Appeal by Killer in ’77 Long Beach Case Fails : Ruling: Justices reject a recommendation by a special referee that the sentence of Earl Lloyd Jackson be reversed. It was the oldest capital matter on the court’s docket.

The state Supreme Court, ruling on the oldest capital appeal on its docket, Monday upheld the death sentence of Earl Lloyd Jackson in the murders of two elderly Long Beach women in 1977.

In a 5-2 decision, the justices rejected a recommendation by a special referee calling for the reversal of the sentence. Jackson, now 36, was one of only four convicted murderers whose death sentences were initially upheld by the liberal-dominated court under former Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird.

The court agreed Monday with findings by retired Appellate Justice Bernard S. Jefferson of Los Angeles that prosecutors improperly failed to reveal at trial that two jailhouse informants had been offered inducements in return for testifying against Jackson. The justices also agreed that Jackson’s trial lawyer should have sought evidence about the defendant’s hardships as a youth in a bid to avoid the death penalty.

But in view of Jackson’s own sometimes bragging and laughing admissions to numerous other witnesses, these improprieties were not sufficient to warrant overturning his sentence, the court said in a majority opinion by Justice Ronald M. George.

“The utter lack of remorse and extreme callousness demonstrated by (Jackson) after the crimes could not help but weigh heavily in the minds of the jury in determining the penalty,” George wrote.

Justice Stanley Mosk, joined by Justice Joyce L. Kennard, issued a 121-page dissent denouncing the decision and detailing the grounds on which Jackson’s lawyers should file a constitutional challenge in federal court.

State Deputy Atty. Gen. Susan Lee Frierson hailed the ruling. “We’ve waited a long time for this,” she said. “These were vicious attacks on elderly women home alone late at night.” But Frierson added that it is still likely to be “a few years” before Jackson’s anticipated appeal in federal court is resolved.

An attorney for Jackson could not be reached immediately.

In another decision Monday, the state high court upheld 6 to 1 the death sentence of former nurse Robert Rubane Diaz, 54, in the 1981 murders of 12 elderly hospital patients in Riverside County with overdoses of a heart drug.

The justices rejected Diaz’s claim that there was insufficient evidence the patients were murdered by large doses of the drug lidocaine or that he was the murderer. “Considered in its entirety, the evidence pointed unerringly to the defendant as the killer,” Kennard wrote in the court’s lead opinion. Mosk dissented.

Jackson was convicted in 1979 in the fatal beatings of Vernita Curtis, 81, and Gladys Ott, 90, during home burglaries that occurred a week apart. Several witnesses quoted Jackson as openly admitting his role in the assaults. One testified that Jackson told of using a wine bottle in a sexual attack on Ott and describing the women as “two old bags who were a nuisance and got what they deserved.”

A year later, Jackson’s sentence was upheld on automatic appeal to the state high court, making Jackson at the time the first convict likely to die in the gas chamber after voter reinstatement of the death penalty in 1977. As it turned out, however, California’s first execution under the new law did not occur until last March, when Robert Alton Harris died in the gas chamber.

After Jackson’s sentence was affirmed (over a strong dissent by Bird), his lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition contending that the death penalty was being imposed in a discriminatory way against blacks and that he had been denied adequate assistance of counsel at trial.

The justices appointed Jefferson as a special referee to investigate the contentions. Jefferson’s ambitious plan to seek data on bias by obtaining access to up to 10,000 homicide cases was blocked in 1987 by the high court, then under Chief Justice Malcolm M. Lucas. But Jefferson later filed two reports, citing other grounds for recommending reversal of Jackson’s sentence.

In Monday’s ruling, the high court said prosecutors should have corrected misleading testimony by two jailhouse informants, Mark Mikles and Ronald McFarland, who had quoted Jackson as admitting the slayings.

Both men testified they had not received any promises in exchange for their testimony. The court noted that Jefferson’s investigation showed Mikles sought--and later received--support from law enforcement officers in obtaining reduced sentences or dismissal of charges pending in other cases. Similarly, McFarland obtained a promise of support for his bid to serve impending prison time in Arizona, where his family was located.

Such inducements should have been made known to the jury, the court said. But because of Jackson’s self-damaging statements to authorities and other witnesses, there was “no reasonable likelihood” the informants’ testimony could have affected the jury’s verdict, George wrote for the court.