Lohan freed from LA jail after posting bail

Lindsay Lohan was freed from a suburban Los Angeles jail late last night, well short of the nearly month-long stay a judge had intended for the actress following a failed drug test.

Lohan was freed at about 11:40pm local time after posting $300,000 (£190,000) bail, said Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department spokesman Steve Whitmore.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Elden Fox ordered Lohan held without bail during a brief hearing yesterday morning, but his ruling was later overturned.

The actress is not entirely free. She will be required to wear an ankle alcohol monitor and stay away from establishments that primarily sell alcohol until her next court date on October 22.

At that hearing Fox will formally determine whether Lohan, 24, violated her probation by failing a court-mandated drug test. The positive result came after the judge released Lohan early from inpatient rehab at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.

He has said the "Mean Girls" star would be sent to jail for 30 days for each drug screening she skipped or failed and appeared to make good on the promise with his no bail order.

If he sentences her to jail in October, the amount of time her orders her to serve would be whittled down because of jail overcrowding and various credits.

Yesterday marked the third time Lohan has been sent to jail in a three-year-old drug and drunken driving case. She spent 84 minutes at the jail in 2007 and 14 days of a three-month sentence earlier this summer.

Fox had laid out a strict 67-day course of counselling, substance abuse meetings, monitoring and drug testing for Lohan in August. He asked probation officials to report how the actress had progressed on the treatment programs before Lohan's next court hearing.