Judge ends Lohan's probation, gives back freedom

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A judge ended Lindsay Lohan's supervised probation on Thursday, giving the actress her freedom after nearly two years of constant court hearings and threats of jail.

Lohan thanked Superior Court Judge Stephanie Sautner for her patience and let out a sigh of relief as she exited the courtroom after the brief hearing.

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The judge had imposed a series of strict probation requirements including cleanup duty at the morgue and counseling sessions last year, and Lohan met all the requirements by Thursday's deadline.

"I just want to say thank you for being fair. It's really opened a lot of doors for me," Lohan said.

Sautner told the problem-prone actress she was not going to give a lecture, but reminded her that she will remain on informal probation until May 2014 for taking a necklace without permission last year.

"You need to live your life in a more mature way, stop the nightclubbing and focus on your work," Sautner said.

The hearing came as Lohan's career is showing hints of a comeback. She is due to guest star on an upcoming episode of "Glee," recently hosted a highly rated but criticized episode of "Saturday Night Live" and is set to star as Elizabeth Taylor in a television movie.

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"Lindsay is ending one chapter and starting the next," her spokesman, Steve Honig said. "She is very eager to get back on set and dive into her next few projects."

Roles have been hard to come by for Lohan in recent years, as she has been in-and-out of courtrooms, spent time in rehab and was sentenced to jail.

Her failure to complete alcohol education classes in 2010 prompted a judge to sentence her to jail for the first time since the actress served 84 minutes for a pair of drunken driving arrests in 2007. A court-ordered rehab stint was cut short, but Lohan relapsed before year's end and was sent by another judge to the Betty Ford Center, where she was involved in a fight with a rehab worker.

Within three weeks of her release in January 2011, Lohan was accused of stealing a $2,500 necklace from a store near her Venice home and soon landed in Sautner's court. The judge rejected rehab and tried to send Lohan to jail as punishment. Overcrowding reduced a November 2011 sentence to a few hours, although the actress did serve 35 days on house arrest earlier in the year.