Jury Urges Death Penalty for Child Killer : Courts: Warren James Bland already is serving a life sentence as a career criminal. In 1986 he abducted, sexually tortured and strangled 7-year-old Phoebe Ho.
RIVERSIDE — Career felon Warren James Bland, already serving a life sentence for terrorizing women and children in a series of sexual assaults in Southern California, should be executed for the 1986 kidnaping, torture and murder of a 7-year-old South Pasadena girl, a jury determined Monday.
A Riverside County Superior Court jury deliberated just 90 minutes Monday before returning its verdict. Judge Gordon R. Burkhart set sentencing for May 28.
In 1989, a federal judge in San Diego sentenced Bland--who projects the image of a mild-mannered, bespectacled grandfather--to life in prison for repeated sexual-assault convictions.
The life term was the first time in California--and the fourth in the nation--that the harshest possible punishment under the federal Armed Career Criminal Act had been administered.
That conviction came after Bland was arrested--but before he stood trial--for the abduction, sexual torture and strangulation of 7-year-old Phoebe Ho, who disappeared while walking to school on Dec. 11, 1986. Her body was found a week later in a roadside ditch in Glen Avon, a rural community just west of here.
At the time, Bland was working as a house painter in Alhambra. He had been paroled 11 months earlier from a conviction for the abduction and molestation of an 11-year-old boy.
Going into this trial, Bland, 57, had been convicted of 14 violent felonies and had provided an unofficial standard for who should be sentenced to prison for life as a career criminal, said Assistant U.S. Atty. Larry Burns, who won that conviction in San Diego four years ago.
By then, Bland had spent 23 of the previous 28 years in prison--and each time he had been released, he was convicted of another sexual assault.
“Other defense attorneys arguing career-felon cases would say, ‘My client is no Bland,’ †Burns said Monday of the severity of Bland’s crime history.
For the Phoebe Ho murder, jury foreman Jim Ford said there was no question among jurors that Bland should be executed. “It was a brutal crime against a little girl,†he said.
Fellow juror Herb Sowe said that the lesser possible sentence--life in prison without the possibility of parole--â€would be like giving him a freebie. We wouldn’t be punishing him.â€
Riverside County prosecutor Creg Datig called Bland “one of the most vicious criminals we’ve ever prosecuted in this county.â€
The jury that passed Bland’s sentence Monday had convicted him last month for the girl’s murder, based on such evidence as blood type, hair samples and carpet fibers.
In both the guilt and penalty phases of the trial, the jury agreed on its verdict on the first vote, jurors said.
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