SACRAMENTO — It’s only one week into a lengthy trial for three alleged Aryan Brotherhood members, but the defense attorneys say they’ve already established something: the 2015 murder of San Quentin Six member Hugo “Yogi” Pinell was a setup and prison guards had a hand in it.
Pinell, 70, was stabbed to death at California State Prison, Sacramento, allegedly by two white inmates hoping to “earn” their way into the Aryan Brotherhood. Now, the man who prosecutors say ordered the murder, Ronald Dean Yandell, 61, wants to defend himself against racketeering charges by proving that others — including prison officials — were actually behind it.
The federal government is trying to stop the whole thing. In a five-page motion filed Friday, prosecutors asked Chief U.S. District Judge Kimberly Mueller to limit defense attorneys’ ability to question prison officials about possible government corruption surrounding Pinell’s death, calling their questions “nothing more than an invitation to juror nullification” and accusing the lawyers of treating the murder case as if its a civil lawsuit against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
“CDCR is not on trial. Its prison guards are not on trial. The prison environment is not on trial,” Assistant U.S. Attorney David Spencer wrote in the legal filing.
Defense attorneys for Yandell, a Pinole native, have responded that the lines of questioning are crucial to proving two things: one, that it was actually Gary Littrell — a deceased former Aryan Brotherhood member — who ordered and directed Pinell’s murder. And two, that “CDCR officials were involved in orchestrating the Pinell homicide.”
“Mr. Yandell expects that similar evidence will continue to come in throughout trial,” his attorneys wrote in court papers filed Monday.
Pinell was a controversial figure throughout his life, much of which was spent in solitary confinement. Hailed as a “hero” and “martyr” by the independent San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper after his death, Pinell was the longest surviving member of the so-called San Quentin Six. The group orchestrated a failed 1971 escape attempt that left six dead, including George Jackson, the revolutionary co-founder of the Black Guerrilla Family.
Pinell sliced the throats of two corrections officers during the escape attempt, both of whom survived. Earlier that year, he murdered a corrections officer in Soledad prison. That violence earned him a decades-long stay in Pelican Bay State Prison, where he was kept in solitary confinement, under basically the worst possible conditions that were still legal in California.
Among prisoners, he wasn’t much more popular than he was with guards, and that was hardly a secret. A book about Folsom Prison, published under the popular Images of America series, notes that in 1981 an Aryan Brotherhood member named Richard “Mickey Mouse” Miles was caught with an “inmate manufactured” double-barreled pistol, cocked and loaded, which he intended to use on Pinell. The hit had been ordered by the Black Guerrilla Family as a “good faith gesture to create a bond” between the two prison gangs, the book says.
It wasn’t until 34 years later, on Aug. 12, 2015, that the Aryan Brotherhood got its chance. On that day, New Folsom Prison inmates Jayson “Beaver” Weaver and Waylon Pitchford allegedly fatally stabbed Pinell on an exercise yard, sparking a riot in the process. Prosecutors contend Yandell later remarked on a wiretapped phone call that the two had “earned” their way into the Aryan Brotherhood through the murder. Weaver and Pitchford are facing racketeering charges in a separate case being prosecuted by the same U.S. Attorney’s office.
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Theoretically, Pinell would have been protected by a peace agreement among California’s four main prison gangs. But when Littrell was transferred to New Folsom Prison from Pelican Bay, he came with specific instructions that Pinell was exempt from the treaty and therefore an open target, according to court records. Littrell later dropped out of the Aryan Brotherhood and died of natural causes while still incarcerated.
After Pinell’s death, a woman sued the state prison system, alleging that CDCR officials deliberately placed Pinell — her father — in harm’s way. The suit was thrown out on a technicality — the plaintiff couldn’t prove she was biologically related to Pinell and therefore didn’t qualify as next of kin.
Prosecutors have a different theory for why both Pinell and Littrell were allowed to leave Pelican Bay for significantly less restrictive prisons. They contend that a lawsuit filed by Danny Troxell — an alleged Aryan Brotherhood commissioner currently on trial with Yandell — forced their hand. The suit led to a settlement agreement that disallowed prison officials from using alleged gang membership to keep inmates in solitary cells.
The settlement had another consequence, according to prosecutors: prison gang leaders like Troxell and Yandell were able to access contraband cellphones, giving them the ability to conference call with others in the gang, direct drug trafficking on the outside and order killings. Recorded audio from wiretaps on some of those very phones is the basis for the current racketeering case, where the government expects to prove each of the three defendants had a hand in at least one gang-sanctioned murder.