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A high-profile (and suspect?) sentencing computation "error"

By Douglas A. Berman

As detailed in this Los Angeles Times piece, a high-profile California case now involves an interesting new back-end sentencing twist:California authorities rearrested Sara Jane Olson at noon Saturday, just hours after she was prevented from flying home to Minnesota from Los Angeles, and said she must serve one more year in prison because they miscalculated her release date.  The former member of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army had been paroled Monday from a California women's prison after serving about six years for her role in a 1975 plot to kill Los Angeles police officers by blowing up their patrol cars. Officials from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said at a news conference that they had made a mistake in computing the amount of time Olson should serve in a separate case in which she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for participating in a Sacramento-area bank robbery in which another SLA member killed a customer...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on March 23, 2008 (boomark / email).