High Court OKs Death Sentences for Two Killers : Murder: Previous penalty convictions had been set aside. The men were found guilty in separate cases of slaying two elderly Southern California women.

The state Supreme Court on Thursday reinstated the death sentences of two convicted killers who, in separate cases, broke into the homes of two elderly Southern California women and murdered them for a total of $117.

The justices voted 5 to 2 to uphold the death penalty for Bronte Lamont Wright for the 1981 fatal beating of Patricia Hunter, a 76-year-old Pasadena Sunday school teacher. The court last year had first reversed Wright’s sentence, then decided to rehear the case before the decision became final.

In a second ruling, the court unanimously affirmed the death sentence of Stephen Wayne Anderson for the 1980 shooting death of Elizabeth Lyman, 81, in Bloomington, near San Bernardino. Anderson’s initial capital sentence had been overturned by the high court in 1985. At the penalty retrial, he was sentenced again to death.

With Thursday’s rulings, the high court now has upheld 84 of the 109 death sentences it has reviewed since judicial conservatives gained control following the November, 1986, election defeat of Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird and two other court members. Under Bird, the liberal-led court had reversed 64 of 68 death sentences it reviewed.

Wright, 36, was charged with rape, attempted robbery, burglary and murder after Hunter was found beaten to death in a blood-spattered room in her home. The body was discovered by friends concerned at her failure to attend a Sunday school teachers’ meeting earlier in the day.

Wright, whose palm prints were found on a copy of a magazine in the home, confessed to the crime, saying that he entered her home because he believed her to be an “easy mark.” He admitted that he took $5 and some change from his victim but said the killing was unintentional.

The defendant was convicted and sentenced to death. In March, 1989, the high court voted 4 to 3 to reverse the sentence. The court said jurors had been improperly allowed to hear testimony from corrections officers that Wright made several threats to kill if he were released from prison and said he liked “to do all sorts of freaky things with the ladies.”

But shortly after the decision, Justice Joyce L. Kennard replaced retiring Justice John A. Arguelles, author of the majority opinion. And Justice Marcus M. Kaufman, who had been replaced on the case by an appellate justice while Kaufman was recovering from surgery, returned to active duty on the court. With Kennard and Kaufman participating, the court voted 5 to 2 to reconsider the decision, an unusual action by the justices.

In Thursday’s ruling, the court, in a 112-page majority opinion by Justice David N. Eagleson, agreed that the testimony at issue should not have been presented to jurors because Wright’s alleged threats did not amount to a violation of the law.

But in view of the brutal circumstances of the killing and other validly admitted evidence of Wright’s criminal past, there was “no reasonable possibility” that the improper testimony caused jurors to vote for death rather than life in prison without parole, the court said, and the sentence should be upheld .

In dissent, Justice Stanley Mosk, joined by Justice Allen E. Broussard, concluded that the officers’ testimony had played a critical role in the jurors’ verdict of death and that Wright deserved a new penalty trial. Mosk, without Broussard’s concurrence, said further that Wright’s conviction also should be reversed because improper jury-selection procedures were used by the trial judge.

In the second case decided Thursday, Anderson, 37, was accused of forcing his way into Lyman’s home shortly after midnight. Armed with a handgun, he entered the woman’s bedroom and, when she awoke and began to scream, killed her with a single shot, authorities said.

Anderson ransacked the home, found $112, turned on the television set and was eating some noodles he had found and cooked when sheriff’s deputies, alerted by neighbors, arrived and arrested him.

Anderson, an escapee from a Utah prison, admitted the shooting, but said he entered the home because he believed it was empty and had reacted out of fear. “I sleep with my gun,” he told interrogators. “Somebody come at me and I--I’m going to blow them away.” He was convicted and sentenced to death, but the high court overturned the sentence in 1985 on grounds the jury did not find that Anderson intended to kill his victim. A new penalty trial was held the next year and Anderson again was sentenced to death.

On Thursday, the justices rejected Anderson’s contentions that the jury at his retrial might have been improperly influenced by the judge’s disclosure that another jury previously had found that Anderson should die. The court, in an opinion by Chief Justice Malcolm M. Lucas, noted that Anderson’s trial lawyer had not objected to the disclosure and had himself raised the issue as he argued that Anderson had reformed and changed his attitude since first being sentenced to death.