The Dilemma of Sara Jane Olson

Soliah changed her name and moved to St. Paul, where she married Dr. Gerald F. Peterson, raised three daughters, acted in community theater, and became active in mildly left-wing political causes, including the anti-apartheid movement. On June 16, 1999, the FBI arrested Soliah in Minnesota; she was subsequently extradited to Los Angeles and then freed from jail after her family and friends posted $1 million bail. She changed her legal name to Sara Jane Olson, liquidated her children's college funds, and hired two of the most successful criminal lawyers in the country: Susan Jordan, a well-known feminist based in Oakland who had represented the Harris couple, convicted of kidnapping Hearst and paroled from prison in 1983; and Stuart Hanlon, who had won an acquittal on the assassination of Oakland School Superintendent Foster for SLA member Russell Little.

When it looked as though the trial in Los Angeles would take months, instead of weeks, Hanlon, a widower, resigned as attorney of record, citing his need to be with his children. Jordan resigned for health reasons. But Hanlon remains involved in the overall planning of the defense, and has persuaded San Francisco's J. Tony Serra, also of a leftist bent and one of the most eloquent trial lawyers in the country, to join the case. It's practically old-home week for the two men.

"Serra's politics are the same as mine," Hanlon says. The Olson case "is the culmination of something we started many years ago."

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Hanlon hangs his professional shingle at a modest, kind of funky -- definitely uncorporate -- Victorian house located on the edge of the Castro. He shares the space with a handful of other criminal defense lawyers. On the wall behind his desk is a row of Soccer World magazine covers featuring his two sons. (Although his children are soccer fanatics, the magazine covers, he confided, are jokes.)

In an interview that preceded the terror bombings in New York and Washington, D.C., the 52-year-old Hanlon seemed pleasant and unassuming, slightly burdened, perhaps, with a middle-age gut and middle-class guilt. "I make a very good living," he said a bit wistfully, "representing drug dealers and murderers." He doesn't really like some of his clients; that, he said, is why he tends to do political cases for free.

"I was a lawyer member of Students for a Democratic Society [a radical group active in the anti-Vietnam War movement]," he said. "I still believe the major problem is an overbearing government that fucks with people's rights if they believe the "wrong' things. The government is racist and sexist and against poor people."

Hanlon seemed to lose the thread of conversation for a minute -- muttering about the dilemma of believing in rent control and, at the same time, being a landlord in San Francisco -- then refocused: "We live in a time when there is not much of a leftist movement. You can still be prosecuted for expressing politics outside the norms of the Democratic or Republican parties. Look at what happens to anti-fur activists protesting at Nordstrom's, or to the youth at the anti-globalization demonstrations."

Hanlon's implication, boiled down to basics, ran on this line: If protesting peacefully in the new century is certainly no guarantee of not being clobbered by the police, people whose form of protest is, or was, more extreme are not likely to be forgiven by the government without the exaction of a pound of flesh.

During the years that Olson was a fugitive, her representatives tried, periodically, to negotiate a deal in which she would surrender and plead guilty to a charge or charges, but not go to prison. When she was finally caught, a deal was proffered, Hanlon said.

"The [L.A.] district attorney said that if Sara cooperated, the prosecution would disappear," Hanlon recounted. In a decision that may now seem horribly and ironically wrongheaded, Olson, charged with conspiring to commit murder, possession of a destructive device, and attempted explosion of a destructive device with intent to murder, resolved to take her chances with a jury. In October 1999, the district attorney upped the stakes by broadening the scope of the trial to include the entire history of the SLA and evidence related to two dozen uncharged criminal acts. It is this horrific history of terrorism that Hanlon, Serra, and the third, much younger member of the legal team, Shawn Chapman, must obscure or distance Olson from if she is to be kept from prison.

According to its trial brief, the prosecution intends to show that "violence was the group's calling card. ... [T]hose who enlisted in the SLA, rather than in other radical political organizations, deliberately chose violence as their weapon for revolution ... chose to part ways with their radical counterparts who were trying to effect change through public speeches, demonstrations, protests, and even attention-getting acts of property destruction."

To date, the prosecution has produced 40,000 items of physical evidence and 23,000 pages of documentary evidence. Blood-encrusted, bullet-punctured clothing will be on display, along with "gunpowder, wire, nails, screws, pipe, end caps, batteries, blasting cap, [and] pipe bombs" seized from Olson's Bernal Heights apartment a quarter-century ago. Prosecutors say they have handwriting evidence showing that Olson ordered bomb-making materials two weeks before the attempted bombing in Los Angeles. A gun was found in the house. According to expert testimony before a grand jury in 1976, Olson's fingerprints were on two gun manuals extracted from the house.

