SACRAMENTO — Federal prosecutors here have seen a bit of a role reversal now that a murder defendant is chiding them for failing to send him to prison for life.
Brant “Two Scoops” Daniel, 49, pleaded guilty to murder in aid of racketeering in December, with the hope that he’d be transferred from state to federal system. But seven months later, Daniel remains in his cell at California State Prison, Sacramento.
He’s now filed a motion to vacate his plea agreement, arguing that prosecutors dropped the ball by failing to secure his transfer to federal prison. Daniel wouldn’t have pleaded guilty, his motion says, had he known how it would all turn out.
Daniel was one of eight alleged Aryan Brotherhood members charged in 2019 with murder and murder conspiracy, in a case that prosecutors said highlighted just how dangerous prison gangs were becoming statewide. After a lawsuit forced numerous suspected gang leaders out of solitary confinement, they were able to easily obtain contraband cellphones and order violent crimes, prosecutors said when the case was filed five years ago. Some of the murder plots targeted people outside of prison.
The solution, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, was to convict the group of federal crimes and transfer them from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation into the federal system, where they could be better contained. Daniel — who pleaded guilty with no leniency to the 2017 stabbing death of a fellow inmate at Salinas Valley State Prison — was supposed to be the first of six incarcerated Aryan Brotherhood members to be transferred. But the government has apparently failed to get it done.
“The prosecutor’s agreements in the plea agreement, and his assurances in court that had been relayed to my attorneys, are the reasons I pled guilty — that is, to be transferred to federal prison,” Daniel wrote in the July 2 motion. “The court should vacate my guilty plea, reinstate my not guilty plea, and set the case for trial.”
Since he filed his motion, Daniel has said that doctors at CDCR have been withholding heart medication he needs. When he asked why, he said he was told it was because he was no longer under the care of the U.S. Marshals, which he was before his plea.
At Daniel’s December plea hearing, he made it clear several times that he expected to be transferred to federal prison, though he also acknowledged it when U.S. Senior District Judge Kimberly Mueller informed him there was “no guarantee.”
At the hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Hitt told Mueller that his office was working with the Bureau of Prisons to assure Daniel would be transferred to the federal system.
“It’s sort of a behind-the-scenes process between the two sovereigns, and I have put a lot of work in before we ever got here to try and secure a transfer of what they call a jurisdictional shift, and I’m going to promptly upon sentencing initiate the proceeding to go make sure that we get that accomplished,” Hitt said.
Prosecutors initially attempted to seek the death penalty against Daniel and five of his co-defendants, but declined to do so months before three of Daniel’s co-defendants went to trial on multiple counts of murder. In the nearly five years between the first indictment and the decision not to seek death, the U.S. Attorney’s office sought a sign-off from the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington D.C., despite President Joe Biden’s voiced opposition to the death penalty during the 2020 campaign.