Prisoners say they are targeted due to their activism
It's been a decade since prisoners incarcerated under the worst conditions in California organized a massive hunger strike that roped in thousands of participants and helped scale back the use of solitary confinement statewide.
In recent years, several of the men who organized it have found themselves shifted from state to federal custody, with racketeering charges that accuse them of running drugs and ordering murders in prison. Now they're hitting back with a new counter-accusation: that prosecutors have targeted them for their political activism.
Near identical motions, filed by defense attorneys representing accused leaders of the Nuestra Familia and Aryan Brotherhood prison gangs, have asked federal judges to dismiss prosecutions against the two groups due to “outrageous government conduct.”
The lead defendant in the Aryan Brotherhood case, Ronald Yandell, helped organize a peace agreement between rivals within the prison system, and his top codefendant, Danny Troxell, was a lead plaintiff in a suit that led to a settlement scaling back solitary confinement against accused gang members.
“Activists like Mr. Yandell promptly faced significant retaliation from both state and federal officials,” his attorneys wrote. “That retaliation included continued mistreatment in the California prison system. And it now includes the instant federal prosecution — which appears designed to remove Mr. Yandell and other Defendants from the state prison system they (successfully) fought to reform.”
A similar motion, filed by attorneys for alleged Nuestra Familia leaders, accuses the state prison system of taking the “extraordinary step of claiming to transfer primary custody of the Defendants to the federal government,” in order to get around a 2015 settlement of the lawsuit filed by Troxell and co-defendant Todd Ashker.
The agreement ending the class action litigation required the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to cease indefinite solitary confinement on the basis of alleged gang membership alone.
A judge is set to hear arguments and possibly rule on the Nuestra Familia dismissal motion on March 5.
In the Aryan Brotherhood case, Chief U.S. District Judge Kimberly Mueller denied the motion, finding that federal prosecutors “persuasively argued, with support, that this prosecution is a direct result of information learned from wiretap interceptions” off the defendants' contraband prison phones, not “vindictiveness.”
Federal prosecutors in the Aryan Brotherhood case responded that the charges were filed because defendants “were ordering and committing murders in and from the most restrictive prisons available” in California, and they're hopeful the federal Bureau of Prisons will be “more restrictive.”
They added that the case was indeed related to the lawsuit settlement, “but not in the way defendants claim” it was. Opening statements are expected to begin on Monday afternoon in the Aryan Brotherhood trial.
The case involves five fatal prison stabbings and four alleged murder plots, as well as heroin and methamphetamine trafficking charges.
As it gets underway, the defense is attempting to curb testimony by CDCR gang investigators who the prosecution has put forward as expert witnesses.