Justice delayed

For most of the last quarter century, Sarah Jane Olson was the model suburbanite: a doctor’s wife living the good life in an upscale St. Paul, Minn., neighborhood; a hostess with the mostest, famous for her lavish dinner parties; a community activist and tireless volunteer for good causes; a regular churchgoer; the quintessential soccer mom of three daughters.

Before that, prosecutors say, she was Kathleen Soliah, a card-carrying terrorist with the radical Symbionese Liberation Army of the early 1970s. In 1975, she allegedly planted bombs under police cars, she may have participated in bank robbery in which an innocent bystander was shot to death. She then went on the lam and spent the next 24 years hiding in plain sight.

Now, she’s in jail in California, the scene of her purported crimes, held in lieu of $1 million bond on attempted murder charges stemming from the bombings. Thus the stage is set for this year’s version of the trial of the century.

Ms. Soliah’s family and legion of friends say the charges, even if true, are bogus. They say too much time has passed, she has atoned for her past by living a good, productive life, the turmoil of the Vietnam/Watergate era may have justified the violence of the revolutionary SLA. Besides, the bombs failed to go off.

Hogwash, say prosecutors. With no statute of limitations for attempted murder, Ms. Soliah must answer for her crimes. The passage of time and the degree of self-reformation are irrelevant. It is not the prosecutor’s role to decide whether an undeclared, unpopular war in Southeast Asia, a presidential attempt to thwart the Constitution, the shooting of students at Kent State or any other event of that sorrowful period can excuse an attempt to murder sheriff’s deputies in Riverside County, Calif. That the bombs were duds is why Ms. Soliah faces charges of mere attempted murder and not actual murder.

The prosecutors are right. The points raised by Ms. Soliah’s supporters can be weighed by jury reaching a verdict. They can be considered mitigating factors by a judge pronouncing sentence. With a justice system in which the degree of justice is too often tied to the defendant’s station in life, they must not be used to give a free pass to someone just because she hid out in a $300,000 colonial.

The prosecutors have a tough case to make. The memories of witnesses fade in 24 years, outrage becomes ancient history. With jury selection a high art, expect at least one of Ms. Soliah’s peers to be from the anti-government fringe, whether the radical left or the militant right. The prosecution’s key witness will be a very reluctant, extremely angry Patty Hearst.

Patty Hearst, of course, is the newspaper heiress who was kidnapped by the SLA in 1974 and forced to participate in their violent actions. After she was freed, she spent two years in prison for her involvement. Today, she is irate that her past is being dredged up, she is irate that Sarah Jane Olson enjoyed for two decades the affluent lifestyle Kathleen Soliah claimed to detest, she is irate that the authorities that prosecuted her so vigorously left it to TV viewers to track down her captors.

Another irony: the innocent bystander shotgunned to death in that bank robbery was Myrna Lee Opsahl, described by the SLA at the time as “a bourgeois pig … her husband is a doctor.”