Former Symbionese Liberation Army radical Sara Jane Olson pleaded not guilty to a 1976 murder Friday just minutes after a Los Angeles judge sentenced her to 20 years in prison for attempting to bomb police cars the same year.

Olson and four other SLA associates were charged Wednesday with the killing of Myrna Opsahl, a bank customer shot during a robbery by the gang, best known for the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst.

Her not guilty plea came at the end of a sentencing charged with emotion despite an outcome predetermined by a plea deal. A string of Olson's defenders, including her mother, husband and 15-year-old daughter, praised the 55-year-old as a devoted and socially aware suburban mom who bore little resemblance to the homegrown terrorist described by the prosecution.

"She's one of the best mothers anyone can have. If you met her, you'd feel the same," her daughter, Leila Peterson, sobbed before collapsing into her mother's arms.

Olson, who maintains her innocence and tried unsuccessfully to withdraw from her plea deal and go to trial, apologized "if I did anything that brought harm to anyone," but she also defended her association with the SLA. She said that after her friend, SLA member Angela Atwood, was killed by police, "friends of her came and asked for help and I helped them."

Olson has acknowledged providing money and shelter to the group.

"I thought I was doing good and saving lives," she said.

Olson pleaded guilty on Halloween to an August 1975 bombing plot that targeted two squad cars. Officers discovered one bomb before it detonated. The other malfunctioned.

Officer John Hall, who was nearly killed by one of the explosives, the largest pipe bombs in the country at the time, told Judge Larry Fidler that his life and the lives of many bystanders "would have ended in an instant if the defendant and her co-conspirators would have carried out their terrorist act."

He mentioned his son, a 20-year-old Marine on active duty, and said a tough sentence would tell him and others in the military "that any form of terrorism will never be tolerated in this country."

Before her arrest on the murder charges, Olson's legal team said a parole board could free her after just five years and had arranged for her to serve the time near the family home in Minnesota.

But Wednesday's charges changed that. Sacramento officials were scheduled to fly her to jail there Friday to await a trial that could bring her a life sentence.

Olson, who was poised and impeccably groomed in previous court appearances, came to the court from jail. She wore a black suit, but her blond hair was unkept and she looked pale without make-up. As she listened to supporters speak, her lower lip quivered.

After her mother, Elsie Soliah, told Fidler "our daughter is a good person" and reached over to hug her, Olson wailed, "Oh Mom!" Elsie Soliah told Fidler that, since 1976 she and her husband Martin were visited by FBI agents who assured them they had no interest in capturing their daughter. Soliah said the agents told her the bombs "would never have gone off" and were being used as paperweights by the police department.

Prosecutors, however, maintain that tests proved the bombs were powerful enough to kill the officers and, in the case of one planted at a Hollywood pancake house, would have killed dozens of customers as well.

Olson, born Kathleen Soliah, spent 24 years as a fugitive from the bombing charges before the FBI tracked her to St. Paul, Minn. There, under the name Olson, she built a life as a well-to-do doctor's wife and mother of three daughters who filled her days with volunteer work and amateur acting.

Her husband, Gerald "Fred" Peterson, said she was a role model to her daughters and community.

"I am very proud of you," he told his wife of 22 years Friday. "We will always stand by you."