SACRAMENTO — 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 both prosecutions for “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 co-defendant, 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. That retaliation included continued mistreatment in the California prison system,” Yandell’s lawyers wrote. “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 agreement 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 prosecution was filed because defendants “were ordering and committing murders in and from the most restrictive prisons available” in California, and they’re hopefully 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.
“As a result of the October 2015 Ashker settlement, Yandell and other AB leaders were released from the Pelican Bay SHU to less restrictive general population prisons,” prosecutors wrote in court filings. “Yandell was transferred to Folsom prison, where he obtained contraband cellphones, including the one that DEA intercepted on the wiretap in late 2016.”
When the Aryan Brotherhood case was filed in 2019, prosecutors mentioned the hunger strike frequently in the criminal complaint, going so far as to claim it was phony because a confidential informant told them participants would occasionally sneak a bean burrito. For his part, Yandell mentioned the strikes in a 2019 op-ed — authored just a month before he was charged — accusing prison guards of assaulting him while attempting to unlawfully transfer him back to Pelican Bay State Prison.
“Prior to the hunger strikes in Pelican Bay in 2011, the Blacks did a hunger strike. It didn’t work. The Whites did one, and it didn’t work,” Yandell wrote in a 2018 oBut when we all came together, all the races, by the power of that unity, we were able to change laws.”
The Aryan Brotherhood case is just days away from trial — opening statements are expected to begin on Monday afternoon. 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.
One such motion says a prison gang investigator named Cory Perryman “conceded that he and other agents deliberately change the language” when re-writing statements of dropout gang members, and leave out “contradictory” information. Similarly, they say, another investigator took “remarkable liberties” when writing a report of an interview with Yandell and Sylvester “that went far beyond what was actually said in the interview.”