As witnesses testified that three Aryan Brotherhood members directed the drug dealing to murder from their California prison cells, the question is not whether prosecutors will convict — but that doing so will prevent future crimes.
Kenneth Johnson, Francis Clement and John Stinson ruled last week that they sentenced blackmail last week to blackmail in Fresno and other crimes have been served in the state system.
During the trial, prosecutors made it clear that California prisons were filled with contraband cell phones that gang leaders used to control their locking of internal and external rackets.
Witnesses testified that they enjoyed the use of smuggling mobile phones and drugs in use of drones or corrupt employees. An prison spokesman said authorities occupied 4,109 cell phones in the California prison system in 2023, a data for the most recent year.
The U.S. Bureau of Prisons provides stricter conditions. High-risk prisoners are held in Colorado’s so-called super-maximum security facility, and they are barely able to access each other or the outside world.
Despite Johnson, Clement and Stinson’s beliefs, it’s unclear whether they will leave California. They are currently held at the Fresno County Jail.
Kenneth Johnson, Francis Clement and John Stinson were convicted last week for ordering the murder of as a member of the Aryan Brotherhood while serving in California.
(California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation)
Statham’s attorney Kenneth Reed said he did not want his client to be sentenced to federal prison after being sentenced in May.
Reed noted that three other Aryan Brotherhood members, also inmates of state prisoners, were found guilty of extortion but have not yet entered federal custody during a trial in Sacramento last year. .
Stinson, 70, has been sentenced to life in his state since he was first convicted of homicide by a Los Angeles jury in 2007.
During the trial in Los Angeles and Fresno, witnesses testified that Statham sat on a three-person “committee” that arbitrated disputes within the Aryan Brotherhood, the Aryan Brotherhood, a group of controls About 30 men who embraced many white prisoners in California and the federal prison system.
Authorities have tried to undermine prison gangs such as the Aryan Brotherhood, the Mexican Mafia and Nuestra Familia by convicting them in federal court, then convicting their leaders and then expelling them to places like ADX Florence in Colorado. The highest security prison is sometimes called the “devil Rockies of the Rockies”, deeming convicted drug cartel leaders, terrorists, escape artists and other high-profile prisoners as the federal government believes to the public and Other prisoners pose the highest risk.
The prison was Scott Kernan’s idea in 2018, when he, as secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, asked top U.S. prison officials to detain eight “extremely dangerous” prisoners.
In a letter filed in court, Kernan said the prisoners included members of the Aryan Brotherhood and the Mexican Mafia. Before being prosecuted, California’s head of corrections hopes the federal prison system ensures it is willing to accept inmates who require “the strictest conditions for confinement.”
It is unclear how federal prison officials responded, but prosecutors filed charges against all eight inmates in 2019. Except for one person who was killed while awaiting trial, all were convicted.
A U.S. Prison Service spokesman said no one was taken to federal prisons. Spokesman Donald Murphy said he would not discuss the status of prisoners not in the agency’s custody.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of California declined to comment.
In the Sacramento case, one of the defendants, Brant Daniel, now attempts to withdraw his guilty plea, saying he only admitted murder because he believes he would be sent to federal prison.
Daniel, 50, did not say in the motion why he was in federal prison. One potential factor: Authorities wrote in court documents that authorities revealed the plot to murder him by other Aryan Brotherhood members.
At Daniel’s plea hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Kimberly Mueller said she could not order the federal prison system to accept state inmates. Mueller said the U.S. Department of Justice’s deputy attorney general must approve it.
During the hearing, Sacramento’s assistant U.S. attorney Jason Hitt said he was undertaking a “behind the scenes process” to put Daniel in federal custody.
Nothing happened. Nine months after the hearing, Hit said in court documents that federal officials refused to take the Daniel. Hitt wrote that their decision was “a confidentiality of the judicial decision-making process, part of the internal review department, which is not subject to censorship.”
Daniel stayed in the California prison in Sacramento as the judge weighed whether to get him back to his guilty plea.
