Career Criminal Convicted Again as a Repeat Felon : Courts: It took a jury just 10 minutes to return the verdict in James Bland’s second trial. An earlier verdit had been overturned. He faces life in prison without parole.

Warren James Bland, a Los Angeles man who was labeled a career criminal last year by a San Diego federal judge, was convicted Friday of being a repeat felon in possession of a gun and, for the second time, faces being sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole.

If he receives that term, as he did in an earlier trial that was overturned, he will be the first person in California sentenced to life without parole under a 4-year-old federal law that targets repeat offenders.

It took a U.S. District Court jury precisely 10 minutes to convict Bland, who has spent 28 of the past 31 years in prisons or mental institutions, of possessing a gun when San Diego police arrested him in February, 1987.

His first life sentence under the 1986 Armed Career Criminal Act was handed down last year.

However, he won a new trial four months ago when a federal appeals court ruled that U.S. District Judge J. Lawrence Irving improperly told jurors during last year’s trial that Bland was wanted in the 1986 killing of a 7-year-old Pasadena girl.

The second trial began Wednesday. Jurors began deliberating the case at 4:04 p.m. Friday and returned with the guilty verdict at 4:14 p.m.

“I think it’s the appropriate verdict,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Larry A. Burns, the prosecutor in the case. “I think the sentence was appropriate the first time. Hopefully the court will reimpose the same sentence.”

Irving, who presided over the second trial, too, set sentencing for Dec. 19.

When Irving imposed the life sentence in August, 1989, he called Bland, 54, a “vicious, incorrigible predator.” Because of Bland’s bespectacled, grandfather-like appearance, Irving said, he is “particularly dangerous” and a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

The conviction Friday marked Bland’s 14th felony conviction, Burns said.

“He has become the measuring stick for other alleged armed career criminals,” Burns said. “I hear defense attorneys comparing their clients to him, saying, ‘He’s not a Warren Bland, judge, he’s not a Warren Bland.’

Bland’s first felony offense came in 1957, Burns said. He was most recently released from prison in 1986.

In February, 1987, he was wounded and arrested by San Diego police and charged in the torture and murder of 7-year-old Phoebe Ho of South Pasadena, whose body was found in a Riverside County ditch. She had disappeared while walking to school in December, 1986.

Bland also has been named as a suspect in the slayings of 14-year-old Wendy Osborn of Placentia in Orange County, and Ruth M. Ost, 81, of San Diego.

San Diego police had been looking for Bland on the Riverside County warrant. Officers found a gun in his car.

Bland was then charged under the 1986 federal “career criminal” law with possession of a gun by a felon with at least three serious convictions. The law sets maximum punishment as a no-parole life term.

Bland was convicted in March, 1989, of the gun charge and sentenced five months later to life in prison. But, in July, 1990, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial, saying that Irving should not have mentioned the Ho killing to jurors.

No juror could have remained impartial upon hearing that acquitting Bland might mean releasing an “exceedingly dangerous child molester and killer into the community,” a three-judge 9th Circuit panel said.

Bland remains in federal prison pending sentencing, Burns said.

Defense attorney Mario Conte could not be reached Friday for comment.