S.D. Judge Again Sentences Habitual Criminal to Life : Crime: Rapist and accused killer is first in California to be sentenced under law aimed at repeat offenders.

Slamming the cell doors shut for good, a federal judge Thursday made Warren James Bland the first person in California to be sentenced to life in prison without parole under a new law that targets repeat offenders.

U.S. District Judge J. Lawrence Irving imposed the term on Bland, 53, of Los Angeles, who had been convicted last month of being a repeat felon in possession of a gun.

Irving had sentenced Bland to the life without parole term last year but was overturned by a federal appeals court, which ruled he erred by telling jurors that Bland was wanted in the 1986 killing of a 7-year-old Pasadena girl. At a second trial last month, a jury convicted Bland of the gun charge--his 14th felony conviction--after deliberating for precisely 10 minutes.

“You have, by virtue of your conduct, inflicted cruel and unusual punishment on your victims of incalculable proportions, in my view,” Irving said Thursday.

Irving said Bland’s victims, many of them women and children, had suffered “horrible trauma.” Irving added, “I am convinced beyond any possible doubt that you must be permanently incarcerated in federal prison. You have earned a permanent cell in federal prison.”

Bland, 53, who has spent 28 of the past 31 years in prison or mental institutions, remained impassive as Irving imposed the term.

After Bland was convicted last month on the gun charge, Assistant U.S. Atty. Larry Burns, the prosecutor in the case, said that Bland had become the “measuring stick for other alleged armed criminal criminals. I hear defense attorneys comparing their clients to him, saying, ‘He’s not a Warren Bland, judge, he’s not a Warren Bland.’ ”

In many respects, the hearing Thursday was a rerun of the August 1989 session at which Irving first imposed the life without parole term.

At one point, as defense attorney Judy Clarke recited Bland’s objections to the term, conceding that Bland had a “seriously bad record” but contending it was cruel and unusual punishment to impose a “natural death sentence,” Irving said, “We have been down this road, most of it, before.”

As he did last year, Burns urged Irving to impose the no-parole term. He said Thursday that Irving could “put an end to Mr. Bland’s reign of terror, his ability to victimize people.”

“It’s time for Mr. Bland to go away and not be among us again,” Burns said.

Bland, who spoke last year at length in his defense, declined Thursday to talk. Irving, who had made his feelings about Bland known last year, was decidedly more brief Thursday in his comments.

Last year, Irving called Bland a “vicious, incorrigible predator.” Because of Bland’s bespectacled, grandfatherly appearance, Irving said, Bland is “particularly dangerous” and a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Bland was convicted Nov. 16 under the 4-year-old Armed Career Criminal Act, which allows repeat offenders arrested while in possession of a firearm to be sentenced to life without parole.

Bland’s first felony offense came in 1957, Burns said. According to court documents, he has been convicted, among other crimes, of burglary, rape and kidnaping.

According to court documents, in one three-week period in December, 1959, and January, 1960, Bland assaulted a 43-year-old woman, a 46-year-old woman, an 18-year-old woman and a fourth woman whose age was not listed. He pleaded guilty to one count of kidnaping and one count of forcible rape.

In August and November of 1968, about a year after being back on the streets and while on parole, Bland embarked upon his next series of rapes and assaults, court documents said. He raped a 28-year-old schoolteacher, then a 31-year-old woman, then assaulted a 22-year-old woman. The next year he was convicted of rape, burglary and kidnaping, court documents said.

Paroled in August, 1975, Bland assaulted an 11-year-old girl and her mother in August, 1976, raping the mother and torturing the girl while trying to rape her, court documents said. He served three years in prison for assault with intent to rape and for kidnaping and was released in April, 1980, documents said.

In December, 1980, according to court documents, he tortured and molested an 11-year-old boy. In July, 1981, he was convicted of three felony counts in connection with that assault and sentenced to nine years in prison.

He was most recently released from prison in 1986.

In February, 1987, Bland 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 awaits a preliminary hearing in that case.

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.