SUPREME COURT REJECTS LAST OF BONIN'S APPEALS.

Byline: Daily News Staff and Wire Services

The U.S. Supreme Court's terse refusal to halt William Bonin's execution late Thursday ended a 14-year legal effort by the condemned killer to have his 1982 convictions and sentence overturned.

Bonin's lawyers sought high court review about 9 p.m. after a majority of the 24 judges from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted at 6:06 p.m. against referring his case to an 11-judge panel for a new hearing.

A three-judge panel from the 9th Circuit, just hours earlier, refused to block Bonin's execution, ruling that his lawyers had waited too long to press prosecutorial misconduct claims.

Bonin's final appeal was filed with Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who in turn passed it on to the full court - which denied it with a short statement issued at 10:45 p.m.:

"The application for stay of execution of sentence of death presented to Justice O'Connor and by her referred to the Court is denied."

The last maneuvers came after a week in which lawyers waged a pitched legal battle, with both sides filing briefs up and down the state. In some cases, prosecutors had their responses ready before Bonin's lawyers filed their motions.

"We basically dreamed up any argument they might come up with," said Steve Telliano, a spokesman for the state Attorney General's Office, which dedicated 15 lawyers to the appellate fray. "We've been preparing this for months."

The state kept lawyers posted in federal courts in Los Angeles and San Francisco all day Thursday and into the night.

State Attorney General Dan Lungren called the daylong proceedings a "model of orderliness."

Bonin's appeal, his second in federal court, claimed prosecutors withheld potentially damaging information about witnesses in his trials in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

One claim was that Gregory Miley, a co-defendant who pinned two of the murders on Bonin, was hypnotized by police before the trials and dramatically changed his testimony.

The three-judge panel said it did not have to decide whether the claims were valid or important enough to have affected the verdict because Bonin's lawyers did not justify their failure to raise the same arguments in his first federal appeal.

Bonin's first appeal focused on claims that his trial lawyer, William Charvet, was a drug-addicted incompetent who hoped to be paid from the rights to Bonin's life story, and curtailed his defense as a result.

U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie rejected those claims in 1992. On Tuesday, he rejected defense lawyers' request to consider most of the new claims.

Rafeedie said the claims were based on facts that were known since the trial and should have been raised at the outset of the appeal.

The state Public Defender's Office, which has represented Bonin throughout his appeals, argued that its lawyers acted incompetently by failing to recognize the current claims earlier.

But the appeals court said there is no right to effective legal assistance in a federal court appeal, because the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a lawyer for such an appeal.

Another appeal by Bonin also was rejected this week.

A federal judge rejected Bonin's claims that the state's refusal to allow him to choose between lethal gas and lethal injection as his mode of execution was unconstitutional.

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PHOTO

The lethal injection table in the execution chamber at San Quentin prison is shown in a photograph by the California Department of Corrections.