The statute of limitations has run out on all as-yet-uncharged SLA crimes except one: the murder of Opsahl at the Crocker National Bank. Prosecutors have subpoenaed Hearst, who has been granted immunity from prosecution in the Opsahl case in return for her testimony. (Hearst was convicted of robbing the Hibernia Bank. President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence in 1978. In January, President Bill Clinton pardoned her.) Prosecutors want the heiress to place Olson in Los Angeles on Aug. 21, 1975, and also inside the Crocker National Bank in April. If a Los Angeles jury believes Olson helped rob the bank, they might not be inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt on the attempted bombing of the police cars. (Through her attorney, George C. Martinez, Hearst declined comment for this story.) And if a jury believes Hearst's testimony, the prosecution's piles of physical (if circumstantial) evidence can be used to corroborate the heiress' story.

Given the nature of a conspiracy charge, it is not necessary that the prosecution prove that Olson planted the bombs, or even that she was in L.A. when they were planted. All the prosecutors must do is convince a jury that she was part of a grand conspiracy that intended, among other things, to blow up the police cars. The prosecution argues in its trial brief that the attempted L.A. bombings were part of a broader conspiracy -- to overthrow the U.S. government.

Conspiracy law dictates that if Olson had knowledge of the plot and failed to stop or report it, she is as culpable as is whoever carefully attached the deadly pipes and clothespin triggers to the undercarriage of the police cars with magnets and fishing line.

Whenever the trial does commence, the defense will counter with the argument that, while Olson may have had certain political beliefs, the evidence does not physically link her to the bombs in Los Angeles, and, therefore, she is innocent of the charges of possessing explosives and conspiring to commit murder. The lawyers insist that Olson does not uphold the "ideology" of the SLA, even though she helped the organization. She was, they say, simply a well-intentioned person caught up in the tenor and turbulence of the times.

Although he does not condone the philosophy of the SLA, Hanlon said that the members of the Olson defense team understand why the SLA did what it did: The group was enraged at the violent acts of the U.S. government at home and abroad. Hanlon said the context of Olson's involvement with the SLA will be at center stage in her trial, and showing that involvement in a positive light will be a focus of the defense.

"The SLA was fucked up on many levels. It was the first group of [leftist] white people to commit real terrorist acts. They were crucified for that," he said. "Killing Marcus Foster was outrageous, of course. Killing Opsahl during the Carmichael robbery was a horrendous act; it grabs people in the gut. Although there is no evidence that the SLA did it, Olson is getting the backlash.

"The SLA did stupid and bad things; but it was not OK -- it was cowardly -- for the LAPD to execute them by burning them alive. Sara spoke out and helped the remaining people stay alive. Sara and the SLA wanted to change the world and make it a better place."

At least, that is what the lawyer said before terrorists hijacked four airliners and turned them into flying bombs, running one into the World Trade Center on live television.

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J. Tony Serra is a San Francisco legend. Born into a working-class family in the Mission District 67 years ago, Serra majored in philosophy at Stanford University before expatriating himself to Morocco. Instead of becoming a romantic poet -- his heart's desire -- he fell in with heroin addicts, eventually returning to the Bay Area and entering law school at the University of California at Berkeley. As the '60s dawned, he threw himself into radical lawyering and the hippie drug culture.

Serra is famous for his skill in cross-examining witnesses. In a recent interview, he said that his specialty is "parachuting" into a felony murder case after most of the pretrial work has been done by other lawyers. Serra thinks his success at trial stems, in part, from the convincing passion of his closing statements. He is just as passionate about his personal beliefs.

"Going to law school was a cop-out, but luckily the '60s blossomed with the Black Panthers and the White Panthers, the SLA, the prison groups -- I represented all of them. I became a Haight-Ashbury image: I was a dance freak, I dropped acid, I identified with the hippies and the Berkeley radicals," Serra said.

"The hippies had the drugs and the dancing and the beautiful, beautiful lifestyle -- "make love not war.' The radicals were disciplined, academic, not very much fun. But, you know, hoping to change things and make them better."

Serra's North Beach office is decorated with the memorabilia of a lifetime, including a fading poster of a seven-headed cobra, the SLA logo. The aging hippie wears his white locks long. He giggled while brandishing a prescription card that entitles him to buy marijuana for medical use, even though, he said, he is not ill.

Serra is not a frivolous person, though. He once served six months in federal prison for being a tax resister. He is a good man to have on your side if you are in deep trouble with the law. The actor James Woods played him in the 1989 film True Believer, about a tricky murder case in San Francisco that Serra and Hanlon won.

"The Olson case is the last large criminal trial of the '60s; part of my destiny," Serra said. "What's sad about it is that the SLA doesn't represent the '60s, they weren't popular."

