Repeatedly Freed, Sex Offender Given Life Without Parole

A Los Angeles man who repeatedly has been set free from prison over the last three decades, only to continually kidnap, torture and sexually assault women and children in Southern California, was sentenced Wednesday to life in prison with no future chance of parole.

The sentence, handed down in a federal courtroom in San Diego, marks the first time in California, and only the fourth in the nation, that the U.S. government has imposed its harshest punishment possible under the Armed Career Criminal Act.

The defendant, 53-year-old Warren James Bland, addressed the court for 45 minutes during the sentencing hearing, at times appearing almost grandfatherly as he described himself as a former alcoholic who has turned his life around and deserves another chance before his natural life is forever shut away behind bars.

“But it is painfully obvious that I have been cast in the worst possible light, and that the court could not view me but as some three-headed monster.”

U.S. District Judge J. Lawrence Irving listened patiently to Bland’s protestations. But he was unmoved.

“You have earned the maximum sentence,” the judge said. “Society demands and deserves the maximum protection and I intend to sentence you to give society the maximum protection.

“You will never ever harm another woman or child again.”

Bland was convicted earlier this year under the federal government’s 3-year-old Armed Career Criminal Act, a law passed by Congress that allows prosecutors to imprison repeat offenders who are arrested while using a firearm in the commission of yet another felony.

In Bland’s case, he has been released from prison on five separate occasions over the last three decades. Five times, he has been rearrested for terrorizing women and children in a series of sexual assaults in Southern California.

Charged in Torture-Murder

He most recently was turned loose three years ago. But in 1987, he was wounded and arrested by San Diego police and charged in the torture-murder of a 7-year-old South Pasadena girl, Phoebe Ho, whose body was found in Riverside County. He is facing the death penalty in that case, and also has been implicated as the prime suspect in the slayings of a 14-year-old Placentia girl, Wendy Osborn, and an 81-year-old San Diego woman, Ruth M. Ost.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Larry Burns cautioned the judge on Wednesday not to be fooled by the bespectacled, gray-haired Bland, who stood before the court in a dark blue, double-breasted suit.

“He looks fairly harmless, and yet that’s what makes him so dangerous,” Burns said.

Burns noted that Bland has spent 23 of the last 28 years in prison, has repeatedly tortured and molested new victims whenever he has been released, and is incapable of denying the urge to harm others.

“His track record is one of abject failure,” Burns said. “Prison is the place for Mr. Bland.”