SACRAMENTO, CA - Prosecutors here are striking a blow for the rule of law by bringing up members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) on charges resulting from a 1975 bank heist in which 42-year-old Myrna Opsahl was murdered. Mrs. Opsahl, a doctor’s wife and mother of four sons, was at the bank to deposit that week’s church collection. Reporters are trying hard to reach all corners of this story but a lot has been passed over.

The SLA was a combination criminal gang and left-wing militia that illustrated a principle outlined by George Orwell. In Animal Farm, the revolutionary animals quickly decided that “rats are comrades.” The SLA, like many a left-wing dictatorship, set about “expropriating” property, through armed holdups. The group’s symbol, a seven-headed snake, stands for the principles now known as Kwanzaa. These do not come from Africa but were invented by Ron Karenga, a former black nationalist and now a professor at Cal State Long Beach. Mr. Karenga was a leader of the United Slaves, a group which in 1969 engaged their rivals, the Black Panthers, in a gun battle on the campus of UCLA.

According to Patricia Hearst Shaw, who was abducted by the SLA and served time for participating in another of their heists, Sara Jane Olson, also known as Kathleen Soliah, was in the bank when a shotgun blast downed Mrs. Opsahl. The SLA troopers wrote her off as a “bourgeois pig.” The SLA women were dressed as men and disguised their voices, but recent stories have not mentioned that Olson was an accomplished stage actress. She once worked as a waitress at a San Francisco eatery, the Plate of Brasse, under the alias of Kathleen Anger.

The trial here promises high drama, especially when Patricia Hearst Shaw, alias “Tania,” takes the stand. Prosecutors also deploy new evidence against Soliah and her SLA comrades Bill Harris, Emily Harris, and Michael Bortin. As a number of fugitive Nazis discovered, adoption of a normal lifestyle with regular employment and friendly neighbors does not cancel misdeeds committed decades earlier.

Those who plead that Sara Jane Olson’s record as a mother, church member, and doctor’s wife makes this trial a waste of time forget that the role of government is to protect life and property, both lost in the 1975 robbery. Government at all levels could perform more of this work, which is their legitimate business, was it not so engrossed in efforts that are not its business. Few pieces on the Olson case have hinted at how much catching up there is to do.

The Black Panthers had little use for the SLA, whose first victim was Marcus Foster, the first black superintendent of Oakland schools. But the Panthers also left a trail of victims including Alex Rackley, one of their own, and Betty Van Patter. She was a bookkeeper at the Panthers’ school in Oakland when she disappeared and was found floating in San Francisco Bay, dead from massive head injuries.

No one has ever been arrested or charged. It happened during the 1970s, a long time ago, but then so did the SLA robbery. A government that holds the rule of law as more important than political correctness should look into it.