Lawyer Jailed for Unpaid Fines Is Released : Courts: Judge had imposed $1 million in sanctions related to pretrial disputes in a civil suit. The Orange County attorney spent six days in custody.

An Orange County attorney was released from a downtown Los Angeles jail Wednesday night after six days in custody for failing to pay part of $1 million in sanctions imposed by Chief U.S. District Judge Manuel L. Real.

The sanctions against Irvine lawyer Robert Bonito are believed to be the largest ever issued in Los Angeles federal court. The fine grew out of a series of pretrial disputes in a complicated civil fraud suit originally filed in Hartford, Conn., in 1989.

Federal marshals arrested Bonito Friday on a warrant authorized by Real after the lawyer failed to pay $8,797.13 originally imposed by Real in late April. Real imposed a second sanction June 7 of at least $947,000 that could be as high as $1.3 million when he issues a final order.

On Wednesday, friends and associates of Bonito raised the $8,797.13 to secure his release, said his attorney, James Toledano of Irvine.

Toledano said he planned to appeal both sanctions, saying that the reasoning behind them is inconsistent with a 1989 decision of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction covers nine Western states, including California. He said the sanctions were improperly calculated.

He also was highly critical of Real’s decision to have Bonito jailed. “I think it’s a totally inappropriate punishment,” he said.

Joseph Fortner, the Hartford attorney who sought the sanctions against Bonito, said he is pleased that the position of his client, Guardian Life Insurance Co., on the pretrial disputes “has been vindicated.”

The disputes centered on the conduct of Bonito’s former client, Daniel Nicherie, in a series of contentious depositions, which were taken in Southern California in 1990 and 1991 and got “out of hand,” Toledano said.

Nicherie failed to show up for a June, 1991, trial and an $11.5-million default judgment was entered against him by U.S. District Judge Warren W. Eginton in Hartford. Soon after, Nicherie disappeared and is being sought as a federal fugitive, Toledano and Fortner said. Parts of the original case are still pending in Hartford.

A Newport Beach attorney was appointed by Eginton as a special master to supervise depositions. The attorney concluded that Bonito was responsible for the pretrial problems and recommended that he be sanctioned. Eginton agreed but sent that part of the case to Real for a final ruling.

The sanctions were partially based on a section of the United States Code providing that any attorney “who so multiplies the proceedings in any case unreasonably . . . may be required by the court to satisfy personally the excess costs, expenses and attorneys’ fees reasonably incurred because of such conduct.”