years since Olson's arrest. Fidler cited those delays when he refused to grant an eighth postponement - that one because of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Many of her family members, including her husband, a daughter and her mother, were in the audience. Olson's mother, Elsie Soliah, who still lives in the Palmdale area where Olson was raised, wept at the guilty pleas.
In court Wednesday, Olson chatted and laughed with her lawyers as Hunter read the charges against her. Hunter asked whether she was under the influence of any drugs that impair her judgment.
"I wish," Olson joked.
Then she added, "No."
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David Houston
Daily Journal Staff Writer
davidhouston@runbox.com
davidhouston@runbox.com
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