Sara Jane Olson

On November 4, 2020, Olson was arrested along with several others for blocking Interstate 94 in Minneapolis during a protest.

On November 4, 2020, Olson participated in a protest in Minneapolis that was 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. Olson rejected a plea deal offered to most of the demonstrators. She was convicted on December 3, 2021, after a trial by a judge, and ordered to pay a $378 fine. Olsen appealed the conviction on the grounds that the state lacked evidence to find her guilty of using a controlled-access highway as a pedestrian. The judge in the appeal case said that circumstances of the events did not support Olson's innocence and denied the appeal on November 21, 2022.

While in Minnesota, she legally changed her name to Sara Jane Olson. Arrested in 1999, she pleaded guilty in 2001 to two counts of possessing explosives with intent to murder, and in 2003 to second-degree murder, both stemming from her SLA activities in the 1970s. She received a sentence of 14 years in prison. She was mistakenly released for five days in March 2008 due to an error made in calculating her parole before being rearrested. She was released on parole on March 17, 2009.

After serving seven years, about half her sentence, Olson was released from prison 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.

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. Olson was taken back into custody by the California Department of Corrections and placed in the California Institution for Women in Corona for another year.

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.

On November 7, 2003, along with the other three defendants, she pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of second-degree murder. She was sentenced on February 14, 2003, for the maximum term allowed under her plea bargain, which was a six-year term, to be served concurrently with the 14-year sentence she was already serving.

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. In 2002, new forensics technology allowed police to link these shells definitively to those found at Crocker Bank; they charged former members of SLA, including Soliah, with the crime. Prosecutor Michael Latin said that Soliah was tied to the crime through fingerprints, a palm print, and handwriting evidence. The palm print was found on a garage door where the SLA kept a getaway car.

At Soliah's 2002 sentencing hearing on the bombing, police officer John Hall, who had been in the car parked over the bomb, talked about a little girl who stood feet away with her family:

On January 16, 2002, first-degree murder charges for the killing of Myrna Opsahl were filed against Olson and four other SLA members: Emily Harris, Bill Harris, Michael Bortin (who had married Olson's sister Josephine), and James Kilgore, who remained a fugitive. Fidler arraigned Olson on the murder charges immediately following her sentencing hearing on January 18. Olson pleaded not guilty to that charge at the time.

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. 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 it out. Her sentence was converted to five years and four months.

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.

On December 3, 2001, Fidler offered to let Olson testify under oath about her role in the case. She refused. He wondered aloud, "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. Fidler said that under California law, the Board of Prison Terms could later reduce the sentence. Olson's lawyers asserted that due to discrepancies between 1970s laws and current California laws, Olson would most likely serve five years, which could be reduced to two years for good behavior. The Board of Prison Terms did later change the sentence.

On March 3, 1999, and again on May 15, 1999, Soliah was profiled on the America's Most Wanted television program. After a tip generated by the show, she was arrested on June 16, 1999. Soliah was charged in the police bomb case with conspiracy to commit murder, possession of explosives, explosion, and attempt to ignite an explosive with intent to murder.

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.

Soliah and five other SLA members were indicted in 1976 for setting the police bombs. She vanished before the trial could commence. When Soliah was brought to trial years later, prosecutors did not the evidence against her a "slam dunk". They did believe that it was enough to convince a jury of her guilt. Two witnesses who had testified in her grand jury indictment had died by the time she was brought to trial. 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.

In February 1976, a grand jury indicted Soliah in the bombing case. Soliah went underground and became a fugitive for 23 years.

On April 21, 1975, SLA members robbed the Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, California. In the process they killed Myrna Opsahl, a mother of four depositing money for her church. Patty Hearst, who acted as getaway driver during the crime, later provided the information that led the police to implicate the SLA in the robbery and murder; she also said that Soliah was one of the robbers. According to Hearst, Soliah kicked a pregnant teller in the abdomen, leading to her suffering a miscarriage.

On August 21, 1975, a bomb that came close to detonating was discovered where a Los Angeles Police Department patrol car had been parked in front of an International House of Pancakes restaurant earlier in the day. 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 department 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 standoff with LA police.

Atwood and five other core members of the SLA were killed in May 1974 during a standoff 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.

Sara Jane Olson (born Kathleen Ann Soliah on January 16, 1947) is an American far-left activist who was convicted of an attempted murder charge related to a failed bombing plot and a second-degree murder charge related to a botched bank robbery while she was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in 1975. Olson was also accused of helping a group hide Patty Hearst, a kidnapped newspaper heiress, in 1974. After being federally indicted in 1976, Olsen spent several decades as a wanted fugitive, spending time in Zimbabwe and the U.S. states of Washington and Minnesota.

Kathleen Soliah was born on January 16, 1947, in Fargo, North Dakota, while her family was living in Barnesville, Minnesota. When she was eight, her conservative Lutheran family relocated to Southern California. Soliah attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she initially majored in English. While a student at university, she participated in theater and was cast in a production of J.B.