Admitting that Olson was intimately associated with the SLA, Serra contended the prosecution is using this fact to inflame the jury against her. Then he grinned, sharklike.

"I anticipate cross-examining Patricia Hearst with great relish," he said. "She's filled with contradiction, filled with self-motivation. She's under the domination of law enforcement. She seeks always to be approved by [male] authority images. That's her personality defect, which borders on a psychiatric condition."

Serra went on to denounce the misuse of state and federal conspiracy laws designed to trap the "Mr. Bigs" of drug dealing and other organized crime. People do not realize, he mused, that these same laws can be used for political ends, for repression of people's rights.

"Conspiracy charges are on the rise. In the last 25 years, law enforcement in this country has grown extremely powerful. We have more secret police than the KGB in Russia. We have a sea of informants out there: reliable informants, confidential informants, participatory informants, percipient informants, material informants, leniency informants, paid informants, arrested informants, sources-of-information informants, anonymous informants. We may be moving toward a totalitarian state."

Serra's sonorous voice bounced off the walls.

"Our basic freedoms have shrunk as a consequence of the strength of law enforcement, and therefore, this is a case that they will never give up. They want to fry her. She represents the SLA, and the SLA represented domestic terrorism, and terrorism is the emotional logo behind which law enforcement gains resources and power."

Serra summarized his basic belief about the system of law in a capitalist society.

"We are brainwashed into believing that the law is equally applied; the same for the rich as for the poor. I say law serves the dominating class; law is to keep the have-nots in that category. The majority of people in this country are not civilized and not sophisticated. The litmus test of civilization is the death penalty.

"I still believe in the jury system, though," he said. "The jury might see [the Olson prosecution] as political, ideological warfare, and we may get the benefit of the doubt."

But that was what Serra said about the Olson case before the tragic events of Sept. 11. Subsequently, he did not return phone calls requesting further comment.

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People on the street still ask Shawn Chapman, "Don't I know you?" In 1995, hundreds of millions of people watched as the Los Angeles attorney helped her boss, attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., convince a Los Angeles jury not to trust circumstantial evidence in the trial of Orenthal James Simpson. Chapman, 38, frequently appears as a legal commentator on national television news programs. She is a partner in a Beverly Hills law firm. She is a serious person, but she also sparkles with good humor, and is of an entirely different generation than most of the Olson defense team.

Chapman was in grade school when SLA members were incinerated in L.A. She is, however, more entrenched on the front line of the legal battle than her co-counsel. Serra, as is his habit, will not immerse himself in the details of the case until right before opening day -- a habit that appears to have concerned Chapman. Last December, according to a motion filed by the L.A. district attorney, Chapman told Superior Court Judge James Ideman that Serra "has done nothing to prepare for trial ... [and] does not speak to her and refuses to return her calls." Serra also missed three court appearances in a row, leaving Chapman in the lurch.

Last fall, Serra made a small mistake that had serious consequences. He filed a motion that contained the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of two former Los Angeles police officers who are on the prosecution's witness list. Due to a series of clerical errors, the privileged information ended up being posted on the Sara Jane Olson Defense Fund Committee Web site. The error was corrected within a week. Eight months later, Serra and Chapman were charged with a misdemeanor for revealing the information. Prosecutors Michael A. Latin and Eleanor J. Hunter (who both declined to comment for this story) had a field day in court, comparing the "tactics" of the defense lawyers to the SLA's cop-killing agenda.

The charges against Chapman were dropped as meritless. In July, Serra paid $5,000 to a police benevolent society in return for dismissal of the charge against him -- but not before he and one of the retired police officers shouted insults at each other in open court. The incident shocked several members of the defense team.

Chapman, who is paid by the court, has been on the case for more than two years. She supervises a team of paralegals, investigators, and forensic experts who review evidence as it is turned over to them by the district attorney. One senses that she is more than ready to take charge when the trial begins, although Serra, who is working for free, clearly intends to be the star in the televised courtroom drama.

Manipulating Olson's public image has been of paramount concern to the defense team. Press and media treatments, after all, can greatly influence potential jurors about whether or not a defendant is guilty as charged. The images of Olson as soccer mom and Olson as aging activist are aspects of her public relations packaging, which is not to say that her activism is not heartfelt or her soccer mom persona phony. People's personalities and motivations are complex, and sometimes unite opposites.

In an interview conducted well before the events of Sept. 11, Chapman said she wishes that Olson would concentrate more on projecting the soccer mom image and less on posing as the simmering firebrand from the '60s. Soccer moms, however, do not typically attract supporters willing to take second mortgages on their homes to provide bail. Nor is a white, upper-middle-class soccer mom likely to elicit tons of sympathy from a jury drawn from the impoverished inner city of L.A.

