KATHLEEN SOLIAH

Following a guilty plea, this Symbionese Liberation Army (remember Patty Hearst?) figure just got 20 to life for her involvement in an unsuccessful 25 year ago conspiracy to bomb police cars in Los Angeles. She has been lving in Minnesota under an assumed name. She married and raised a family. A colleague I respect queries whether it serves any purpose to imprison this woman, who she argues has spent her life at large rehabilitating herself.

I say shoot the bitch. Irrespective of how exemplary a life she led as a fugitive, remaining at large compounds, not mitigates, her crime. By depriving the state of the opportunity to incarcerate her through the prime of her life, a punishment she richly deserved, she thumbed her nose at society -- not surprising, given the contempt for society the SLA represented -- and accounts must be settled.