“I don’t know what to tell you, other than, ‘I apologize,’ ” she said. “I am not a bad person.”

At another hearing, in 2008, Bonner said she had somehow become confused about the deadline in Thomas’s case. She was at a loss to explain what had happened, in part because many of her case files had been destroyed in a hurricane. “I just don’t know,” she said.

When Corrigan ruled in these cases in 2009, his language was unsparing.

“The terms ‘bad faith’ or ‘dishonesty’ capture Ms. Bonner’s conduct,” he wrote of her work for Asay. In the Thomas case, he wrote, Bonner “engaged in an egregious pattern of misfeasance.”

Bonner’s failures were sufficiently grave that Corrigan granted both prisoners “equitable tolling,” a judicial remedy allowing the missed deadlines to be forgiven.

Bonner was asked to comment for this story in e-mail and telephone messages and letters sent to her office and home addresses in Fort Lauderdale. She did not reply to any of them, and no one answered the door when a reporter made multiple visits to the two locations.

In 2007 — four years after Bonner missed the deadline in one capital case, and two years after she missed deadlines in two other capital cases — she was appointed to represent another death-row inmate, Leonardo Franqui.

This time, Bonner filed Franqui’s petition on time. But a federal appeals court judge still denounced the quality of her work, saying it reflected either “something more than negligence” or “a level of gee-golly, aw-shucks lawyering that is completely unacceptable in capital cases.”

In the three cases where Bonner missed the habeas deadline, there is no record that she ever submitted a request to be paid. In yet another case, in which a habeas deadline had been missed by an earlier attorney, she did seek payment. But that request, which was supposed to be filed with the court within 45 days after the case closed, arrived four years late.

Bonner blamed the delay on a heavy workload and health problems that included four heart surgeries. The judge denied her request, noting a “pattern of untimely pleadings” and “the use of the same or similar health problems and excuses.”

In the 80 capital cases with a missed deadline, the inmate who missed the mark by the most was Paul Anthony Brown, whose petition was more than 11 years late. Bonner shows up in that case, too. Brown’s federal deadline had already passed when Bonner — who was one of Florida’s private registry attorneys — was appointed in the state courts to work on a post-conviction motion.

Court records show that almost seven years passed before she filed the pleading. “Bonner apologized to Brown for the delays and explained that she was hampered by health problems,” a court order says.

Despite the criticism she has weathered, Bonner has a spotless record with the Florida Bar. She is still eligible to practice in the federal judicial district where she missed the three deadlines. And she remains on the Florida registry of attorneys for capital appeals, where she has asked to be considered for appointment in every circuit in the state.

Bonner’s missed deadlines do not appear to have registered with the Supreme Court, where in 2006 she argued a question of timing in federal habeas cases in Lawrence v. Florida.

For the court’s purposes, Bonner had put forward the right case at the right time: One that raised a somewhat narrow but important technical question on which lower courts had split.

Bonner commemorated her Supreme Court appearance by commissioning a painting of the event. The work, in watercolor with gouache highlighting, shows her standing at the lectern in a navy blue dress and a strand of pearls, holding forth as the nine justices listen thoughtfully and courtroom illustrators sketch her portrait.

Bonner and her client lost the decision by a vote of 5 to 4.

Facing consequences

Of the 80 federal habeas cases noted here, the one attorney held accountable for the missed deadline did more work for less money than many of his counterparts.

Earle Schwarz, an attorney in Memphis, declined to comment for this story. But his account can be pieced together from a letter he wrote to the Board of Professional Responsibility of the Tennessee Supreme Court, along with other records in the board’s file.

A specialist in commercial law and alternative dispute resolution, Schwarz’s typical clients included Blue Cross Blue Shield and BellSouth. But in 1998 he agreed to handle a capital appeal — his first — and to do the work free of charge. He hoped for a case in his own state but was persuaded that the need for volunteer counsel was greatest in Alabama.

Schwarz took the case of an Alabama death-row inmate named Robin Myers, who had been convicted of fatally stabbing a woman and stealing her VCR. He picked up the case in the state post-conviction phase, the second tier in the three-tier appeals process.

For more than four years he juggled the appeal with his commercial law practice. Schwarz and his legal team went back and forth to Alabama, to interview “countless witnesses and potential witnesses,” Myers’s trial attorney and investigator, and Myers himself, according to Schwarz’s letter to the board. Together they logged more than 1,200 hours of work on the case. Had the hours been billed, the total would have come to about $145,000 at the law firm’s going rates.

While representing Myers, Schwarz changed firms. His old firm had an “enlightened policy” concerning pro bono work and offered support, according to Schwarz’s letter. His new firm “did not have a similar commitment.”