LOS ANGELES, Dec. 5 – Perjury charges against attorney Daye Shinn were dismissed Wednesday when special prosecutor Theodore P. Shield was unable to prove that anybody ever lied under oath about statements handed to reporter William Farr during the 1970 Charles Manson murder trial.

“I naturally feel good. I always thought this would be the end result,” Shinn said as his case ended two months after similar charges were dropped against Manson prosecutor Vincent T. Bugliosi for the same reason.

Farr also expressed “great relief” at the end of another phase in the four years of court appearances prompted by a story he wrote for the Herald-Examiner Oct. 9, 1970, based on transcripts of a statement by Manson trial attorney Virginia Graham.

He once spent 46 days in jail for contempt for refusing to reveal the sources of that statement.

Still remaining for Farr are a five-day and $500 punitive sentence for contempt that could be erased by a pending federal court appeal, and a $24 million civil libel suit by Manson defense lawyers Irving Kanarek and Paul Fitzgerald.

Farr returned to the witness stand late Wednesday for Shield’s final attempt to elicit the sources from him. He answered four questions about his occupation as a reporter, and on the advice of his lawyer, Mark Hurwitz, declined to answer three questions about whether he had received statements from two of the six Manson trial attorneys.

Superior Judge Earl C. Broady ruled that Farr could not be held in contempt for his silence, because he legally had invoked the state “shield law” excusing newsmen from revealing their sources. Broady had made the same ruling in the Bugliosi case, signaling an end to Farr’s series of possible contempt citations.

But the brief Farr appearance was anticlimactic.

Shield’s case appeared doomed when Broady refused to permit him to establish the “corpus delicti” or facts proving perjury occurred by using a transcript of Farr’s July 19, 1971, two-of-six testimony before Superior Judge Charles H. Older. Farr has said that testimony was an error made on the advice of a former lawyer and one he would not repeat.

In that hearing before Older, Farr was asked if two of his sources of the Virginia Graham statement were attorneys of record in the Manson trial. Farr answered, “Yes.”

Shield hoped to establish that somebody lied under oath by showing the prior testimony of Farr and statements by the attorneys that they did not give Farr the statements conflicted.

But Broady ultimately agreed with Shinn’s lawyer, Robert Kirste, that Farr’s prior testimony was hearsay and could not be used. Broady also said admitting the transcript would deny Shinn his constitutional right to cross-examine the witness, the physically present but silent Farr.

Shield argued the earlier transcript should be used because he was introducing it, not to prove the truth of Farr’s getting statements from two attorneys, but only to show that he testified to that.

Broady said the “corpus” that somebody had lied could not be established without considering the truth or falsity of what Farr had said. Weighing the truth, Broady said, made the prior testimony hearsay and therefore in-admissible.

Shinn’s nonjury trial was aborted before Shield could call his star witness, convicted murderer Lawrence E. Wilson, a client of Shinn’s who planned to state that Shinn told him he gave the Virginia Graham statement to Farr.

“I have got a witness who will establish the fact that Mr. Shinn was one of the two lawyers who gave the statement to Mr. Farr, by means of Mr. Shinn’s admission,” Shield told Broady as it appeared he could not establish commission of the perjury.

Wilson was taken to the Criminal Courts Building early Wednesday and held in the building’s “lockup” ready to be called into the courtroom. Shield talked privately with him during the day but could not clear the legal “corpus” hurdle in order to put Wilson on the stand.

Shield, who will turn in his $60-an-hour bill to the state for his task as special prosecutor and return to his private law practice, said he was “disappointed” in the outcome but felt justice had been served because the Bugliosi and Shinn cases did get to court.

He said he had tried the unusual move of introducing prior testimony to establish a “corpus” in the Shinn case when he did not in the Bugliosi one because the expected Wilson testimony promised him a stronger case against Shinn.

“We did everything we could. We needed Farr’s testimony,” Shield said. “It is Farr’s testimony that started it and his non-testimony that finished it.”

By MYRNA OLIVER