Chapman, who is liberal in her politics ( if "more conservative than Tony or Stuart"), spoke at a defense fund-raiser for Olson in Minneapolis last year. The organizers had screened Out, a film about Laura Whitehorn, who was convicted in 1985 for conspiring to bomb the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to protest police brutality and American foreign policy.

"Whitehorn was not an apologist," Chapman remembered. "She wanted to effect change. For the first time, I understood why Sara wants to speak out and not just bake cookies. I got it."

After Sept. 11, Chapman did not return telephone calls seeking further comment about the direction of the Olson defense, and whether it would change.

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Two weeks ago -- that is to say, before the World Trade Center and Pentagon were bombed -- Olson granted SF Weekly an interview in Los Angeles, on the condition that a defense attorney be present. Also attending the session was Mary Sutton, the head of Olson's very active support group. Olson and Sutton have relocated to Southern California for the duration of the trial. Sutton will be organizing people to attend the trial, and demonstrations, too, if necessary. The political strategy of Olson's supporters has mirrored the defense strategy of her lawyers: The good intentions of a whole generation are on trial before the nation; the prosecution is politically motivated to make an example of Olson.

Dressed in a bright red blouse and red-patterned skirt, Olson, 54, presented an animated, if not quite confident, self. She has a quick sense of humor, though, and her laugh is catching.

Perhaps because she is a trained actress, she can freely improvise dramatic stories about her life as a mother, a wife, an activist. Olson was definitely not acting, though, when she said she is terribly frightened for her future.

If a jury believes that Olson joined the SLA knowing beforehand that the SLA committed violent crimes, it could judge her guilty by association. Her sentence would be seven to life. Olson is afraid that, as a convicted cop-hater, she would carry a "silent beef" against her inside the walls and never be paroled.

As of two weeks ago, the defense strategy was to seat a jury dominated by inner-city African-American women, who would, it was theorized, be inclined to acquit Olson because they despise the LAPD, which is perennially plagued by corruption and race scandals.

Even before last week's airplane bombings, Olson was not looking forward to weeks and weeks of testimony about the SLA's bloody deeds. "It's going to be horrible," she shuddered. "I feel assaulted by these charges." On the advice of her attorney, Olson declined to answer any questions about the SLA, Hearst, or the trial evidence.

Expressions of moral outrage bubble up easily in Olson, though. She feels strongly that the issues of abortion, feminism, racism, poverty, and the degradation of the environment are the big political issues of today, as they were in the '60s. "We are all interconnected, but not in control of our destiny," Olson said very carefully, almost parsing her words. "In small groups we can unite against the multinational groups."

On Sept. 17, the Sara Jane Olson Defense Fund Committee issued the following statement: "Sara Jane Olson and the Sara Jane Olson Defense Fund Committee abhor the violence and destruction that took place on September 11th. Our hearts go out to the victims and their families. We sincerely hope that the answer to this disaster will not involve further violence against innocent people."

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In a telephone interview last Thursday, Stuart Hanlon, speaking on behalf of the defense team representing Sara Jane Olson, said that, in light of the terrorist-inflicted horror that has changed the national psyche, Olson will be unable to receive a fair trial anywhere in the U.S. at any time in the near future. "The catastrophe has affected my own view of the world," Hanlon continued. "I, myself, would have been the best possible juror for Sara -- but I cannot get those images of the World Trade Center out of my head."

Hanlon said that the defense team had not made a formal decision, but will probably ask for a postponement of Olson's Oct. 15 trial date.

But Sandra Gibbons, a spokesperson for L.A. District Attorney Steve Cooley, said, "If a continuance was granted, that would be the ninth continuance. It's time for this case to go to trial; we have waited for 26 years. We will oppose a defense motion for a continuance, there is no doubt."

Gibbons noted that two days after the terrorist attack, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Richard L. Weatherspoon denied a motion to postpone the trial of an Egyptian man accused of killing an Orange County boy. But on Tuesday, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the judge reversed his position after many prospective jurors said they were too angry to be fair to an Arab.

Peter Arenella, a professor of criminal law at the UCLA School of Law, says that in the wake of last Tuesday's attack, Olson may get the postponement she seeks, but the delay cannot be indefinite. "The obvious concern is that jurors who were not alive when the alleged crimes were committed would lump Olson into the modern terrorist context, which would prejudice her right to a fair trial," Arenella says. "There are safeguards that can be used by the judge to ensure the jurors do not come in with an agenda and bias, although it is impossible to get at the heart of a juror.

"Since the defendant is not a menace to anyone now, wisdom would suggest delay. The problem for the trail judge is how long a delay. The idea that because the country is at war defendants cannot get a fair trial is something that the criminal justice system will not accept."